Gizmo Gone Bonkers

For my birthday I had been given a what I considered to be a great present at the time. It was a box shaped object with a black wire protruding from the side that presumably could be inserted into the back of the television. Also, to the top left hand side of the box was a green button which had the word "on" inscribed below it.

Now considering this seemed to be the only English literary skills these Japanese had acquired (not including the obligatory "made in Japan"situated round back), I thought I knew enough to operate this Eastern wonder.

The game I had received with this small yet powerful console was Power Drift. This was originally an arcade game by Sega, and in the previous months I had sunk my entire years saving into its coin munching slot. So it was with ecstatic excitement and the highest of expectations that I inserted the game cartridge into the slot. Power Drift was now mine to own forever!

Immediately on sliding the "on" button some unintelligible Japanese jargon appeared on the screen. Being not very fluent in Japanese I followed the only due course of action available, and pressed the little red button on the controller which was made conspicuous by its prominent position. And again the miniaturized technical wunderkind responded with a perfect reproduction of the theme tune that had become so imprinted on the inner walls of my brain when at the arcade playing Power Drifts big coin op brother.

Suddenly, getting over my awe at the unlimited potential of this wondrous invention,  I was acutely aware that the limitations were eternity. In front of me the screen ominously seemed to have vanished, and I had somehow entered a world where Japanese scientists could create a new reality at the touch of a button.

The start line was now in view, my engine was growling so ferociously it would make a jumbo jet run for cover. I was lined up with hoodlums in their own screaming pocket rockets to the left and right of me, in front and behind too. A quick glance around revealed a Californian type setting for this race, all perfectly simulated by the tiny computer box.

Too quickly, the red light, then the green light and we are off! The vehicle absolutely tore off the line like a tigers pounce. The ground seemed to provide no resistance as I gathered pace, while the crowds in-explicitly hostile chants were drowned out by the engine and my need to focus on the job at hand. All my attention now needed to be directed at battling the incredible G-Forces being exerted on what I felt was a jelly like body.

And now there was more important... A corner to be... A bridge coming... A long straight flashes by... Going up... Going down... Pass a car... All happening so fast...

Wow. Lap 1 negotiated, phew. My instincts and skills garnered from all those hours playing the arcade game have enabled me to immediately perform all these audacious maneuvers which are simply not possible for a normal, mortal, destructible human being. Yes, that was it, I felt indestructible.

Lap 2. Feels like a flash of unadulterated brutal murder to my person. Hair flying, adrenaline pumping, power surging action pouring out from deep inside me, exceeding my human limitations.

Lap 3, my body is now aching, going beyond all of its structural boundaries. My muscles feel as if they are tearing away from my bones in every sweeping corner. I hold on.

Out of the corner of my eye, a leader board appears and I realize that I am in fourth position with two cars directly ahead of me. We are approaching a part of the track which narrows and goes onto a bridge. They are just as exhausted as me, maybe more so. As we go over the bridge one car misjudges the edge and loses control, his heavy car turns into something its not made for, while I don't make the same mistake as I don't have a pilots licence.

As we enter Lap 4 I am in third position. Now both cars ahead are in sight. My car surges forward, never failing and I push it harder and harder. I need the glory that comes with a win, even though I knew the other drivers wanted it just as much.

I made my way slowly up to the car in second, and dove through at the next corner, he reacted too late to close the door and I was past. I could hear his exhausted body and car join as one and cry out in exasperation as I disappeared off into the distance

Only one more car to pass.

I pressed on and pushed myself to the limit, then over the limit. And in a flash I was past her too, into the lead! I just had the last bridge left to negotiate, I was already starting to celebrate.

Wait...

As I navigate this last obstacle I begin to feel a strange sensation. Is the car overheating? No! Is the feeling of immanent victory playing on my nerves? NO! What was it?

Oh no! The fated, the hated uncontrollable Power Drift had struck. Confusion and Pandemonium. The car slid here, or was it there. Up and down, round and round.

Metal crunched into turf and the whole thing exploded with a brutal fury. There would be no beautiful glory, not on this day.

"Game Over, Game Over" shouted the universe in a tiny white box. Exhausted, I struggled to sit upright. I was back in the real world, sitting in front of my TV, controller in hand.

The Japanese geniuses had invented a machine that had you addicted enough to ensure you return again and again every time you die. They could reincarnate you at the touch of a button, the little red button so conspicuous on the front of my controller.

I press it again...

Road tripping retro style

My games collection is fairly vast. Well, vast may be stretching things a bit. I know a guy who has a lot more. And I know a guy who knows a guy that owns a lot more than the guy I know. But what I have is vast in my mind.

To quantify what I have, if I were to try play every game I have to 50 percent completion would take several lifetimes. Which begs the question, do we collect to play or do we just collect to have?

If I were to value my collection at new prices, the physical media alone would run into hundreds of thousands and be well out of the grasp of a low wage earner like myself.

Here's the thing. I hardly ever buy new. By nature, games hit the market and quickly lose value. In fact, they lose value faster than pretty much anything else you ever buy. To a point that a few years after release, you can acquire games in retail bargain bins or on ebay type websites for next to nothing. Bundled hand fulls of software for cents.

Aside from the joy of playing games, there is an inherent joy in collecting games. Its in the searching, uncovering rough diamands online, walking into a thrift store or a charity shop and stumbling on a deal thats incredible, a game thats rare, a system thats cheap. There is a thrill and sense of fulfillment when you hit the jackpot.

I often start my day, still in bed before the sun rises, by browsing the local online second hand sales. It was here that I found a guy selling a second hand NeoGeo arcade machine in Port Alfred. He was looking to sell or trade for an old second hand mobile phone.

A day later, a buddy and I woke up at 4am and took the 300km round trip to complete the trade and take ownership of my first coin op. I travelled to an area I would never have seen and engaged with another gamer I would never have chatted to had I not taken the plunge and committed to collecting.

Looking back, I havent actually used the aracde machine all that much, but its one of my most endearing gaming memories. The adventure of collecting and then restoring the cabinet is a real life experience.

And it was cheap. Barring a very few unique and ultra exclusive titles (mostly things like Nintendo world championship gold carts where there were only a few ever made), we have a hobby where the price of entry is dirt cheap. It may not stay this way, but right now the time has never been better.

Yes, I have also bought a few duds. hardware that doesnt boot, software media thats damaged. But as I never offer much, its never a big deal, and the wins far exceed the losses.

So why not take a few bucks, browse the net and find a few gems for your cupboard at home. Just remember, its not only about whay finally ends up in your collection, but also how it gets there.

Conversion Capers

In 1972 Atari released one of the first arcade machines - Pong - into a world that was very alien to how we live today. Up to that point, games were made by Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers and were decidedly analog, comprised of cardboard, plastic and dice. Or involved a ball and fresh air. But the Atari Pong arcade machine drove people into bars and carnival arcades by the thousands, previously the domain of pinball machines and pellet guns.

Fast forward to 1977 and Atari released their Atari 2600 into the home market. Although dedicated home Pong machines had previously existed, this was the first mass market machine that allowed you to change the games by slotting in different cartridges with new game code hardwired onto their ROM chips. Atari 2600 pong was a reasonable facsimile of the arcade hardware it was trying to emulate, and rightfully so as the arcade hardware predated the shiny new home console by more than 5 years. All was good in the land of Atari.

Except that by 1978 the Arcade landscape had moved on. It had progressed to be light years ahead of the Atari 2600 in terms of hardware specs and raw power. The arcade games were now full color and in high resolution. The hardware specs were cutting edge, with CPUs, GPUs, RAM and sound processors often being hundreds of times more powerful than home consoles. Cabinets on occasion had custom controls and sometimes even included hydraulic force feedback to create more realism for the punter.

The shiny new Atari 2600 was obsolete before it even hit the market by arcade standards. It could never hope to compete, more so because economy of scale determined that for a machine to become mass market it had to offset price against performance, which was not the case with an arcade machine which could be sold for several thousand dollars. Whilst one arcade cabinet could be played by thousands of people and recoup a large price tag, a home console would only ever have one or two users, meaning it had to be affordable to a single family income. Its price had to be a couple of hundred dollars at most, with its internal hardware fitting this tag.

As new games were being released into the arcade by Atari, Taito, Midway, Sega, Namco and many other early arcade game developers, home users wanted to play them in the comfort of their own home. After all, why pay for 5 minutes of entertainment in the arcade when you could own the game and play it forever at home.

And so arcade conversions became the staple diet of the early console industry. Practically every popular arcade game saw a home release. It did not matter how good the arcade machine looked or played, companies looking to make a quick buck would attempt to put out a home console version of their coin-op hits regardless of how futile the effort.

It didn't take punters long to realize there was something very wrong with their home ports of their favorite games. Sometimes the job nigh on impossible due to the vast chasm between the specs of the Arcade and Home machines. It was simply folly to try to shrink down the code of super computer level arcade hardware and get it running on something akin to a glorified pocket calculator/word processor. Many attempts were admirable and commendable in falling short of their mark.

However, more often than not the conversions were sloppy, rushed, bugged to hell and pathetic shameful cash-ins by unscrupulous vendors.

Our venerable Atari 2600 got a woeful Pacman conversion which did not even look like Pacman, and the controls didn't allow you to move through the maze without getting stuck. Nintendo's Donkey Kong arcade had 4 levels, whilst the 2600 conversion looked nothing like the arcade and only had 2 levels. It just wasn't worth the effort.

Now I can go on all day mentioning bad or pointless arcade conversions. I remember playing Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum conversion of Sega's super powered Outrun machine. The only reason why you might believe you were playing Outrun at home is that the packaging box the cassette came in said it was Outrun. The game neither resembled nor played like Outrun. But yet it stayed at the top of C&VGs game charts for years!

Even the 16 bit era saw many many conversion failures. The Sega Megadrive, SNES, Amiga and others all had to vastly scale back when presenting graphics and sound. But the gap began to close, and slowly we began to imagine we could play arcade games at home without compromise. By the end of the Sega Genesis era, Gunstar Heroes would show that with the right programmers you could get close to the quality of graphics that had been attained at the arcade a few years before.

And then something magical happened. Sony released the Sony Playstation in 1994, and for the first time ever home users were playing almost carbon copies of games they could play in the arcades. Tekken and Ridge Racer were as close as dammit to being the real thing, and you could walk out of your local arcade, go to the game shop and buy what you were pumping coins into minutes earlier.

This process of catch up continued through out the 90s and by the time the Sega Dreamcast was released in 1999 there was absolute parity between the arcade hardware and home hardware. In fact by 2003 the Microsoft Xbox was actually far more powerful than any existing arcade hardware. Which ironically was the final nail in the coffin of the already faltering arcade scene. You could now buy a home console that easily outshone arcade graphics, so there was no longer any reason to spend your time and hard earned cash for an inferior experience at the local arcade. By 2005 there were no longer any local arcades to speak of, resigned to be a footnote in video game history. Today game arcades take the form of museums with little to no new content.

But the memories remain. How foolish we were, buying Operation Wolf, Outrun, Afterburner, Space Harrier, Super Hang-on, Midnight Resistance, WWF Superstars and many many hundreds more, hoping to get the same experience at home and then being completely let down by what we found. Or if you were lucky or smart enough, you read the reviews before you bought and got gems like R-Type, Chase HQ, Rainbow Islands or Bomb Jack, arcade conversions that punched so far above their weight that it made putting up with the crummy ports almost worthwhile. Almost...

Level 1, the tutorial and the Walkthrough

In 1990 I finally managed to bag myself a new games compilation for my ZX Spectrum, with the game Last Ninja 2 from System 3 being one of the featured games. I cant for the life of me remember what the name of the compilation was, but it was a Godsend as it was budget priced and contained several titles I couldn't afford at full price (think Steam sale Ronald Reagan era).

Now if I can just explain how these titles were shipped. The original full priced game was on a cassette tape, with an inlay which had rudimentary instructions on how to load a game, the back story in perhaps two paragraphs, and maybe, just maybe, a quick tutorial on how to play, control layout and authors details.

The compilation purchaser often had to forgo these luxuries to further save costs for the publisher. It was just the cassette tape in a cardboard box, and you kind of had to wing it.

So placing the tape in the cassette player and typing Load "" and pressing play on the tape got the game going. A brisk 7 to 10 minutes later the computers 48k of memory had been filled with gaming goodness.

Now the Last Ninja 2 was an isometric action rpg. You could run, jump and search items as well as kick other non playable characters in the face. The screen didn't really scroll either, when you went from one room to another the next area was drawn in.

But here's the rub, the game was so hard, that I could never get past the first set of rooms or areas. There were no instructions, there was no tutorial to guide you along, and no walkthrough or Youtube Longplay video to show you what to do.

I mustve played the game 50 times or more, and I ALWAYS got stuck in the same place very early on. And there was nowhere to turn to make progress. I was simply stuck. I clicked every button, jumped over every river, killed every bad guy. But still, nothing.

There were many many more examples of this on the humble Speccy. In Rambo 3 I always freed all the hostages but I could never find the extraction helicopter in the North West. In Beachhead 2 I didn't know how to advance my men to rush the beach. There were even games that I couldn't progress past the title screen.

Recently I downloaded and played Last Ninja 2 as an emulated game on my trusty PSP. Maybe the passage of time and wisdom would allow me to finally make some progress. I fast loaded the rom, chose the control scheme, played through level 1 and promptly got stuck again at the exact same spot I did in 1990. 

I didn't go search for a solution on Youtube or IGN, I did what all good games players did when they got stuck in 1990. I put the game down, switched on the telly and watched reruns of Macgyver. For all I know the programmer never even made a level 2, and I am happy in my ignorance...

Bigger isn't always better

In the early 1980s there was a small (by modern standards anyway) British software and games development company called Imagine. They were renowned for developing very high quality entertainment for the early 8 bit computers like the Vic 20 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I remember playing many of these games. Arcadia was a personal favorite at the time, and I would look out for the Imagine name on any game, effectively knowing I was getting a AAA release.

Imagine had an idea that was unheard of at the time. They decided to release games (6 were planned) that would be developed as "Mega Games". Effectively they would be games so large and accomplished and fleshed out that you would for all intents and purposes never need to buy another game. They were supposed to be the ultimate games, an entire world to lose yourself in which would cover many genres and gameplay styles.

Volumes have been written about Imagine and the Mega Games, as the crash and demise of Imagine happened to occur very publicly, with the BBC busy filming a documentary at the time based on Britains fledgling games industry and focusing on the meteoric rise of Imagine. The whole mess was fully filmed and documented and is easily researched on the net. I highly recommend it for anyone with even a passing interest in games, business or soap opera.

The naivety and sheer arrogance of their Mega Game undertaking was a ridiculously short sighted for the time. For even though Imagine was a rising company at the top of their game, it would have taken massive resources well beyond their scope to achieve even a quarter of what they envisioned.

Last night I sat playing Far Cry 4 on my shiny new Xbox One. I bought it online for $10, and memories of the so called Mega Game came to mind right after finishing the prologue. Because the modern equivalent of the Mega Game is the open world, sandbox game which we have all come to take for granted.

Many Mega Games get released every year now. From Grand Theft Auto to Fallout to Far Cry to Saints Row, and hundreds more in between. These games exist today because the nature and scale of the publishing industry has changed dramatically. Back in 1984, Imagine would have spent $1 million to develop the game and tried to sell 50k to 100k copies of the Mega Game, in the hopes of covering development costs. Today Activision can bankroll a title like Destiny to the tune of half a billion dollars, and then quickly recover these costs within a day or two of a titles release. With DLC and micro transactions, these Mega Games can go on to make billions over a year or two.

But I hate Mega Games. There, I have said it.

The idea of making a game so big, so all encompassing and so realistic that it imitates life and allows you to get lost in a fantasy world is both its attraction and its downfall. If I wanted a sandbox where anything was possible, I would go outside and play in the real world.

I first experienced this phenomenon when I bought Elder Scrolls Oblivion on Xbox 360. This was my first exposure to a true Mega Game. They gave me a world where ANYTHING was possible. They asked me to go out into their universe and live my life like I wanted. Speak to anyone, do anything, go anywhere. It was an engineering marvel. And it was boring as hell.

Games need to be fantastic, entertaining and to the point. If I want to ride a car fast, I should be able to buy a game that allows me to drive a car fast. I should not need to buy a game that allows me to live in a world where I can be anything I want, and within this world I can decide to one day walk to a car dealership, buy a car, find an underground racing league after I level up to 30, then ask for a race. That's a chore. That's boring.

I will play Far Cry 4. I will struggle through the mundane moments of pointless travel, stupid conversations that add nothing to the story, and idiotic loot gathering (thank God there is fast travel). I will most notably enjoy the action sequences. And I will probably feel a measure of satisfaction and accomplishment when I see the credits roll. BUT everything in between is over-production. Its just not necessary.

Imagine was probably my favorite games company from the early 80s, and they will forever be known to the world as the company that went bust on TV. But to me, they were the genesis of the open world, sandbox, do-it-all Mega Game. And for that they cannot be forgiven. Damn you Imagine, damn you...

The fog of... the 80s

A long time ago, in a far away place (actually it was about 1987 in my local arcade) there was a great disturbance in the force. The Darkside was luring impressionable youngsters to part with their allowances by creating experiences so tactile and realistic, that kids everywhere were succumbing to this evil empire. (and yes, by this I mean Sega made kick-ass coin ops which were so addictive they almost literally stole your 20c coins). But enough with the Star Wars already (note: Sega made the best Star Wars coin op games too!). ENOUGH!

Outrun, Afterburner, Thunderblade and Power Drift. Power Drift! This was the game that enthralled me, occupied my every thought and dream for years after I first saw it at my local tenpin bowling alley. It was so vibrant, so realistic, so LOUD. And in my naivety I pondered that it would be impossible for any game to EVER be better than the lauded Power Drift.

Of course, a large part of my assumption was based on the fact that the gulf at the time between a $50k arcade machine and my humble $99 word processing/come gimped-for-games Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k was lets say rather large. To try to convert an arcade experience to hardware which was often 50 or 100 times less powerful than its source was foolhardy at best. But fools are made every day, and so we lapped up these games whose genetic and cosmetic resemblance to their Arcade parents began and ended with games' name on the printed sleeve of the box the tape came in. None of the digital content provided could ever be mistaken for the property it was trying to replicate. And it never really helped that these arcade conversions were often rushed out the door and awarded to the lowest bidding programmer to save on development costs. Games were often so unfinished that later levels were not included or so buggy they were un-finishable. Which didn't matter as you had lost interest and returned to the arcade for your next Sega fix long before you realized your home conversion was terminally broken.

Lust over these 80s arcade behemoths and the idea that we would never be able to truly own our dreams only added to the mystique. Even as time marched on, home hardware never really seemed to be catching up to the quarter crunchers. Every step forward seemed only to add substance to the myth that the gap would never be truly traversed.

The 80s became the 90s, and 8 bit turned to 16 bit and then 32 bit. And before the millennium was truly upon us, I was able to finally be able to try out an almost perfect version of Power Drift at home, courtesy of a Sega Ages compilation on Sega's powerful but sales deficient Saturn console. I had looked forward to that moment for so long, that on loading the game I had the suspicion that life was never going to get any better, that the moment in time I was about to experience was going to be the benchmark for every future life defining event.

The game booted, and it WAS arcade perfect. It was everything I remembered from the arcade back in the 80s. For that moment I was happy, content that finally I was able to own what I had craved after for so long.

I played for about 30 minutes, then put another game in my Sega and never played Power Drift again. I lost my Saturn in a move in 2002, and never bothered to download Power Drift when I bought a new Saturn a few years later.

More recently, I had the chance to download 3D Outrun on the Nintendo 3DS, the quintessential conversion at 60fps with stereoscopic 3D thrown in for good measure. And I did, a day one purchase to capture my dream of owning the ultimate 80s arcade experience. And I played it for about a half an hour, then loaded up the new Zelda and continued dungeon crawling for the rest of the evening.

There was something absolutely mesmerizing about the 80s. A level of sheen, a degree of bling, a coat of cosmetic vibrancy that was far larger than life, far deeper than the product it covered and often masked. It permeated through the 80s culture, and went much further than the technology constrained game and IT industry. It came out in their music, their fashion their movies and their ideals. It was Madonna, Michael Jackson, Flock of Seagulls and David Bowie. It was Top Gun, The Breakfast club, Thriller and Ghostbusters. It was piano ties and Family Ties, it was skateboarding, skater clothes and Back to the Future. Every one a classic but also hard to quantify.

"never meet your heroes". "we look back through rose tinted glasses". There are so many idioms to explain this phenomena. We should save our precious and often hard earned cash when we know that owning a piece of the past, a relic of our childhood, "the arcade in your home" is simply a marketing ploy trying to part you from your money through nostalgia value and the fog of the 80s.

And now Nintendo and Sega have announced that they are releasing a retro compilation for the first time in the west, which will include a 60fps 3D stereoscopic enhanced version of that classic 80s hit, Power Drift. I know what will happen when I re-acquaint myself with my hero. I am assured of a bout of disappointment or indifference at best. I have been down this road before, it always ends the same way.

And  yet here I am, logged in on my favorite game site, pre-order at the ready. Damn you, fog of the 80s, damn you to hell...