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...