One of my favorite videogames of all time is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I was very skeptical about it when it came out because I wasn’t sure if it would work in the 3D world of the Nintendo 64. I reserved a copy anyway and picked up the gold cartridge on launch day. I still have that gold cart; I’ll probably never get rid of it.

Since it came out in 1997, I’ve played it several times to the end. I never finished the Master Quest version, though. I thought the whole game was different only to find that it was just the dungeons that were and I was playing at a time when I had higher priorities so I put it down.

In the last twelve years, I found that every time I pick it up, I get better at it. I remember more off the top of my head and find that I can get farther in the game faster each time. So I got to wonder whether or not I could finish the game in a day. Start at 6am and play on until I finish. It’s supposed to take 12-15 hours to finish depending on how deep into the game you go which would put my finish at 6-8pm the same day.

Why do this? Curiosity, mostly. I don’t need to do this in a day, this isn’t a dream I’ve had, I just wondered if I could. I wouldn’t necessarily have to get every skulltula or do the minigames, just beat Ganon.

And then I got the idea of livestreaming it on ustream. Would anyone watch? Would anyone care? I know there are a lot of OoT fans out there that would be curious at best.

So tell me what you think. Am I crazy, or is this something people would be interested in?

If you had $5, you could play 20 games which could last you several hours which included the time it took to wait for games to become available. If you wanted to be next, you placed a quarter on the machine stating that you’re next in line. Some games had a few quarters lined up.

My suggestion is to fire up whatever Journey songs you have before reading the rest of this blog post. If you want to read more about these games and others, check out Arcade History or Digitpress.

I posted on Twitter today:

“If you had ONE classic arcade game to buy, what would it be? No cheating and saying MAME . Me: Star Wars vector.”

I picked Star Wars vector because the game was by far the most fun for me. What was great about it was that although parts of the gameplay started off scripted, as the game went on, things became more dynamic. TIE Fighters’ flight paths changed, lasers were shot from random points at random times. There was a little-known trick at the end of the trench run where if you did the entire trench run without firing a shot until you fired your torpedoes at the end, you got bonus points when you blew up the Death Star (100,000 on level 5 I think).

The responses I got were awesome, and shows just how much influence arcades (and Journey) had on some of our lives.

@isheepthings said “Gauntlet”. I remember the day I saw this for the first time. The game was MASSIVE because it needed space for 4 players. There was a LONG waiting time for this game because people were pretty damn good at it, even right off the bat. I may be wrong, but I think it was the first game I saw that asked for 50 cents for a play. The computerized narrator’s voice chastised us for making mistakes such as “Someone shot the food“, or “Valkyrie is about to die”.

@Pancho88 said “Galaga”. I was never a huge fan of this game, although it was fun.

@JeffHinz said “Donkey Kong”. This would probably make my top 5 classic videogames of all time. It’s what launched the then-unknown Mario into stardom. Everyone should know this game. Donkey Kong steals Mario’s girlfriend (was it officially Peach at the time?) and you need to climb towers to save her. What made this game addicting was how there was no pattern to the game and you needed quick reflexes to dodge and jump over the barrels.

@extralife said “Joust”. This was one of the games that really made you work a button. Flapping around while trying to make sure you’re at least a pixel above where you needed to be to knock your opponents off was a lot of fun. I never liked playng against another person, though.

@echuta said “Sit-down Spy Hunter”. Ok, I absolutely LOVED this game. The computerized “Peter Gunn” theme in the background while shooting bad guys while avoiding their tire spikes was one of the few games that got your adrenaline running. During the game you had to drive into a semi’s cargo area and upgrade your car. You could do oil slicks against cars that are following you which was always fun. Watch out for the cars that aren’t spies, though! I always loved changing to a boat also.

@shawncoons said “Depending on what “classic” is I’m going with Major Havoc, Gauntlet, or 720 (Skate or die!).” Major Havoc I don’t remember ever playing. 720 was fun to try but I never really got the hang of it.

@hossimo said “Dragon’s Lair”. This was an interesting beast. Animator Don Bluth did an interactive videogame with a CAV (constant angular velocity) laserdisc to provide what’s seen on the screen. You’re Dirk who needs to save a princess in a castle. As you progress through it, the game gives you visual clues as to where you should move or swing at. As you do each maneuver, the laserdisc player moves to the specific frame number (not possible on CLV laserdiscs) and plays that sequence. It was a great idea and although I was never a big Don Bluth fan, it was a respectable undertaking. My issue with the game was that it would hint for you to move left, which you’d do, but OH NOES! it was a trick and you’d die. That really annoyed me because you really didn’t know what was a trick and what wasn’t. I think I saw one person ever finish that game.

@new5thpants said “Space Harrier”. I don’t think I ever played it

@banannie said “Asteroids”. Who could forget this classic? The premise was simple: you’re stuck in an asteroid field and you need to shoot your way out. The catch is that the rocks get smaller as you shoot them, and pesky aliens try to shoot you down (how do THEY not get killed by the asteroids??) As you progressed, the alien ships got smaller and shoot directly at you as they emerge, making life in the asteroid field rather hectic. Your hyperdrive can save or kill you as it could randomly destroy you.

@tedkulp said “Paperboy”. An interesting game which I could never master. The game had the handlebars of a bicycle and you had to use them to move your Paperboy around the neighborhood, pressing a button on the side of one of the handlebars to deliver a paper. If you delivered it to the right house, you were granted a point for that route. If you missed, you lost a customer. There were “mean people” houses you could throw papers at and get points for. The downside to this game was that it was nearly impossible to line up your throw because of the angle you were throwing the papers at. If you were off just a little bit, the paper went in a customer’s window and you lose a point for that route. After a while I just gave up playing it. I also didn’t like the sounds and music the company made for those games.

@roadhacker on Plurk said “Defender”. Another one of my “top 5″. Your job was to save 10 humanoids from getting captured by aliens. If they grab an humanoid and make it to the top of the screen, it turns into a mutant which fired at you faster and had a more erratic flight path. If you took too long to run the level, a special ship would come at you to take you down. If all 10 humanoids were destroyed before every 5th level, you’d lose the planet and play levels against all mutants until you reached a 5th level again where you’d start over on a new planet. This game had a ton of controls on it. The stick, hyperdrive, smart bombs, and reverse. It was complicated and fun. I’d love to have one of these at home.

@robusdin on Plurk said “Dig Dug”. I liked this game, but it was too cute and easy. You could theoretically stay on the top of the garden and kill the little monsters.

Some others I’ll make quick notes about:

Tekken – I was never a big fan of fighting games until this came out. This also came out just as arcades were dying. I beat a guy using Michelle Chang. He was so pissed off he puched the side of the cabinet. I ruled with her back then. I even made a book for the Newton with all her moves so I could reference it while I was out.

Tempest – You had two controls: a knob and a firing button. You moved your cannon along (or around) geometric shapes and shot what was coming at you from the opposite end.

Robotron – THAT SOUND when you reached level 5 and all the brain mutants beamed in. Awesome game.

Space Wars – A very simple game where you put a Star Destroyer up against the Enterprise. The fun part of the game was that you could change the dynamics of the playfield. Black holes, boundaries, and other options made the game a lot of fun.

Arkanoid – A hyperactive “Breakout”. The surprised capsules that fell to the bottom of the screen were always fun to catch. My favorite was the lasers one.

Battle Zone – This was a tank game of the future where you SLOWLY moved across a landscape and shot at other tanks. It’s fun when you start, but then tanks shoot at you from behind and kill you with no way to shoot at them first. I never got the hang of that game.

Pac-Man – Everyone has to know this game. You moved a yellow circle with a “mouth” that eats up dots in a maze while four ghosts try to eat you. I pumped a lot of quarters into this game and its later sibling Ms. Pac Man. It had a pattern and I learned the first few levels until I found that there were different ROM versions which killed the pattern I knew. After that I kept playing for fun, learning how the game worked. Did you know that ghosts never attack you from above if you’re tucked in the corner above their pen?

Marble Madness – I. Loved. This. Game. The whole game was you trying to maneuver around a maze using a trackball. You had to have PERFECT precision with this game or you’d fall off the sides and die. I made it to the end of the game once, but it was always fun to try. The music on level 2 was just awesome. I think I’d have to put this in a Top 10.

Space Invaders – Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump. That was all the background noise you needed to understand the unrelenting march of the aliens as they try to destroy you. This was such a fun game because it was so simple, but as you killed more of them, the game got harder and faster. You had to have a method to how you killed them or they’d be all over the place. There was a pattern to the game which I read in an old issue of New Jersey Magazine which I still have. I don’t remember it, but there was a certain number of lasers you would fire which would cause the next ship to be 300 points. I used to try to get an alien on the bottom row to be the last. It worked sometimes.

Sinistar – At first it looks like an Asteroids clone, but then you realize that the aliens you’re fighting are building this….thing. You shoot asteroids to mine Sinibombs which are the only weapons useful against the Sinistar. When it’s built, the game screams at you in a demonic voice “BEWARE I LIVE“. That was damn scary when you first heard it. The thing would come at you full speed and you had to deploy your Sinebombs while fighting off little aliens. If you had enough bombs, you took Sinistar out. It would taunt you too. “RUN, COWARD!“. “RUN! RUN! RUN!”.

Tron – One of the few tie-ins to a movie that worked well. You had two controls: a flight stick and a knob. When you start the game, you have 4 directions to go in and each direction brought you to a different game: tank maze, light cycles, bugs, or the MCP. Each game used the flight stick, but not all games used the knob. When you won all 4 games, you went up a level where you’d play the same 4 games, but at a higher difficulty. The music matched what was in the movie also. Such an awesome game and definitely a “Top 5″.

Starship I – Basically you flew around space shooting ships that came out of Star Trek. When the game was over it would say “Sensors detect another quarter in your pocket”. I loved that.

Tron was one of those revolutionary films that was really pushing what movie makers could do back in the early 1980′s. The bluescreen process that Star Wars used had been invented decades before, but was really put to the test by Lucasfilm. Even though computer graphics (CGI) had been used in vector form in the movies before (again, with Star Wars), it was never used to fully render a frame of film and move the plot of a story along on the big screen. Tron was also one of the few films I owned on 35mm back in the days before DVD.

Apart from the CGI, Tron also pushed the envelope of what a Disney film was. The Black Hole was Disney’s first PG-rated film and depite what people think of the film, I personally believe it had a wonderful atmosphere about it. Even though one line of dialog needed to be fixed (“we’re looking for habiatable life”), I think the movie really worked.

Tron also had a subtle subtext of religion. “If I don’t have a user than who wrote me?”, asks captured program RAM. It was never really expounded upon because it wasn’t necessary, but it gave the programs a much needed feeling of being human and not some robotized character running around with a monotone robotic voice saying “You..must…not…take…data”.

Last, but not least, Tron’s music was impressive as well. Written by Wendy Carlos, it wasn’t the first electronic score (I believe that goes to Forbidden Planet), but it was very unique in how it was written and performed.

It’s been 26 years since Tron was released and ComiCon showed a surprise teaser for the sequel, Tr2n. What worries me is that moviemaking has lost a lot of its humanity, especially in effect-driven films. Movies like Star Wars, Aliens, and Predator worked because although there were effects in the films, there was good story as well. I personally blame Top Gun, and moreso Armageddon for th fall of modern cinema. There are too many fast MTV-style cuts nowadays. Effects-driven stories have their actors phone in their performances. Watching Batman Begins last week really made me feel that there are people out there that still understand what makes a good film.

And that brings us back to Disney. If you look at Disney’s track record of late, the stories are good, but revolve around a central theme: some poor character is somehow lost and needs to find their way home. Toy Story, Cars, Finding Nemo, Wall-E. I pray that Tr2n doesn’t turn into some poor program getting bit-shifted outside his CPU and needs to find his way back to his home address (pun intended). I would hope that the creative team at Disney isn’t looking to make an eye-candy film, but one that pushed the envelope of movie making like the original movie did in 1982. No, I don’t mean with respect to CGI, I mean the experience of the film as a whole, just like the first film was. Push the film to challenge the audience about what lives inside a computer, don’t just run arond with lightcycles for the hell of it.

End of line

If you want to see the concept trailer, it shows up from time to time on youtube; just do a search for “tr2n”. Filmstalker has also been keeping tabs on it.

There’s something exhilarating about fighting games. When you’re playing a first-person shooter or an RPG, or even an MMORPG, events unfold rather slowly. In Halo, you’re scouting out an area before being attacked, and in World Of Warcraft, you could ride for miles before seeing something to fight. However, in fighting games, you’re thrown into the ring immediately with barely enough time to shake the sweat off your palms from the last game you barely won.

The concept of fighting games has been the same for decades since the days of Karateka for the Atari 800 and Mortal Kombat: learn to use moves against your opponent, block incoming blows, counter moves if you can, and survive. It seems easy, in fact some poorly designed games are called “button mashers” because all it really takes is just mashing certain buttons on the controller to beat your opponent.

However, there are some rather intelligent fighting games out there. Tekken and Soul Calibur are known to be the two best in the genre and each have their own unique styles of gameplay. Tekken is more hand-to-hand whereas Soul Calibur is based on swords and other weapons. What makes them “intelligent” is that your computer-controlled opponents don’t just stand there and randomly attack you. They’re designed to challenge you by simulating what a real person would do.

The fun part of Soul Calibur has been the story mode and the unlocakable content. The original Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast had so many unlocakables I couldn’t list them all. Soul Calibur IV will have the same and I’m itching to go through it all.

The fun part of fighting games ends there. There comes a point in these games when they just get ridiculously difficult. Many times in these games I’ll do well, have a few close calls, but survive, and then reach a point where the opponent is so hard to beat that I can’t get a move off of them. Or, I’ll get them down to within a hair of their life and they’ll come back and somehow beat me to a bloody pulp. To me there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to beat an opponent for the umpteenth time and just as you’re about to take them out, you find yourself knocked to the ground. Game Over.

I personally believe that fighting games are what keeps extra controllers in stock at game stores.

So with today’s release of Soul Calibur IV, I look forward to beating Voldo and Ivy and Siegfriend into the pavement. Again. I’m going to try and be Zen about it this time around and realize that if the game’s getting too frustrating, I have the option of walking away, or bribing my nephew into doing the work for me.

Preordering started with laserdiscs. There were so few printed that if you didn’t get one on release day, you were doomed to find one on usenet or eBay as early as the following day. Preordering from Ken Crane’s was something I started to do religiously and to this day I’m happy I have my copies of laserdiscs and DVDs which are long out of print.

Invariably, in the days before preordering videogames, I’d forget a game was coming out, or I’d miss the release date. Now, normally that wouldn’t be a problem but several titles in the past have become rare and if you don’t pick them up on release day, you’ll have a lot of trouble finding them.

Two perfect examples are Rez for the Playstation 2, and Tetris for the Nintendo DS. I preordered Rez thinking nothing of it. A few months later I found that not many copies of the game were shipped and it got amazing reviews. The consequences were that the game was going for over $100 on eBay at the time. The same goes for Tetris for the DS. I believe that game was discontinued and started commanding silly money on eBay as well.

A game I regretted not preordering was the collector’s edition of World Of Warcraft in 2004. Since I was such an Everquest junkie I didn’t think I’d be playing WoW at all. Come February 2005, I had to pay $175 for my copy of it.

Another aspect of preordering are the goodies that come with them. If you preorder certain games, you’ll sometimes get a beta key for them! That allows you to play the game early for free and give feedback to the developers. Sometimes you get art books, soundtracks, keychains, etc. Some of the stuff may be trash to people, but I keep some of it. I love art books, I love soundtracks. I’ve kept every one I’ve gotten over the years.

And then there’s the advantage of having the game the second it’s released. Most of the time I really don’t care, I just like to get things out of the way. For games like Final Fantasy XII and Halo 3, I just felt I had to have them in my hands the instant they came out.

So while some cynics may think of preordering as a scam, I see it as an opportunity.

Back in the days of laserdiscs, Criterion uses to release special editions of movies like Blade Runner and Robocop which had running audio commentary by the cast and crew, documentaries on the making of the films, and other goodies not found on regular editions. These special editions weren’t marketed to the masses, they were marketed towards people like myself that were big fans of seeing “behind the curtain” about how films were made.

So now we’re getting the same treatment with videogames. I try and buy the collector’s editions of anything I’m interested in because I want to see everything I can about how the games were made; especially the art books. It’s fascinating how concepts go from pencil to screen. Funcom put out an art book for Dreamfall, Blizzard put out an art book for each of their World Of Warcraft versions. Back in college I was going to go into CGI, so I eat all this special edition material up. I read every page, I watch every documentary. I always like to see voice actors delivering their lines, and how much effort went into doing voices.

So the next time someone tells you that collectors editions are “crap”, ask them why. Collector’s editions aren’t for everyone, but the ones that do buy them are probably the people that are interested in how games and movies are made.

“I had to set aside my plans for world domination yesterday when S7arman decided to game. Our score is 1,851 and always improving! He played Halo 3, and then he had to stop because we both couldn’t take it anymore… we were spent”

Uh, no. I wasn’t spent. I had to take care of the kids. And despite the rumors of my character in WoW hitting 70, I’m not set on any sort of world dominiation.

Maybe the site should have the owners write the blogs for the 360.

My 360′s blog

Electronic gaming didn’t start with the Atari 2600. In fact, the first console I ever had was a Coleco Telstar Arcade; my sister and I got it for Christmas in 1976 or 1977. For its time it was a wonderful new toy, having three videogames in it, one game for each side of the triangle the machine was built into. Back then kids were mystified by little red LEDs in games like Mattell Football or Merlin. To be able to play games on a television was just mind-blowing since the only way you could do it back then was in an arcade for 25 cents a pop on machines that cost hundreds of dollars.

Back when I was a kid I used to take things apart and figure out how they worked, but unlike today where you can get arrested for breaking the DMCA, I used to take apart calculators and tried to understand what made them tick. My first “hack” was with this Telstar. I found that every time you reset the racing game it would start from a cycle of patterns, and if you know where the cars start from, you can play the entire game without crashing once. The Telstar was nice but lacked diversity.

On Christmas Eve 1979, my dad brought home an Atari 2600. I had been egging him on for one for a while because the Telstar Arcade had gotten tired real fast. The only game in the box was Combat, but what a huge difference it was than the Telstar. A joystick, better sound, more options for the game itself, all in this one little cartridge. The problem was that my sister wasn’t too interested in playing a video game, and with Combat being a 2-player game only, I had to find a better game to play alone.

I don’t remember what my first game was, but I think it was Space Invaders. I was bummed that it didn’t reflect the arcade version perfectly, but it was much more economical to play it at home than in an arcade. Still, I think the arcade version was better. It was the first game I remember getting “Atari palm” from, where the corner of the joystick would dig into your left palm after playing so much. I got other games like Surround, Breakout, Superman, Kaboom! and Adventure. I tried the Swordquest series but didn’t like it too much. I loved Frogger. The theme was so addicting my mom used to sing it.

There was a fellow student in my junior high that lived up the street from me whose mother worked for some company related to Imagic. He’d bring over games before they were released like Demon Attack. Oh, how I loved that game. To this day I still fire it up sometimes.

I remember when I first got Asteroids, it was the very first time I pulled an all-nighter. I just played until 6am the following morning. That was my first videogame obsession. Who knew what it would lead into? .

Pac-Man was hyped like you wouldn’t believe. The fact that another big arcade game was coming to the 2600 was a big deal. I remember the day I picked up Pac-Man and just sat there thinking “this is crap”. I tried to like it but couldn’t. What a terrible let down. So much hype and the game didn’t deliver. Things haven’t changed much, have they?

Pitfall was the first game I bought with my own money and I had a blast playing it. The concept was very simple: just keep moving, grab treasure, and don’t die. The trick was to find the best route using shortcuts. I don’t remember what my high score was, but I had spent a lot of time perfecting the run. Activision had done something that’s akin to today’s Xbox Live achievements. If you send a screenshot of your score, they’ll send you a patch if your score is high enough. Check out the patch gallery at Atariage.com.

Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first true adventure game. Sure there was Adventure and Vanguard, but I really thought that Raiders put you in the game, you felt like you were doing something epic. For starters, you needed two joysticks. One controlled Indy, the other controlled your inventory slots. I read rumors that a perfect score would grant you the signature of Howard Scott Warsaw, but I never got it, as hard as I tried. There was no internet back then to research it with.

The great thing about the Atari was that you didn’t have to bring the whole console to a friend’s house that already had the 2600, you just take the carts with you. A lot of us traded carts all the time. I still have some of my old carts in a box in the garage.

I eventually sold my Atari 2600 at the Trenton Computer Show in 1986 for something like $25. I was a starving college student then and I already had an Atari 800 computer, so I didn’t really need it, nor did I miss it. Since then I did buy a refurbished one with jacks for S-Video and RCA audio.

If anyone’s interested in looking back at some of the games that were so influential, check out Atariage.com. There you can find ROM images and emulators for pretty much any platform.

To Be Continued Wallpaper
In 2004 I had reproduced one of my favorite Atari 2600 ads “To Be Continued”. I got all hi-res images of the boxes in the original ad and fixed them all up. There are wallpapers for 1024×768, 1600×1200, and 1920×1200.