Atari 7800 Retro Inspection In Retro Gamer Magazine #78
Atari 7800 Retro Inspection In Retro Gamer Magazine #78
My favorite Atari console of all time is the Atari 7800. It could play 99% of the Atari 2600 games and it had very nice versions of some of my favorite arcade games (Food Fight, Galaga, Pole Position 2, Joust, etc).
8bitrocket friend, Marty Goldberg (www.classicgaming.com) has written a HUGE (by Retro Gamer Standards) 8 page feature of this sometimes forgotten classic gem of a machine.
Here is a Youtube walk through of the issue by GamerDaz.
The issue can be found at the Retrogamer Magazine site and at most fine book stores world-wide. I get mine at both Borders and Barnes and Noble (depending on what city I am in when I get the hankering for some retro games readin').
Nice work Marty (with some help his buddy Curt)
Vacation Game Storm #1: Free Budget Breakfast Buffet
Note: I've always felt that the best time for me to come-up with new ideas for games is when I'm on vacation. I recently went on vacation with my family. These are some of the game design notes I took.
On our first night of the trip we stayed at a nice little family hotel that had a very satisfying 'free breakfast buffet'. As far as I can tell the 'free breakfast buffet' in the USA is based on the idea of the 'Continental Breakfast' that was served at the hotels I stayed in the UK a decade ago. However, like everything Americans suck-in and make their own, our hotels have taken it and ran with it. The 'free breakfast buffet' in the right hotel, is a complimentary, hot breakfast with a magnificent variety of foods piled-up in quantities to that could feed a battalion of hungry soldiers.
That is the idea anyway.
Now, there are also places that serve-up the idea of the 'free breakfast buffet', but don't always follow-through. Our family once had the opportunity to stay at a small hotel near Disneyland. I won't tell you the exact name, but they offered the world's worst Free Breakfast Buffet at an adjacent restaurant that will not be named, however I will describe how it worked and how it might be an interesting game.
Apparently many of the local hotel and motels that don't have their own facilities for a 'free breakfast buffet' offer free tickets to this specific restaurant to their guests so they can bullet-point 'Free Breakfast Buffet' in the advertising materials. However, this specific restaurant is not necessarily interested in serving the 'free breakfast buffet' at all. The minute you walk-in, they attempt to up-sell you on a 'full cooked breakfast' for $9.95 a head, which is considerably more than anyone who is staying a budget hotel/motel looking for a 'free breakfast buffet' is willing to pay. The normal restaurant is down stairs. It was waitresses, silverware, hot coffee, and smiling faces. However, if you choose the 'free' option, you are unceremoniously sent upstairs.
And then the mayhem starts.
When you arrive, you must find your own table. This is the easy part, because the upstairs room is a vast wasteland of tables. Rows and rows and rows of chipped wood veneer tables, and torn orange vinyl seats. Enough tables for 100's of people. You locate the best looking one for your family, and sit-down. So far so good. The seats are a bit gross, but it's 'free', right?
Next comes the best part: Getting food. This is where the game starts. You see, unlike a 'free breakfast buffet' at a regular mid-priced hotel, the food at this 'free breakfast buffet' is not on display at all times. It needs to be 'released' from the kitchen in batches. Throngs of hungry budget travelers surround the empty hot plates, waiting for food to arrive. When the kitchen door opens, anticipation mounts. When they food is spotted, calls start going out 'bacon has arrived!' The workers don't stick around very long, but run back through the swinging doors to the kitchen as fast as possible. The crowd pushes toward the bacon, forks ready to grab whatever they can get their hands on. Pushing and shoving ensue, fights break out, then it all calms down a bit while the collected scraps of food are consumed.
The food itself is awful. Brown water for coffee, runny eggs, bacon and sausage coated with enough grease to fuel a Ford F-150 Super Duty all the way back to Alabama. Babies cry, kids get yelled at, adults curse one another and argue about who gets to eat what. It is humanity at its most basic and most ferocious: trying to feed hunger.
This process repeats itself in 5-10 minute intervals for the entire morning. It might not be medieval, but it's definitely 3rd world. It feels like the way markets in the Soviet Union were described to us during the Cold War (true or not). Oh, did I mention that most of the people fighting for their share of the 'free breakfast buffet' area bit on the humongous side, so 'their share' might just be the same amount of food an entire small African nation consumes in a single day.
This memory has prompted a game idea for me: Free Budget Breakfast Buffet
Here is the idea. You start the game with a family of 3 on a 2 week vacation. You enter the upstairs and must first be assigned a table (closer to the food on easier levels). You then position your resources in the best places to try to get as much food as possible. Visible clues will guide you toward which hot plates will be filled next. Your job is to fill the tummies and reach the necessary caffeine level of your family in the allotted time. If you do it, you gain money for the day the amusement park (the money saved by eating the free breakfast buffet). However, if you don't succeed, you lose money because you have to buy very expensive food at the amusement park. The goal is to make it through the 2 weeks without going broke.
As the game progresses, more people arrive that are in your family. They need to be fed as well. Caffeine levels rise as your stay at the 'relaxing amusement park' wears on. You can collect bonuses that help in your quest: bad odor spray will make (certain) crowds disperse, or fake 'arriving food smell' generators will make crowds swell in areas that you choose.
The picture below is a rough drawing of what the screen might look like (without a design). The Green Stars are your resources, the Red Diamonds are the other patrons trying to get food. You need to collect food and take it back your table (green) without having it stolen by others on your way back. Collect bonuses (like bad odor spray) on your way back. The game is part resources management and part action. It happens in real-time.
That's it, my first idea from vacation. I have no idea what I will do with it. Hopefully it spawn better and more interesting ones.
8bitrocket.com Declares Today As Landon Donovan Day!
Let July 23rd, 2010 forever be known as Landon Donovan Day!
Strong Adobe CS5 Sales Show The Battle For Hearts And Minds Is Far From Over
The Wall Street Journal is reporting Adobe sales at $905 million for the first part of this year. Here is a nice quote:
"...Apple's stance does not yet appear to be deterring purchasers of CS5..."
What does this mean? It means that the corporate buyers, the ones with deep pockets and lucrative Enterprise Agreements ("EAs") are still buying from Adobe. This is good news for Flash. It means that CIOs have not been fooled by Apple...yet.
We still think it is inevitable that the tide will turn away from Flash (to some extent), but Adobe has been doing very very well to keep things moving!
8bitrocket.com: The End Is Nye? We Need Ideas On Where To Move.
Today our hosting company emailed us to tell that our site uses too many resources. They want to move us to a much more expensive plan. One that simply does not justify the cost.
We have collected almost 1000 stories and tutorials in the past 4 years, plus almost 100 games. We are supporting one book, and hopefully, will soon be supporting another.
Now, we have to move.
At the same time, I'm really tired of supporting the code for this .NET blog. We would like to move to a hosted CMS, (Joomla, or something else that is not Drupal) or even a site builder (Google Sites, Blogger.com) or white label social network like ning.com.
Our question is this: Where do you think we should go? Should we just go with straight blog? Should we return to Ning.com and go full-bore there? Does a site in this format even matter any longer?
We just don't know yet. Any ideas would be appreciated.
8bitrocket.com @ E3 Report #1 : Lucha Libre Fight While The Game Industry Dies (updated)
So we went to E3 today, and we saw few things worth mentioning (which we might cover later), however, our general impressions can be summed up with this story from Cracked.com:
(updated: E3 was still pretty terrible, but this *IS* the match we saw)
It includes 4 masked wrestlers, two of which were midgets. Honestly, it was the best thing I have ever seen at an E3.
8bitrocket.com @ E3 2010
We are attending E3 2010 this year. We hope to bring you back all the "news" of stuff on display for Flash, Web, Viral, Retro, Mobile, Indie game developers.
However, we assume, just like last year, the entire show will ignore this part of the game industry. If we can find anything, we'll tell you about it.
We'll update you on Wednesday.
Apparenty, 360 "Natal" is Named "Kinect", And Apparenty Someone Jumped The Gun On Talking About It
It's now official (maybe) that the Xbox 360 "Motion Control" device, once named "Natal" will be named "Kinect", and apparently we are not supposed to know this yet.
The USA Today game "blog" (column, whatever) went with a story about it today, that now looks like this:
Oops. Someone jumped the gun and got called on it. The funny things is, they made the story into "xxxxxx", but they left the comments intact:
Anyway, we hope the guys who did this are not in trouble. C/NET has a full story, so it looks like it's OK to to post now.
USA v. England : A No Win Situation For 8bitrocket.com
The last time the USA met England, a definite chill fell over relations with our English friends. Things that we found funny suddenly were...not. Things that we found interesting were suddenly...boring.
This game might be the best chance ever to make our English friends upset, and it really doesn't matter how the game goes.
If the USA wins (highly unlikely), there is a good chance we will be blamed for it, and the cold-shoulder will return. At the same time, if the USA loses, it will be tough to face the same people as they say things like "well, it's not your sport" or "no one in the USA cares anyway". It is my sport, and I care very very deeply.
So, to our friends from England we wish you good luck and Godspeed...just not quite as much we wish our guys. We will accept the cold-shoulder/soccer jibes for a while, but we expect things to return to normal come mid-July. And come on, we all know that Maradona will find a way to get on the field and knock the tournament winning-ball in with his ego anyway , so what does this game really matter?
Review: New Star Games Sensational World Soccer 2010
Wanna play some digital footie?
Synopsis:
Sensational World Of Soccer 2010 Review.
Are you a USA fan who wants to replay the England match and try to put more goals by the hapless Robert Green? Are you an England fan who desires the opportunity to massacre a virtual Tim Howard? Are you an Argentina supporter who thinks he can take a digital Messi to the promised land against the likes of Nigeria? Now you can and for only $6.99! The brilliant single-button control scheme and classic 2D overhead game play will have you enthralled for hours as you guide your favorite country to World Cup glory. You even have control to edit tactics and save/load your favorite goal replays.
Unlike what most of our overseas (and over border) friends might assume, Steve and I have been fans of the world's game for our entire lives. I have watched every World Cup since 1978 (when only the matches that interested English fans were cut to 50 minutes and taped delayed to PBS stations in the USA). Living in Los Angeles that entire time (with no less that 5 Spanish language stations) we were also afforded the opportunity to also watch every match that mattered to Mexican, Central, and South American fans (albeit in a tongue just slightly less difficult to understand for a 8 year old then the British PBS broadcasts).
We also played the youth game from age 8 until 15 and then took it up again at 25, playing another 10 years with local leagues and teams to prove we still could. During that entire time (and beyond) we have supported the USA national team and all local pro teams even when there were only a hundred of us watching them at El Camino college stadium in Torrance (1984) up until now when the USA team boasts its largest fan base ever and a team of 23 that play in the best leagues in the world (including 3 great players from the local under-rated MLS).
Being such a fan of the game I was always happy to get the latest Anco or Sensible import footy game for my Atari ST in the late '80s and early 90's. When I was forced to swap the ST for a PC in 1992 I was very disappointed with the state of football (soccer titles). The FIFA titles were always good and looked great but didn't have that classic playability that Anco and Sensible afforded the game player. Also, the sheer number of buttons needed to control play started to become ridiculous when it was 3 (Sega Genesis version in 1995) and that morphed to absolute lunacy with the 20 button version that I attempted to play last week on the 360.
A couple years back I was trolling Bigsoccer.com and found a thread on a PC soccer game called New Star Soccer 3 (NSS3). Created by indie developer, Simon Read, this game was a revelation. It was a combination of Anco Player Manager and Sensible World Of Soccer - two of the best footy games I had on the Atari ST. Since then I have purchased every footy game Simon has put on the market (all of very reasonable prices from free to $20). Between versions of the full New Star Soccer (version 5 will be released this year), Simon has tested the market with a stripped down (read - no player, team, and league management functions) match-engine only version. This year is no different as he gloriously takes on the 2010 World cup with his new match engine called:
Sensational World Soccer 2010
Harkening back to the simpler times of computer soccer (footy) games, Sensible World Soccer 2010 comes out swinging with an impressive looking and playing set of "ball skills", "solid fundamentals", and a little extra "magic" in places to make a wonderfully fun game to play especially given the $6.99 price tag.
Something old returns and something new is added
Shedding the solid (if not spectacular) 3D visuals of NSS4, the new
match engine boasts a refreshed version of the NSS3 2D match engine look
and style. While the match perspective returns to 2D, the control system has been upgraded to a "single-button" model. The longer the button is pressed, the harder the shot or pass. On defense, you only need to run into players to strip them of the ball (based on basic team skill attributes and positioning), but pressing the button will initiate a slide tackle. This helps to greatly simplify the game-play to an extent (for me at least) and helps put emphasis on solid passing combinations to create scoring chances.
The ball sticks to the foot of the player in control (Sensible model, not Anco) and this makes for a relatively easy and fun way to zig-zag down the pitch, passing and dodging the "enemy" ala Messi.
It's the World Cup just without the name
Simon has modeled the tournament portion of the game after this year's world cup, using the Fifa rankings of each team to create aggregate skill levels for the competition.
The Game In Action
After selecting the USA as my team I was treated to the above screen that let me skip through the other matches (seeing the scores) until my match came up on the schedule. Simon has added some wonderful South Africa inspired music (my wife was especially keen on this aspect of the game - the only aspect she appreciated as she has never played a game on a computer other than Tetris).
My first match against England came up and I was able to choose to change to the preferred white USA kit (they usually win in white and lose in blue, go figure).
Ed Note: or tie as we found out today.
I quickly was able to get the hang of the single-button control by racing down the pitch, passing once (using the nifty radar screen to find my nearest compatriot in white), rounding the keeper and placing a shot to the upper corner - "Fucking Awesome" was my response.
The game ended USA 3, England 0 (in easy mode).
After this game I was able to take the USA to the finals and beat Brazil 4-1. The point here is that the skill of the player behind the joystick is much more important than the perceived skill levels usually modeled into games such as these. This makes for some intense arcade footy action the likes of which I have not played since Kick Off 2 in 1990.
Before each match you have the choice of selection pre-created tactics
and formations or you can dive in and create your own. You also have the
ability to modify a host of toggles such as game speed, match length,
radar screen size, difficulty, and more from the options screen any time
(before or during a match).
If you enjoy a good arcade soccer game, especially if you remember classic over-head 2D 16-bit footy games from late '80s and early 90's, you will not be disappointed in Sensible World Soccer 2010. At $6.99 it is quite a steal and worth 3X that price.
Sensational World Soccer 2010 game gets a 90% Retro-tastic!
Both native Mac and PC versions are available. Up to two players can duke it out footy style at the same machine with a variety of control options. My favorite was to use the Legacy Engineering Atari Retro 2600 stick.