retro-gaming

My one quarter game

Video game arcades emerged in the mid-1970s and flourished through the 1980s. During this same period, I was 10–25 years old, so pretty much the prime age to indulge in arcade gaming as a pastime. A friend and I would sometimes even get in his van and drive from Duncan to Victoria, a roughly 50-minute trek, to check out the latest games at the snazzy arcades in the capitol. This was around 1984, just when the first (and as it turned out, some of the only) laser disc games emerged.

I was never great at arcade games, but also not horribly inept, so I usually felt I got my money’s worth when I exchanged a $10 bill for a roll of 40 quarters. Unless I played anything from Williams (Robotron 2084, Defender, Stargate, Sinistar), because their games were technically brilliant, a blast to play and required a level of hand/eye coordination I never had, even as a nimble youth.

But there was one game that I actually mastered and could play from beginning to end (because it actually had an end) on a single quarter. That game was one of the aforementioned laser disc titles, Space Ace.

I was never that good at its predecessor, Dragon’s Lair, but loved the film-quality animation and being able to “control” the same. I put control in scare quotes because both games were ultimately just variations of Simon–hit the button or push the joystick when a colour flashes onscreen, and the animation continues uninterrupted. Guess wrong or take too long to react (measured in fractions of a second in some cases) and you got to watch Dirk the Daring (in Dragon’s Lair) or Dexter (in Space Ace) die in some horrible way, you’d lose a life, and the game would play through the sequence again, giving you another chance.

Space Ace was a bit more generous in the clues guiding you through the game, and this was apparently enough to get me to keep trying, to where I could get through the entire thing for only 25 cents.

Last night, YouTube served up a video of a complete playthrough of the game. The video is about nine minutes long and is linked below. Watching it, I am kind of amazed I managed to get through the entire game on a quarter, even with 20-year-old reflexes, because there were so many times decisions had to be made so quickly, I couldn’t even suss out which was the right one before two more had already popped up and flown by.

Clearly, I was a maniac in 1984.

I continued to hang out and play in arcades until the early 90s, or until I was around 30 years old. By then home video game consoles were getting good enough to make them credible alternatives to the arcades and today arcades are just a niche for either nostalgia buffs looking to play the cocktail table version of Ms Pac-Man (which was the best way to play), or for indulging in novelty games with weird controls that are two bucks a pop or something.

But I’ll always remember those early years and my only single quarter game, even as it seems totally bananas today that I could pull off those moves back then.

Partying like it’s 1998 (with Unreal)

Don’t shoot the Nali! Also, there are more colours in the game than brown, I swear.

After some chat about the olden days of gaming in Discord that include recollections of the original Unreal, released in 1998, I felt the silly urge to re-install the game–and did!

For other people who are thinking, perhaps unwisely, of giving in to their nostalgia, here is what I did:

  • Went to my gog.com library to install the game from there. It turns out I never got the game on gog.com. I then checked Steam. On both platforms I have:
    • Unreal Tournament
    • Unreal Tournament 2004
    • Unreal Tournament 3 (re: UT2007)
    • Unreal 2
    • No original Unreal. Sad face.
  • I pondered whether I wanted to buy a 25-year-old game, but the decision was made for me because Epic delisted the game on all digital stores last year (along with all the others I listed above).
  • I dug out my binders of game CDs (BOGs) to see if I had my original Unreal disc. I did!
  • I dug out my USB DVD drive and plugged it in
  • I inserted the CD and waited to see what would happen
  • I got a pop-up about compatibility mode, clicked OK and waited
  • The installer launched!
  • The game installed!

Amazingly, the unpatched original CD version actually worked. It defaulted to 800×600 resolution. I then applied the UnrealClassicPatch227i, a community-made patch that builds on the efforts of Epic to allow the game to work with modern renderers and fixes a few bugs and glitches. The patch is on the community site OldUnreal, found here.

I made the following change to the console in the unreal.ini file, found in the Unreal/System folder, under the [Engine.Engine] section. This enables the UT-style Umenu system, which gives access to some of the newer options (and makes changing keybinds easier, too):

Console=UMenu.UnrealConsole

The original line is Console=UBrowser.UBrowserConsole.

I set the resolution to the same as my monitor, 2560×1440, which looks fine, though the HUD shrinks to micro-sized. Apparently HUD scaling is coming to the 227j patch.

I originally chose OpenGL for the renderer, but it was too dark and changing brightness had no effect. I switched to the Direct3D 9 renderer and was able to change the brightness from Impenetrably Dark But Undoubtedly Moody to Moody But I Can Actually See Some Things Now.

Finally, I installed some high resolution textures, which look fine, though there’s a jarring difference when you see a fuzzy original texture next to a high-res one. You can fix most of these by also installing the HD Skins pack, available from the same link. HD Skins is actually a mutator, but the readme.txt file doesn’t note that you must start a new game to first enable the mutator. You can save the configuration so the mutator always runs after that.

The game itself plays great, of course. I could probably run it at 100,000 x 100,000 resolution and still get 140 FPS. Now we’ll see how long a 25-year-old first-person shooter can hold my interest.

Bonus shot:

Looking back at the crashed Vortex Rikers ship you escape from.

Welcome to 1993 (again), courtesy of Grandpa Apple

Apple has awarded the 2021 Mac Game of the Year Award to…

Myst.

Yes, the same game that came out in 1993 for the Mac. This is a full 3D version of the game, but it’s still got all the same puzzles, so it’s really just a nicer-looking version of the same game that came out 28 years ago and ran on System 7.

Is it fair to say this sums up gaming on Macs? Not entirely, but more than a little. Kind of embarrassing, considering there were better contemporary games that could have been highlighted. Apple is devolving into the corporate equivalent of the dad-soon-to-be-grandpa who’s grown conservative, has questionable taste and likes his food packaged and processed, not that hippie natural stuff.

Book review: The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech

The Nostalgia Nerd’s Retro Tech: Computer, Consoles & Games by Peter Leigh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Retro Tech provides just what it says on the tin. Starting with systems in the early 1970s, it provides a summary of virtually every video game console and personal computer released up until the debut of the original Xbox in October 2001.

Each summary includes a generous number of photos, sometimes including controllers or oddball accessories, or more mundane things like the power supplies. Leigh offers both an historical overview and also his own personal assessment on each device, which at times stands in contrast to how I saw some of the systems, accounting for the differences in reception between the UK and North American (and in particular U.S.) audiences.

Each summary concludes with a look at three games from each system: The Must-See, the Must-Play, and the Must-Avoid. A lot of the Must-Avoids are typically obscure fare (no, E.T. did not make the list for the Atari 2600–though it does get mentioned alongside the “winner”).

Leigh keeps the writing light and at times droll, never being afraid to call out lemons and questionable marketing of years gone by.

I was struck by the sheer number of systems that came out in the 70s and early 80s. It seemed that nearly everyone tried to get a slice of the video game pie before the famous crash of 1983. While there are systems that never sold well here in Canada that I was aware of–like the MSX computers, there are many listed here that I was utterly unfamiliar with, even leaving aside the UK-specific machines that never made it over here.

For anyone who grew up when these machines were coming out (as I did), this is indeed a heady dose of nostalgia. For others, it serves as a brief and well-illustrated history of the early days of video games and personal computers. In fact, my only real knock on the book is that each write-up only amounts to a page or so. I would love to see a more in-depth look at the same topic. As it is, I was able to tear through the book all too quickly.

Still, this was an enjoyable look back and an easy recommendation for those who would enjoy seeing the sometimes wacky products that came out in the quest for the early gamer’s dollars (or pounds).

View all my reviews

My favorite video games from a hundred years ago

Pong was the first popular video game. I first played it in a darkened pizza restaurant in 1974, the video screen casting an eerie blue glow on those gathered around it. I was nine years old.

And hooked.

In 1976 we got the home version of Pong. It had two control knobs built into the console. My brother used his advanced high school electronics wizardry to pry the knobs out and then attach them to longer wiring, allowing us to sit back and play while reclining on those giant weird pillows that were so popular in the 70s. It was great.

Through the mid-70s and early 80s, my love of video gaming saw me spending many an hour in video game arcades–my first full-time job was handing out quarters at an arcade. The job was about as exciting as it sounds, but it was still cool to be surrounded by the light and noise of forty arcade cabinets. My manager was less impressed when a group of teenage boys gathered around a machine one night, managed to jimmy it open, and then empty all the quarters from it. Hey, I just thought they were really into Sub-Roc 3D.

Looking back, some of my memories and recollections of arcade games include:

  • the Williams games were technically dazzling and impossible for me to play competently. These included Defender, Stargate (no relation to the movie or TV series) and Robotron 2084. I loved these games but my roll of quarters would vanish all too quickly attempting to play them. I’m pretty sure I lost a ship just pressing the one player button in Defender.
  • while I enjoyed Time Pilot, there was something almost transcendental about its sequel, the space-oriented Time Pilot 84, that really hooked me. I actually got pretty good at this one. A local laundromat in Vancouver had it and I probably spent more money on it than others did doing their laundry.
  • I never quite mastered Dragon’s Lair but could play through (the superior) Space Ace with a single quarter. It was pretty much watching a cartoon with a joystick. That sounds wrong and in a way it was.
  • A friend and I played Super Mario Bros as player vs. player since you could push or otherwise manipulate the other player into the crabs, turtles and mean ice cubes. You didn’t get points by indirectly offing the other player but in a way that made it even better.
  • I remember thinking laser disc games were not the future. I was right (fortunately). Williams had one called Star Rider that was decent, cleverly using the laser-y part as a fairly seamless background to a respectable racing game (there’s even a YouTube video).
  • The cocktail table version of Ms. Pacman was awesome. Suddenly, standing in an arcade was obsolete (several arcades started providing stools).
  • The Movieland Arcade in Vancouver was one of my regular haunts and had a row of Sega’s Daytona USA machines near the front. Racing against friends was great fun. The arcade and those Daytona USA machines are still there more than twenty years later, but the arcade always looks forlorn and empty. The sign in the window also still advertises “girlie movies” in the back. I never watched the girlie movies.
  • by the mid-80s, we reached a kind of golden age of arcades. Most games were still 25 cents, with new games sometimes being 50 cents. Graphics had improved dramatically so titles like Toobin’ still look pretty good today. Home consoles were in the pre-Playstation era, so arcades still had a place with a technically superior presentation. That would fade by the early 90s. Coincidentally I was edging toward 30 and my own interests began pulling me away.
  • a friend and I played Cyberball against the Deluise brothers. I don’t remember why they were in Vancouver at the time.
  • another friend and I would drive from Duncan to Victoria to play games like Star Rider and Crystal Castles at Xanacade. Yes, we drove nearly an hour just to play video games. Both ways, in the snow!

Video arcades still exist, mostly on the appeal of massive novelty machines that cost a lot more than a mere quarter, but like many things you adore in your youth (hello, Mad magazine), the magic has faded. Alas and such.