Curmudgeon Gamer
I have a friend that works as a real-life video game developer. He works for a company that is primarily focused on Windows games right now but he did work for a Linux game company for a short while. Whenever I bring up WINE (WINE is not an emulator), he tells me that I need to stop worrying about it since WINE is not a legitimate platform. "No real Windows developer knows about it, much less cares about it. It can't hurt the Linux gaming scene one bit," he chastises me. Generally, I have deferred to him, since he is, after all, more in touch with the game developer world than I am. But I think he's missing a crucial point, one that really is my biggest concern. I suppose I just wasn't able to vocalize it before.
WINE, as it stands right at this moment, is not anything that can be used against Linux users. Windows developers are now ignoring, and will for the next year or so continue to ignore, Linux users. I can accept that, and WINE isn't affecting the situation one way or the other. WINE is still immature, for gaming, and plays only a few select games well, like Half-Life. Today's WINE is not my concern. My concern is what happens when WINE reaches a level of compatibility that allows some new games to work, at least mostly, at the time of release for Windows.
Consider this situation. If Linux population starts to grow and can take 5% of the desktop market, then Windows developers will be in a position where it might make sense to sell some extra copies to Linux users. After all, this is about the same percentage of the desktop that Mac users have right now. But a better WINE increases the temptation for developers to allay the Linux gamer with the partial support that WINE provides. "See, we developed it on Windows. You have WINE to play Windows games. Now go away," they'll tell us like little misguided children. And when the games don't work because some feature in WINE because part of an API isn't implemented yet, or the developer's code does some weird thing that just happens to work in Windows but not WINE, we'll be right back where we started. It gives developers a reason not to put any effort into supporting Linux users. Yes, in this possible future WINE may be doing well for many games. But that is not a success. It will provide a means for developers to continue to treat us as second-class citizens, hindering development of good cross-platform software with native builds on each system.
Any tool that we develop which allows commercial developers to ignore us cannot possibly be helpful. The fact that WINE is not a fully realized tool at this time is not the point. The point is that as WINE gets better (and it will since development on it continues at a brisk pace) it marginalizes Linux more with each step forward. If it reaches 95% compatibility and Linux gains 5% of the desktop market, almost all of the advantage of the market share gains will be nullified by the advances in WINE.
Labels: linux
In other news, Quake 64 is sitting in my N64 and I think I can get a TV tuner card kind of cheap locally. If the capture card is captured, then I'll be more apt to post comparisons of games on dead systems.
As the parents were visiting yet again, I didn't really get a chance to be my usual game-aholic self until after midnight. I almost cranked up Devil May Cry again, but remembered the Mr. Do! cartridge. Fortunately, the GameBoy Color was actually visible under the piles of clutter around the den and shortly thereafter I was Do!ing away.
Vanilla GameBoy games don't necessarily have pleasing default color schemes on the GameBoy Color. If you happen to get Mr. Do!, try the color scheme accessible by powering the system up with the D-pad held to the left. This is the most pleasing set of colors, to my eyes.
Mr. Do!, the classic arcade game, is a GESPALO (game everyone should play at least once). As the game's clown-like namesake, the player runs around underground Dig Dug-style, carving out tunnels and mining hordes of cherries arranged in 2x4 blocks of 8. Nameless baddies attempt to stop Do!'s subterranean fruit gathering, but can be offed with the dropping of Do!-sized apples that just happen to live alongside the cherries. Various delicious treats like fried eggs and pieces of cheesecake can be collected along with letters to spell out EXTRA for an extra man. This is early videogame nonsense at its best, really. That's what makes it a GESPALO. 
But how's the game? The GameBoy Mr. Do! is not a pixel-perfect port, but the gameplay is there. Music and graphics are faithful, if not exact. Controls are somewhat problematic, for a fat thumb on a petite D-pad, but that gripe is quite minor and fair trade-off. There is a welcome option to turn music or sound effects off, something that every game should include.
As in olden days, I still play poorly, but enjoy the beating. Ever hopeful, I attempt combinations with falling apples and end up crushed by said apples, captured by the enemies, or both at once if I'm really at the top of my game.
One perpetual downer with older games: no saved high scores. From what I can tell, high scores are notretained between sessions. This is a silly restriction. One really needs a maximum of 50 bytes of some sort of flash RAM to keep a 10-entry high score table. That's 10 entries at 5 bytes each. Only 5 bits are needed to describe a set of 32 characters, meaning one needs only 15 bits of RAM to store three initials. An additional 24 bits of RAM permits score entires up to 16 million, which isn't really a realistic score for this game. If scores above 130,000 were realistic, then one could cram three initials in 15 bits and the score into 17 bits, getting everything down into 4 bytes per high score entry, or 40 bytes total. (Note: Scores in Mr. Do! actually can go higher than 130,000, as evidenced by the default high score table. However, the last digit of the score is always zero, so the question really becomes if 1.3 million points is a reasonable maximum. I'm wiling to be that it is.) Since RAM most likely comes in packets that are powers of 2, it is no doubt easier to go with a 64 byte chunk. How expensive can this really be? Is it worth annoying millions of gamers with game after game that is missing this feature?
This is one area where emulators really can provide an enhanced experience that goes beyond the original. With an emulator, you could theoretically save the state of the game on exit and then high scores would be retained. I haven't checked with the emulator scene in a long time, but I'd be surprised if this wasn't already a common feature. I know that several 8-bit computer emulators, like the Commodore 64 emulator VICE, do allow state saving.
Long rant. Annoying missing feature. Feh.
On the high score entry screen, the programmers put some nifty scrolling effects in the background and a whirlwind of sprites in the foreground. These are reminiscent of the scrolling and sprite effects that coders put in Commodore 64 demos. These effects on the Commodore were achieved by getting right down to the hardware and using clever tricks to do what some thought impossible. Not that the effect in Mr. Do! for GameBoy is that impressive, but it does make one wonder about the backgrounds of the coders that worked on it.
I still fantasize about buying a Super Nintendo someday, but thus far haven't found a cheap one that fit my limits as an part-time cheap-ass game collector. When I do find one, however, I'm going to see if I can't get Mr. Do! for that platform as well. I have heard good things about it, and I'd like to own and try it for myself. For now, however, this GameBoy version is giving me my Do! fix right nicely.
Price I paid: $12, bare cartridge
Recommended price: $10 or less
NOTE: Images used here are stored locally and were grabbed from VG Museum. Go visit them, so I don't go to hell.
Labels: nintendo
Crushing enemies turns out to be much more enjoyable when you don't die from cheap shots every time you play! Who woulda thunk it, right? But the acting and storyline aren't really that mature, from what's been revealed so far. Enemies aren't varied enough to really make the gamefeel new and exciting every time you enter a new area. And I just had to do a section with a platform jumping mechanic. These parts of Devil May Cry don't give me much hope for the latter part of the game.
On the other hand, I now have the Ifrit gauntlets which will hopefully allow me to do that really cool ballet kick that I've seen in the trailers. Sure, most people probably think it's a goofy looking move, but I think it looks sweet. I hope it doesn't take a contortionist to pull it off.
Oh, and I've finished off that spider, Phantom. Sure looked like he died for good, so with any luck that's the last I'll have to deal with him.
Maybe I'm just blind to what is really going on but I just had to speak out what seemed to me to be a rash of political correctness.
To the older gaming generation, this may seem somewhat similar to the Starpath/Arcadia Supercharger that was used on the Atari 2600. There, the device allowed the gamer to buy games on audio tape and play them, one level at a time, into the Supercharger. This hardware added a full 6Kb of RAM to the Atari 2600, consequently allowing more complex games than the original hardware with its meagre 128 bytes of RAM had allowed. In recent times, this hardware has provided a path to developing new homebrew games. It also allows for pirating of some games.
One main difference between the Supercharger and the GBA device is the time period in which was available. In the time of the Supercharger, consumers didn't have access to the hardware and software to pirate normal games sold on cartridge. The internet didn't exist to swap ROMs with your buddies all over the world. It wasn't, really, until the Cyberpunks CD that things like that could really take off. In fact, one might say that the WAV to BIN tools, originally developed by Bob Colbert, are the real key bit in the Supercharger and 2600 toolchain. The emulators available are good, but there is still no substitute for the original hardware.
The catch with this new device is that Nintendo could see that Atari 2600 homebrews revival and consider this a way to sell more GBA units. Make it an open platform, and some good games will get made and people will buy the hardware to play those games. Any GBA unit sold is probably going to bring in at least a couple of brick-and-mortar-store software sales, which as we all know is where the real money gets raked in by the handfuls. That's one scenario. The other is that a cloud of evil pirates buy the hardware and never buy enough games for Nintendo to make their next profit estimate. Unlicensed games that aren't in line with Nintendo's image could appear. Frankly, I think the former is more likely given the developments on the 2600, but the latter probably is enough to scare Nintendo into closing this door to home development for their principal money machine. And by the time the 2600 development tools were free to everyone, there wasn't even much of an Atari anymore to lose money.
Maybe I just haven't learned the controls. I do know I've gotten the hang of dodging and some of the special moves lately, but between that cheap-shot second fight with the giant lava spider and the Black Knight (original stuff, eh) that takes a pot shot at you while you're trying to jump up onto the level where he's standing, the game just seems like an exercise in frustration. I have just about decided that my reflexes are slowing with age and the game is really intended for kids that are half my age.
To its credit, the secret missions are pretty fun. Or rather, the ones that aren't as frustrating as the rest of the game are fun. Killing the tiny spiders (parts I and II) were a fun diversion and something I found possible to pull off with my quickly-slowing reaction times. The other secret mission I've seen, the first one that most gamers will see, the one where you have to off the ghost with the scissors in one hit, is crap. Who the hell thinks that is fun? Is it clear that you have to get your gun practically into the face polygons of the creature to kill it? Is there any indication that that's the weak spot? Hell no. Someone clearly thought this was fun. I sure don't.
With any luck I'll get past the Knight tonight and find out whether what comes afterwards is worth playing through. More often I should just cut my losses and call a crap game a crap game and trade it for something else. I did that with ATV Offroad Fury for the PS2 and it was one of the few times I've been glad to get rid of a game.
Why bother playing it in the first place? I'm a fan of the original from way back, that's why. And, in case you haven't ever played the original arcade game, let me say that it is, hands down, the best arcade game I've ever played. The goal is simple: guide your cyborg through a limitless number of waves saving humans (Dad, Mom, and Mikey) from robots gone mad. The controls consist of two joysticks, primarily because Eugene Jarvis devised the game and controls while he had a broken arm and couldn't thrash on buttons. In the end, the two eight-position joystick scheme, one for movement and one for firing, is absolutely brilliant. To make it complete, the game takes place at a pace that leaves you gasping for breath. As Jarvis said, you're always a couple of seconds from dying at any moment of play, and under that kind of pressure, you can't give in, ever.
So the next generation platforms of the late 1990s, the Nintendo 64 and the Sony Playstation, each got a reimagining of the original Robotron. Out of the gate first was Robotron X for the PSX, and I was relatively pleased with the result, even though it suffered from several drawbacks. I never heard much about Robotron 64, which arrived several months later, and decided it probably was about the same. However, I couldn't have been more wrong.
It is definitely the case that Robotron 64 is a far better game in several respects than Robotron X. As follows:
- The playing field is larger with respect to the player and enemies in Robotron 64. This is more in line with the original Robotron, in my humble opinion, and makes for a much more playable game.
- The player seems to move much more quickly in Robotron X (or this is simply a consequence of the above item), making precise movement much more difficult. Alternatively, there are definitely times when I consider the player to be moving far too slowly in Robotron 64, but I wonder if this isn't a problem with my controller.
- The player fires faster in Robotron 64, I believe, which is closer to the original. Any clone of Robotron should include a firing rate more akin to "flood" than "trickle". Having seen Robotron 64, one can't help but notice the Robotron X trickle that substitutes for firepower.
- The load times are painful on Robotron X, which is just a sign of poor programming. Any modern PSX game would be laughed into oblivion if it were this bad today. Since I'm playing on a PS2 (not an original PSX), I could try speeding it up with the disc speed feature, but I'm not sure how much that can change these awful times. The point is that any self-respecting, not-pushing-products-out-the-door-just-to-make-a-quick-buck-off-of-retro-loving-kids-from-the-70s developer wouldn't have foisted this kind of crap on us in the first place.
- The graphics are smoother (i.e. not quite so pixelized) on Robotron 64, more detailed, and better designed. However, I think that Robotron X may possibly have a better framerate. There is also some annoying "jitter" to the playfield in Robotron 64 that I notice mostly after the level has finished, so I don't think this is a huge deal. Not sure how much PS2 "texture smoothing" can change the smoothness of the graphics, but it can't bring it completely up to the level of Robotron 64.
- Robotron 64 has a better viewing angle of the board, allowing you to see much more of what's close to you and farther away. In Robotron X, you usually are dealing with things more locally, it seems. Since in the original Robotron you could see the whole board at once, any sequel should probably give the same benefit. For example, some enemies in the original shoot projectiles that can move extremely quickly, giving you almost no time to react. To have that same danger present in Robotron X would be impossible, because you would get blindsided. The view of the board is really that poor.
- The powerup icons are much more meaningful in Robotron 64. They are tiny and abstract shapes in Robotron X. Dumb design.
If you want the original, I recommend getting one of the first Williams emulator discs for the PSX and playing with a Mad Catz controller that treats the two analog sticks like the digital controls on the original PSX controller.
Labels: nintendo
Feedburner
