61 Frames Per Second : pong

Whatcha Reading: Racing the Beam

Joe Keiser — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

There are a lot ways to think about games—as cultural artifacts, works of art, works of programming craft. Racing the Beam asks you to think about games in a way that is rarely considered: as a negotiation between game developer and hardware platform, between an artist with vision and the constrained tool that must be used to bring that vision to life. It’s a particularly apt metaphor for the platform in question, the Atari 2600, as almost all of that console’s games were made by one-man programmer/artist/designers. The result is a video game history unlike any I’ve ever read.

Racing the Beam is full to the brim with interesting tidbits about the nature of the Atari’s hardware. Cost-cutting measures on the system meant it was designed in a very specific way, to play games like Pong and Combat but little else. That meant that nearly everything that was actually done with the console was an elaborate hack. Getting more than two characters on screen, a la Space Invaders? That was a hack. Getting cars to drive onto screen from the left and off the screen from the right? The Atari was never designed to do anything like that, so that’s a hack too. That beam of brightly colored safety in Yar’s Revenge? That’s an absolutely ingenious hack.

Told in this way the story of the Atari 2600 becomes a story of brilliant renaissance men, twisting to their whims a piece of hardware that turned out to be far more versatile than its creators could heave dreamed. It’s also supposed to be a story about how this weak system with almost no memory tempered the ideas of developers, but this comes off much less well. The way the book is written, even the system’s abominable port of Pac-Man looks like a miraculous work of laudable engineering. By the end, it almost makes you think that the Atari 2600 could run, well, anything, if only you put the right genius in front of it.

Still, maybe this is the best way to look at that time period. The people involved in the programming of the 2600 were wizards. All too often they were tasked with impossible projects, like converting a graphically rich arcade game to a console that couldn’t even hold an entire screen’s worth of data at once. The stories of how they succeeded and failed paint an important historical picture about the relationship between the system and the people who made art come alive on it.

Racing the Beam paints that picture well, but it’s still in many ways a book about a computer and some programmers. It will occasionally become dense with technical speak and it even sometimes boxes out esoteric machine code, so if you don’t have any technical knowledge you can expect to re-read some pages many times before your understanding becomes complete. It’s still worth it to try, though. Watching Atari's wheezing beast get tamed by the intellect of this industry’s forefathers is a great and necessary journey for anyone who cares about games.

Pick it up here: Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies)

Related Links:

Whatcha Reading: 20 Years of Nintendo Power
The Videogame Ages, part 1
Death of the Gamer, Redefinition of the Audience

The New Graphics Whores: Bit.Trip Beat is Gorgeous, But Retro Style Does Not Equate Quality

John Constantine — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:30:00 GMT

A strange thing happened to me between downloading Bit.Trip Beat and beating its first boss. While delighting in its vivid color, laughing at its signature character leaving rainbows in his wake across digital space, and letting its infectious chiptune beats colonize my brain, I realized that I wasn’t having any fun. That’s fine — I’m a firm believer in the fact that a game doesn’t need to be fun to be good — but I was expecting to have fun. I wanted to have fun. I was engaged by it, but not in a good way. I found the game to be overbearing and stressful. Then it hit me: Bit.Trip Beat is a bad game.

Its presentation is immaculate and the idea behind its play is sound; a horizontal shooter that has you deflecting objects instead of projecting them, making ammunition and enemy one and the same — Pong + Arkanoid + Gradius = Bit.Trip Beat — is a great foundation. The game is broken though. The motion controls are adequate but far too sensitive, and the game doesn’t allow you to adjust the sensitivity. It also doesn’t offer d-pad control, so you’re stuck. As you chain together hits in rhythm to the music, your combo meter rises and the visual effects start to intensify. They intensify so much that the color and flashes of light make it impossible to follow the action. It should be challenging to play at a high level, of course, but it should come from the speed and layout of the game’s obstacles, not because it’s hard to see. Most problematic though is that there is no respite throughout Bit.Trip’s long levels. Scrolling shooters necessitate moments of peace that allow you to refocus and rest before the next series of challenges. You need chances to blink. Without them, the game becomes exhausting. Bit.Trip is oppressive, necessitating that you pay attention constantly, or fail as a result. In spite of these game breaking problems, Bit.Trip’s scoring very well in reviews. Why?

I worry that Bit.Trip Beat’s critical success is a case of the Emperor getting a new wardrobe. Game critics, fans, and casual players are all enamored with the retro-styled games trend. Games with chic visual and aural designs that recall gaming’s NES, Atari, and early-arcade heyday are in high demand right now and I think that some people might be willing to praise a game based solely on its aesthetics. They're new graphics whores for a nostalgia-obsessed age, drunk on the promise of limited technology instead of high-end graphical feats. I’m one of them. I laud Mega Man 9, Space Invaders Extreme, and Edge for their old school looks and sounds. Those are three very well made games underneath their attractive façades though. I expect great things out of Bit.Trip Beat's creators, Gaijin. They’re clearly a very talented team of developers. Before they make Bit.Trip Volume 2, I hope they learn from their first game’s mistakes, no matter how well their first game was received.

Related links:

BIT.TRIP BEAT is Hella Sweet
Chiptune Friday: Trip to the Beat
Design Resurrection: How Capcom Finally Proved That It’s Game and Not Graphics That Matters
The Commander's Out Of The Bag, And I Couldn't Be More Excited

Dad of the Year Builds Custom Arcade Cabinet for Daughter

Nadia Oxford — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 00:58:00 GMT

One of the most remarkable things about this generation of gaming is that we're breeding. Yes, it's remarkable that we're finding mates with which to reproduce even after spending the Friday nights of our high school years with Final Fantasy IV, but that's not just it. We grew up with a strong appreciation for game culture, and we're passing that on to our kids.

Oh sure, my father played Pong while high, but once he had children and the fun was over, his gaming hobby fell over dead, and he didn't take much away from the experience.

Today, we still game and talk about games even while our kids wipe their runny noses on our skirts and pants. That's because our generation is more interesting than our parents' generation, obviously. Really, though, I think that because we grew up with narrative-heavy games (in comparison to our parents), we formed attachments to characters that are not easily dissolved.

And that's why we get awesome fathers like “James,” who introduce their daughter to gaming by building a customised game cabinet that's small enough to fit in a (very pink) bedroom.

If you're interested in reading about what went into the making of “Bella's Arcade”, or if you just want to stare jealously at the awesome pictures, visit James' blog.

Related Links:

The Post-Apocalyptic Arcade Image Gallery
A Perfectly Cromulent Beat-Em-Up
Penny Arcade Sums Up E3

The Videogame Ages, part 2

John Constantine — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

In part one of The Videogame Ages, I discussed the inadequacy of “generation” language in gaming, and laid out The Golden Age of gaming. In part two, I look at the Silver and Bronze ages before taking a look at the modern era and the future.

The Silver Age – 1983 to 1996
8-Bit, 16-Bit, Early Handheld, Early 3D, Advanced PC and Arcade

The silver age of games is defined by expansion, in not just playability but breadth of experience. When home computers became affordable and home consoles began diversifying, games started transforming from immediate, single-mechanic experiences into more lasting forms. Silver age games were still about escalating challenge, but high scores ceased being the goal, replaced by definitive endings. Games started becoming more explicitly narrative-driven, as aesthetic justification on consoles and as the focus of many PC games (see the entire adventure game genre.) Portable gaming also started to rise to prominence during this period, early single-screen LCD games replaced by multi-game consoles like the Game Boy and Atari Lynx. Arcade and PC game technology pulled far away from home consoles, but all games were shifted from the rough visual abstraction of golden age games, into more aesthetically recognizable presentations – albeit still cartoonish impressionistic rather than realistic. The rise of polygonal 3D graphics, both real-time full 3D (Yu Suzuki’s Virtua series) and pre-rendered (Myst, etc.), at the end of the silver age marks the transition to bronze. In 1996, with the release of Mario 64, Tomb Raider, and Quake, the silver age comes to a close.

The Bronze Age – 1996 to 2006 (maybe)
32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit, Death of Arcades, PC Equalization

While golden age games’ boundary was a single screen and silver age games were largely confined to movement from left to right or down to up, the bronze age is the birth of 3D space as gaming’s chief concern. This isn’t to say that games that take a place on a 2D plain ceased being important or a valid medium for experimentation (though they certainly became marginalized on consoles, PCs, and in arcades.) But creating spaces with depth similar to the physical world took center stage in design. This push toward realistic spaces is mirrored in game aesthetics. Nearly all the technological benchmarks of the bronze age have come from creating as lifelike a facsimile of real life as can be achieved on any technology. PC games typically set that high water mark, though by the end of 2006, home consoles had largely caught up to PCs, much as they did with arcade games during the first few years of the 20th century (arcades are close to extinct now.) Game narrative started heavily borrowing from film’s storytelling language, relying on scripted scenes voiced and acted by digital characters in an attempt to tell deeper stories, but games also started developing there own unique storytelling language during this period, some games allowing the player to always be immersed in drama through play (see: Half-Life.) Multiplayer games no longer required physical proximity with the rise of online play on both PCs and consoles, and portable gaming started offering richer, longer play experiences, akin to those found on consoles.

I’m not totally convinced that the bronze age has ended yet, but the telltale signs of gaming’s latest age-defining shift have been popping up with some frequency over the last few years. The argument can be made that the Heroic Age of gaming is one of community via online networks and MMOs, user-generated content (see: Spore, LittleBigPlanet, Halo 3, Boom Blox, etc.), and experiential gaming. Experiential gaming is a big one whose mettle has yet to be tested, whether or not broad physical activity, from waving a Wiimote to playing fake musical instruments, will catch on. It’s certainly a dramatic shift to see experiential gaming leave its one-time home, the arcade, and transform into a driving force of home gaming. Then again, who knows? Maybe the golden age of gaming has only just ended, and its now, when players can finally build games themselves inside of other games, that the silver age has begun. Let me know, dear reader.

Part 1

Related links:
Comparison of Wiki Articles Proves Geeks Inherited The Earth
MMO Predicts Life in 10 Years
Men Are From Hyrule, Women Are From Simville: If Gender Defines the Games We Play, Why Does Everyone Play By the Same Rules?
9/9/99 9 Years Later
Fix It: Alone in the Dark, Tiger Woods, and the Death of the Glitch
Everyone Will be Able to Rock

The Videogame Ages, part 1

John Constantine — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

This past Friday, I tried to slip a little piece of language into a discussion about game emulation that I was wary about using at all. At this point, the go-to boundaries for discussing videogames’ admittedly small history is console-technology generations. We say 8-Bit or 16-Bit because these are easy identifiers based on competing, contemporary technologies. But the language “The 8-Bit Generation” doesn’t account for arcade technology, PC games, or portable gaming. Now that Bob Dvorak’s Tennis for Two is officially fifty years-old, I think we can finally start applying broader terms to gaming’s evolutionary eras. Obviously history is fluid, and chances are these classifications won’t hold true in 2050, but for now they work. The Hesiodic ages, as laid out here, consider games on every platform; the rigid parameters of home consoles, the advanced nature of PC and Mac gaming throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the fast strides made by arcade technology throughout that same period, and the predominantly inferior technology available in handheld gaming. Unlike Hesiod’s Ages of Man, however, the videogame ages are (mostly) a positive progression. Please note: these are not strict definitions. This is a discussion, and I want everyone to make their opinions heard in the comments section. Now then, onward to the Golden Age.

The Golden Age – 1958 to 1983
Dvorak, MIT, Early Arcade, Early Home Console

The golden age of gaming began in 1958 and was, for almost a decade and a half, almost exclusively concerned with tennis. It took Nolan Bushnell getting clever for us to start calling it Pong. Tennis for Two, Magnavox’s Odyssey, and Bushnell’s advice to “avoid missing ball for high score” was pretty much the only game in town until the mid-70s with some notable exceptions. The second videogame ever made has a more recognizable legacy in today’s games. Steve Russell’s Spacewar!, started in 1961 as a side-project of the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT (history’s first hackers, dontchaknow,) shares the two-player, two-object dynamics of Pong but the gameplay focused on actually destroying your opponent in a science-fiction setting. These games set the standard for the golden age: individual play mechanics presented on single screens. By the late-70s and early-80s, as Atari and other early consoles that could play multiple games were becoming common, games started expanding in both scope and ambition. Adventure, Pitfall, and others introduced continuity in their worlds, while Pac-man and Donkey Kong made the first stabs at introducing narrative. On the technology end, 1980 saw scrolling action in Defender and the larval form of 3D play, vector graphics, in Battlezone. The game industry crash and the release of the Famicom in 1983 mark the end of this period.

Part 2

Related links:
Comparison of Wiki Articles Proves Geeks Inherited The Earth
MMO Predicts Life in 10 Years
Men Are From Hyrule, Women Are From Simville: If Gender Defines the Games We Play, Why Does Everyone Play By the Same Rules?
9/9/99 9 Years Later
Fix It: Alone in the Dark, Tiger Woods, and the Death of the Glitch
Everyone Will be Able to Rock