Spectral Analysis

Roughly, uh...

(counts on fingers, runs out of fingers)

...twelve years ago, I wrote a series of articles for the late, lamented 1UP web site featuring the ZX Spectrum. This budget priced home computer was a regional phenomenon, ubiquitous throughout its native Great Britain in the 1980s but a total mystery to budding tech nerds in the United States. It was one of those things "Yanks can't wank," to quote YouTube's "Guru" Larry Bundy.

After learning about the machine and taste-testing some of its software in an emulator, I took it upon myself to share that knowledge with 1UP's readers, in a regular feature titled "What the Hell is a Spectrum?" It was a crash course in Britain's best kept secret, a makeshift game console with thousands upon thousands of titles which had somehow escaped America's notice.

It had games from Donkey Kong to Street Fighter II with nearly everything in between, but in hindsight, it's not hard to understand why the Spectrum was ignored in this country. Where home computers were concerned, America was Commodore's turf, thanks to the aggressive pricing and superior hardware of the C64. While it wasn't much to look at on the outside, sharing the ugly breadbox design of the earlier VIC-20, the C64 was better suited to video games, with sprites that could move independently of the playfield, a custom sound chip, and a rich color palette. The Spectrum didn't have any of these things... hell, even a joystick port wasn't standard equipment on the earlier models, forcing players to buy a peripheral to add that functionality. (And probably some blue tack to keep it in place. Clive Sinclair's electronics weren't what you would call sturdily designed. Explodey, but not particularly robust.)

So the Spectrum never came to the United States in an official capacity... but its designer Sinclair Research and Timex did take a swing at the American market with several home computers, ending with the Timex-Sinclair 2068. The two companies must have realized that the Spectrum had no hope of competing with the Commodore 64 as a game system, because the 2068 is better equipped for that purpose, sporting an arcade-tested sound chip, more RAM, dual joystick ports, and extra graphics modes with more versatile color handling. Oh, and it looks a lot more stylish than the C64, too. Check out that clean, compact design and that silvery sheen! Truly, a magnificent specimen of early '80s speculative futurism!

The only problem is that there were tons of computers in the American market all hoping to topple the industry leader. Without brand recognition, software support, and the star power of Alan Alda, William Shatner, or Charlie Chaplin (quite dead, yet somehow motivated to shill consumer electronics), Timex-Sinclair had no chance of competing in the United States. The cruelest cut is that while the TS-2068 was objectively better than the ZX Spectrum, it could only run ten percent of that system's enormous software library, and zero percent of those titles could take advantage of its improved hardware. What kind of dope would even think of buying a computer like this?

Uh... me, actually. But I have reasons! The first is that someone had offered a Timex-Sinclair 2068 for the price of shipping on Reddit, and considering that prices for video games and home computers have rocketed into the stratosphere over the last two years, I just had to get in on that. The second is that while the TS-2068 isn't compatible with the ZX Spectrum by default, it can be persuaded to run nearly all of its games with the aid of a reasonably priced adapter. I'm also pretty sure someone's found a modern workaround for its reliance on cassette media... perhaps an app that would let me connect a smartphone to its mic port for lightning fast loads and almost infinite storage space. Look, I loaded games from cassette back in the 1980s with the VIC-20. I ain't going back to that again. 

Also, I did mention the silver finish, right? 

* Special thanks to Wikipedia for its assistance in researching this blog entry. Also, I know Texas Instruments had a celebrity spokesman too. He's dead to me now, and it's not just because of Leonard Part 6.

Rex Fatalis

Mortal Kombat was a game that demanded your
attention in 1992. Well, maybe not quite this
much.

Remember if you will the distant year of 1993, when the white-hot fighting game Mortal Kombat made its debut on home game consoles. We were all excited for its arrival, and pretended to be excited after taking the cartridge home and slapping it into our 16-bit systems of choice, but the sad reality is that neither the Genesis or Super NES ports met our expectations. 

See, there's your problem, Mac.

The Super NES game by Sculptured Software sure looked like the arcade game, taking full advantage of the system's lush 256 color palette, but the gameplay was kind of sluggish, and Nintendo's censorship turned the scarlet sprays of blood erupting from your opponent into brown clods of dirt. Meanwhile, the Genesis game by Probe was, well, by Probe. The fights were faster and the control was tighter than it had been on the Super NES, but there was a lack of panache to the presentation, with fewer voice samples, less detail in the backgrounds, and an appalling lack of color even by the system's humble standards. Even the heart Kano tore out of his opponent's chest seemed to phone it in, squirming around in his hand like a flabby fish eager to be put out of its misery.

For Super NES owners, the best cure for the Mortal Kombat blues was to wait for the sequel, an exceptional port of what's regarded by fans as the best game in the original trilogy. The inclusion of all the blood and gore from the arcade version wasn't going to make parents happy, but they weren't the ones playing the game. Things weren't so cut and dry for Genesis fans... Mortal Kombat II was only passable on that system, a victim of both the console's audiovisual limitations and a typically underwhelming conversion by Probe. Satisfaction would only arrive on the Genesis in 1995, when Sculptured Software brought an admittedly fugly but structurally solid port of Mortal Kombat 3 to the system.

The original game (left) vs. Master Linkuei's revision (right).
MKAE adds clouds overhead, as well as a more realistic
shade of blue-grey for its sky, as opposed to the turquoise
in the official release.

There were eventually alternatives to the first Mortal Kombat, but the original remained sadly lacking. Fortunately, a team of hackers led by Master Linkuei are determined to right past wrongs by giving Genesis owners the port of the original Mortal Kombat they should have gotten in the first place. Titled Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition, this conversion uses Probe's lackluster effort as a foundation, but builds onto it with more voice, meatier sound samples, and discernible stone surfaces where there was once smeared globs of pixels. 

Again, the original is on the left, and Master Linkuei's
revision is on the right. The kombatants seem to stand on
nothing in particular in Probe's game, while the new version
features a cracked stone floor with the skeleton of an
unlucky fighter lying in the foreground.

Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition still doesn't look as nice as the Super NES game, and it still has Matt Furniss' irritatingly wobbly soundtrack, but there are nevertheless abundant improvements over the official release. Fatalities now begin with a threatening musical dirge, there's better use of color, with fewer peach-colored pixels clinging to the edges of characters, and minor details like the clouds rolling past in the Pit stage and the lightning crackling around Raiden have returned. It adds impact and artistry to a game that felt alarmingly devoid of both when it first debuted.

Today, there are all kinds of ways to play the first Mortal Kombat thirty years after its debut, but if you insist on doing things the old-fashioned way with a 16-bit system, Mortal Kombat Arcade Edition is your best option. Now if only someone would do something about that dire Genesis conversion of World Heroes. What's that? Not a chance in hell? Well, it was worth a shot...

Well, THAT came out of left field!

Microsoft recently announced its intentions to purchase Activision, and... frankly, I'm struggling to find an end to this sentence. On one hand, it seems to be the only way to get rid of detested CEO Bobby Kotick, who will reportedly bail from the company with a golden parachute strapped to his back once the deal is finalized. On the other, Microsoft has been gobbling up a lot of companies lately, recently swallowing Bethesda whole and washing it down with a tall glass of Double Fine. These habitual acquisitions are becoming a problem... someone should stage an intervention before someone walks into Bill Gates' mansion and discovers that he's choked to death on Electronic Arts.

There is one silver lining to this, and I'm not just talking about Bobby Kotick's impending ouster. According to Microsoft's Phil Specter, all the companies within Activision who were forced to toil away on Call of Duty will be freed from this terrible fate, and allowed to make games that are a better fit for their unique skills. This news was announced on Twitter with a meme that carries the same high sense of relief and spirit-lifting liberation as, say, a hostage release or the last episode of M.A.S.H. 

Let it all out, guys. The nightmare is finally over!

In other "how did this even happen" news, someone ported Tomb Raider to the Game Boy Advance. This is not an adaptation with creative liberties out the wazoo, as was so often the case on the system, but rather a straight port of the Playstation game. It's not entirely free of compromise, with a lower frame rate and less detail, but seeing a Game Boy Advance handle a fully polygonal video game that was all the rage on consoles five years before its release is a thing of wonder, like watching an ant carry a leaf many times its size back to its nest. This shouldn't be possible, yet there it is, happening right in front of your eyes!

Tip-Toe Through the Tombstones

It's almost a cliché to bag on an easy target like Kotaku, but I feel that some recent posts on the long-running, long-vexing video game journal deserve a response. After it was revealed that Microsoft had quietly stopped manufacturing Xbox One consoles in 2020 to step up production of the Xbox Series S and X, Luke Plunkett had this to offer in way of a eulogy...

Goodbye to the Xbox One, the most pointless console I have ever owned.

Not to be out-douched, contributor Ari Notis added this...

The Xbox One is officially dead. RIP. It will not be missed.

This was followed up with such observations as "the Xbox One was a trial run for the Xbox Series X," "Toward the end of its run, if you played a glossy AAA game, you could almost feel the thing wheezing under the pressure," and most pointedly, "The Xbox One sucked!"

It must be one of those casual work days, when Kotaku gets to be a blog and throw objectivity and decorum out the window, rather than one of the days when they call themselves a reputable news source, so they can sneak their foot in the door of an industry trade show. In way of a rebuttal, I'll just let Spicoli say what I'm thinking really loudly.

I'll admit, I've had qualms with the Xbox One throughout its lifespan. The launch was a disaster thanks to the machinations of Don Mattrick, who hoped to tie the system to all kinds of onerous digital rights management, but was undone when he realized that none of the other console manufacturers planned to follow his lead. Mattrick did serious damage to the Xbox brand name, but Microsoft spent the next seven years rectifying his mistakes, sending a Day One patch to Xbox Ones which eliminated restrictions on physical games, and putting the all-seeing, all-creepy eye of the Kinect into retirement shortly afterward.

There was also the user interface, which was intuitive but puzzlingly slow for at least a year after I purchased my Xbox One S. It could take upwards of three seconds to make the constipated cursor move from one game in your library to the next, in contrast to the speedy interface of the considerably older Xbox 360. Admittedly, this should never have been a problem in the first place, but like Mattrick's dark ambitions, the sluggishness of the GUI was ultimately addressed with patches. 

My point is that when Microsoft makes mistakes with the Xbox brand, it typically acknowledges and fixes them, often at great expense. The oversized "Duke" controller included with the original Xbox was eventually replaced with a smaller, more ergonomic model. Early Xbox 360s had an abysmal failure rate, but the systems were repaired or replaced free of charge by Microsoft, and later models were designed to be more reliable. The Xbox One was originally designed to be the most user-hostile piece of consumer electronics since Coleco's ADAM, but when fans expressed their frustration, Microsoft listened, changing course almost immediately.

On the other hand, when issues crop up with Sony and Nintendo's respective consoles, the response from the two companies is "tough titties." We all remember having to turn our Playstations upside down to play games, or not being able to play games at all thanks to disc read errors on the Playstation 2. The Playstation 4 is more reliable by comparison, but is needlessly encumbered with constant firmware updates that seem engineered to annoy the player rather than improve the overall experience. If you happen to install a game from disc and purchase it digitally later, you'll have to install it all over again, a process that can take many hours on a slower internet service. 

As for Nintendo, the Switch's failure-prone Joycons have been giving people fits for years, and this issue still hasn't been definitively addressed. Sure you can send the controllers back to the company for repairs, but after five years, you should be able to use a Joycon without worrying that it'll fall apart in your hands. Microsoft put the red ring of death to bed with the Xbox 360 S and E... what's Nintendo's excuse?

I'm not going to sugarcoat my experience with the Xbox One... it hasn't always left me with happy memories. But in the five years that I've owned the Xbox One S, it's become my go-to game console, seeing regular use while the Switch and Playstation 4 gather dust. It's the undisputed king of backward compatibility, with hundreds of games from the Xbox and Xbox 360 libraries running on the system in both disc and digital forms, and even improved with sharper resolutions. Native games run fine as well... obviously they're not going to run as well as they would on the latest hardware, but I've played fifty hours of the 2020 release Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and it hasn't brought my Xbox One S to its knees as Notis  suggests. 

Finally, when I do eventually upgrade to the Series, I'll be better served with it than the Playstation 5, as all of the games I purchased for the One (and the 360, and the classic Xbox) will be right there waiting for me, and appropriately upscaled to the new hardware in some cases. The Xbox One will ultimately grant me a smooth transition to its successor, unlike Sony, whose statement that "we believe in generations" sounds a lot to me like "you'll start your game collection all over again and you'll like it."

The writers at Kotaku might be dancing on the grave of the Xbox One, gleefully toppling tombstones and kicking over flower pots, but I won't be joining them in their mean-spirited mambo. It took a while for it to get there, but the Xbox One eventually became my favorite console of the last generation... and it was Microsoft's dedication to the machine in spite of a rough start and disappointing sales that put it at the top.

Game Collecting Sucks in 2022

That's the title. No cute puns or references, I'm just dropping a truth bomb on your head right from the start. 

I went down to Tucson for my birthday last Sunday, and was aghast by the prices at the two Bookmans I visited. Three hundred and forty dollars for an Atari Lynx? Really? Can I have some of what you're smoking when you're done with it, or is there anything left? Hell, the stupid Analogue Pocket only ("only") costs $219, and that has the potential to play games for a half-dozen systems, with a crisp LCD screen that doesn't turn you into Hans Moleman when you try to make out the finer details. Three hundred and forty dollars for a damn Atari Lynx. What the absolute hell?

Worth its weight in gold, apparently.
(image from Wikipedia)

It's not just semi-obscure handhelds that are getting their prices raised through the roof and beyond the Earth's gravitational pull. The Playstation Portable, long a safe haven for penny-pinching collectors, has seen its game prices creep upward over the last two years. Before COVID, you used to be able to fish through a big 'ol container of loose PSP games, and while many of those were commons and sports titles, there were some gems hiding amongst the Maddens and Daxters and whatever the hell Beaterator is, often for five dollars or less. These days, though? Good luck, because brother are you gonna need it! I found loose copies of Gradius Collection for fifteen dollars and Puzzle Quest for five, and felt exceedingly grateful for this thin gruel. This would not have been a good haul in 2019! I'm a little disgusted with myself for calling that a haul now!

On the plus side, I also scrounged up a copy of Bust-A-Move DS, which only cost five dollars and remains one of the high points in the long-running series. Pulling back an onscreen rubber band to fire bubbles gives the game a more tactile feel than Bust-A-Move Pocket on the PSP, and the general ambiance strikes me as more faithful to early entries in the series than BAM Pocket's head-scratching Halloween motif. 

Slightly more expensive at ten dollars was the Xbox One Kinect, and while I didn't really need one of these, it's nevertheless something I wanted to try for myself. I was a fan of the original Xbox 360 Kinect, and this version is supposed to be a lot more cutting edge, recognizing players as more developed forms with a sense of depth and mass, rather than stick figures. Unfortunately, Microsoft was so desperate to ditch the Kinect after its initial failure that later Xbox One systems, including my own Xbox One S, require an adapter to work with it. So until I get that adapter and a couple of games, I won't be flailing my arms around like a Muppet who just smoked whatever the Bookmans people were enjoying before they priced that Atari Lynx.