Video Games? Home Computers? What's the Difference?

People have complained that this generation of game consoles and the past one are too similar to computers... and while both the Xbox Series S/X and the Playstation 5 do indeed use slightly customized x64 computer CPUs, it's important to note that the line dividing home computers and video game systems was blurred from the start.

In the 1970s, technology was still in the early stages of development, and hugely expensive. Consumer electronics like video games were massively primitive to offset those heavy costs. The first home game console was Ralph Baer's Odyssey, not much more than an electronic Etch-A-Sketch with pin jumpers for cartridges and plastic overlays for your television. By the late 1970s, game consoles had improved, but were still hamstrung by limitations. The Atari 2600 had no video RAM of its own, forcing designers to "race the beam" of a television set and draw graphics in a fraction of a second, before the electron beam in the television could make another split-second pass over the display. The Odyssey2 had an appallingly low 64 bytes of RAM... that's not gigs, or megs, or even kilobytes, but 64 bytes (characters), just enough memory to hold a small sentence. The Intellivision's internal clock speed can be measured in mere kilohertz rather than megahertz, resulting in the plodding pace of many of its games.

By the 1980s (especially after the disastrous Atari 2600 ports of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong), players demanded more power from their game consoles, to more accurately capture the elusive arcade experience. Console manufacturers addressed this need by taking the more robust hardware of 1970s personal computers, and turning this withered but still useful technology into next generation game consoles. The successor to the Atari 2600 was the Atari 5200, which used the hardware of the Atari 400 computer as a foundation for its design. Indeed, the two machines are so similar that Atari 400 games can be ported to the Atari 5200 with ease... and they continue to be to this day, to fill gaps in the latter system's anemic library. Atari would return to this well in the late 1980s for the XEGS game system, a console with the added power of the XE computer line and an optional keyboard. (If you called an XEGS "two Atari 5200s duct-taped together," you wouldn't be far off.)

The Atari 5200's more successful competitor, the ColecoVision, was made from off the shelf parts, which means it shares its DNA with a whole lot of 8-bit home computers and game consoles. Its closest cousins are Sega's SG-1000 and the Japanese MSX computer, with Britain's ZX Spectrum hanging on a nearby branch of the family tree. The Bit 2-in-1 Dina, a Taiwanese game console sold by video game mail order company Telegames, offers compatibility with both the ColecoVision and the SG-1000, thanks to the two machines' similar hardware. The MSX is moderately more powerful than the ColecoVision and thus not directly compatible with it, but its games can be run on a ColecoVision with tweaks to their code and the aid of a peripheral called the Super Game Module, designed by Eduardo Mello. The later Sega Master System contains the legacy hardware of these machines along with its own vastly improved graphics processor, and can be coaxed into running games for the MSX, the SG-1000, and even the ColecoVision.

Of course, just because a video game system contains the CPU of a home computer does not mean that the two systems are at all similar. The Sega Genesis has the 16-bit 68000 processor of the Commodore Amiga, but differs from that system in many ways, with less RAM, an entirely different graphics processor, and a sound chip built from the brains of the Sega Master System. Although there were a good many Amiga ports to the Sega Genesis (The Killing Game Show, Risky Woods, Shadow of the Beast, and Lemmings among others), they had to be rewritten from scratch, and were often lesser games than their Amiga counterparts.

On the Nintendo side of the fence, the Super NES contained the Ricoh 65C02, an 16-bit off-shoot of the CPU in the NES. One might think that this would make the Super NES cross-compatible with the Apple IIgs, but one would need to think again, as the Super Nintendo was packed with cutting-edge, custom-designed technology that elevated the system's graphics and sound past its competitors. By contrast, the Apple IIgs used the 65C02 to maintain compatibility with previous systems in the Apple II line. It was still a 16-bit computer that offered improvements over the dusty old Apple IIe you might have used in middle school, but despite using the same CPU, the Apple IIgs doesn't come anywhere near the quality of the Super NES as a games machine.

Future game consoles would also share a genetic link with home computers... the Xbox is essentially an x86 PC tailored for the video game experience, and the GameCube took the PowerPC architecture of late 1990s Macintosh computers and smashed it into a purple lunchbox. Then Nintendo took the same hardware and smashed it into two other shells, with extra RAM, extra cores, and extra... uh, waggle.

So if you were wondering when video game systems suddenly became home computers, the answer is is that it's always been this way. You just didn't notice.

Bon Chance... and Tough Luck! Lock 'n Chase re-emerges on Atari 2600 as LUCKY Chase!

M Network was one of the underachievers among the Atari 2600's many third party developers. As a division of Mattel, the makers of the competing Intellivision, they had no reason to bring their best work to the 2600... and so they very much didn't. Games by M Network were almost certain to be vastly inferior to their Intellivision counterparts, whether it was a sorry home port of Burgertime where everything but the chef and the hot dogs were rectangles, or a conversion of Tron Deadly Discs without precision aiming and the Recognizer battles between stages.

Shown: Lock 'n Chase by M Network. Yeech.

Lock 'n Chase is no exception. The game, originally debuting in arcades as Data East's response to Pac-Man, was functional on the Atari 2600, but squeezed completely dry of its charm. The police officers became men's room signs, the lead character became a featureless hat with feet sticking out of it, and the treasures were turned into striped squares that don't look like something anyone would want to steal. What even are these? Ribbon candies? It's almost as underwhelming as the beige Pop-Tarts that would pop up in the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. No thanks, I think I'll skip breakfast.

If you were a fan of the arcade game, the 2600 version of Lock 'n Chase will leave the same empty feeling in the pit of your stomach that Pac-Man did. Luckily, programmer C Centeno has Quantum Leapt into action, making right what once went wrong with his own port of the game, called Lucky Chase. The title is a bit of a reach (what's so lucky about being chased by cops?) but the game is outstanding. In contrast with the cold and sterile M Network version of Lock 'n Chase, Lucky Chase offers plump, friendly characters dressed in vibrant hues, and looks as much like arcade Lock 'n Chase as you could reasonably expect from the venerable (that means seriously old) Atari 2600.

Now here's C Centeno's conversion.
Okay, now that's more like it! The only way
this could be better is if it wasn't Lock 'n Chase.

It even plays better than M Network's Lock 'n Chase. I'm not big on the door play mechanics (and they didn't thrill me in Exidy's Mouse Trap, either), but when you press the fire button, Lucky drops a door right where and when you want it. Opening and closing doors is a lot twitchier and less reliable in M Network's version of the game... you're more likely to drop two doors in rapid succession or even trap yourself in front of the door, leaving you at the mercy of the cops. If any. (Yay, not so subtle social commentary!)

There may be better ways to play this game (and better maze games than Lock 'n Chase, cough), but on the Atari 2600, it doesn't get any better than Lucky Chase. Kudos to C Centeno for a brilliant port... that'll show stuffy old George Plimpton a thing or three about what this system can do when pushed to its limits!

Riding on the Rim with Grim

As a promotion for the birthday of its purple mascot Grimace, who vanished from the restaurant after the release of the film Super Size Me, McDonald's introduced a berry shake bearing his trademark plum color, along with... a video game? And it's a skateboarding game. Because when you think of totally bodacious, gravity-defying stunts on the half-pipe, braw, you definitely think of a bell-shaped buffoon from a fast food joint.

That helmet somehow makes
Grimace look like a member of Run DMC.

And here's Grimace, in all his inexplicable, cross-promotional glory. Look out, Kool-Aid Man and Cool Spot! There's a new frosty mug in town, and all the boys in the yard are going to want his milkshake! No, really, he has to deliver his purple milkshakes to everybody he knows... on a skateboard. It makes no sense, but after Sneak King, why does anything need to make sense?

This screen is endlessly confusing
for anyone who's actually playing
this on a Game Boy Color.

One fascinating fact about Grimace's Birthday is that although it can be played on a web browser, the code is designed specifically for the Game Boy Color, making it compatible with that system and, through the magic of emulation, practically everything else. Even my Data Frog can play this game, albeit with glitchy text. You've got to wonder why the developers at Krool Toys didn't step up to the big leagues of the Game Boy Advance, but creating Grimace's Birthday for the lower spec Game Boy Color means the game will play on more systems, and the marketing will find more eyeballs.

Beyond that, making Grimace's Birthday for this specific system makes a lot of sense. The Game Boy Color's humble 8-bit graphics make the game seem like it was released at the turn of the century, when handheld technology wasn't quite up to snuff and the towers hadn't fallen yet and Twitter was just a noise birds made and Morgan Spurlock hadn't demolished McDonaldland. 

(Snif. Sorry, I'm getting a little misty eyed over here. I really miss those damn shortbread cookies. You know, the ones with a light citrus flavor, molded into the shape of the McDonaldland characters. Okay, FINE, I'll get back to the game.) 

Like 90% of third party titles for the Game Boy Color, Grimace's Birthday isn't fantastic. However, it's a fun injection of nostalgia, and it's free, so why not indulge? It's certainly healthier than the purple shake, if nothing else.

Oh, by the way! This is important from a historical perspective. Microsoft just pulled the plug on the Xbox One, a machine stabbed in the heart by Don Mattrick and left in a (sales) coma for ten years. Do I regret buying an Xbox One in hindsight? Not really... I'm certainly not as embarrassed by that purchase as the Wii U, Nintendo's most cumbersome game console since the Virtual Boy. Nevertheless, the Xbox One never quite met expectations, limping through the last generation with an unsavory reputation, underwhelming exclusives, and some utterly agonizing load times. I won't miss it, especially since the Xbox Series S is almost 100% compatible, and is much better at being an Xbox One than an actual Xbox One.

The Sega Genesis is also dead... in Brazil. That's after thirty three years of support, and mostly because TecToy ran out of the parts to build them. Luckily, this has absolutely no bearing on the development of Brazilian Mega Drive games like Sunset Riders and Final Fight MD. (Whew.)

The Man Who Erased His Physical Copies

Now you see 'em, soon you won't.
(image from Amazon)
(specifically the HG Wells book The Invisible Man)
(by the way, watch Time After Time. Malcolm
MacDowell is HG Wells, and the guy who played
Sark on Tron is Jack the Ripper. It's great.
Malcolm MacDowell kicks ass.)

Well, that's distressing. Like a Dragon: The Man Who Erased His Name (whew), the latest spin-off of the long-running Yakuza series, will be the second major console game to be released without actually being available in stores. Like Alan Wake II, if you want this title, you'll have to get your system online, and be willing to sit through what one presumes will be a lengthy download. Like the fly trapped in the split second before hitting a car's windshield, I don't think I'm going to like what comes next.

I'll be completely honest with you. I've gone the digital route with most of my games from the last two console generations, especially the Switch, where my digital collection far exceeds the games I've got on cartridge. (Plus, the digital games taste better!) At the same time, it's going to be a major blow to preservation efforts. You can't keep a game that exists in the cloud any more than you could clutch a real cloud in a closed fist. Once the servers holding your game are taken down, it's just gone, and you'll have cross your fingers and hope for a remaster. If one ever arrives, and if a completely different design team doesn't completely butcher it. (Cough. Cough. Ahem. Gee, I've got a scratchy and bitchy throat today.)

Yes, this is quite literally a case of Old Man Yells at Cloud. Consarnit.

Speaking of living in the past, I finally bought a ColecoVision power supply to go with the ColecoVision I bought six years ago. This thing is the Voldemort of wall warts; too heavy and gigantic to realistically hang from a wall outlet. If you don't have an extension cable for one of these monsters, you will be deprived of the joys of the Connecticut Leather Company's greatest game console and its wide selection of accurate (heh) arcade conversions until you get one.

The ColecoVision's default color set is,
by my humble estimation, a big 'ol bag of barf.
It's like a bag of Bertie Botts jellybeans, except
nearly all of them are some variation of pine
cleaner, phlegm, or earwax.
(image from AtariAge)

You may note a hint of reluctance at getting this system up and running. Well, the first thing is that I'll probably also have to install an A/V mod, as a standard RF signal just doesn't cut it anymore... especially not on modern flat-screen television sets. The second things is, well... my heart belongs to the Atari 5200. It's a big, clumsy, wrongheaded mess of a game system that saw the yawning gap of oblivion and screamed "FULL SPEED AHEAD!," but I have a weakness for these kinds of sad sack consoles. My very first system was an Odyssey2, I've got both a Saturn and a Dreamcast, and I was on the Neo-Geo Pocket train while everyone else was riding the Game Boy Color express. They're the little PC Engines that couldn't, but you have to admire how hard they try. (Except the Odyssey2; that was clearly goldbricking.)