Fool's Errand

 

The Bart Simpson elephant is BACK, baby!
(image from some Russian site. Look,
I can't read Cyrillic, okay?)

In "I can't believe it's not an April Fool's joke" news, real life 007 villain Vladimir Putin intends to make a Russian game console to offset his country's loss of the Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch brands. Note that the last time Russia was associated with video game consoles, it was for the Dendy, an NES knock-off from about twenty years and three console cycles ago. To say that Russia will be at a technological disadvantage with their own game machine is a magnificent understatement, but at least this new Putin-approved machine is sure to have the eye-catchingly soulless industrial design of Russian consumer technology.

Russia's ATAM computer. You know how
the Commodore VIC-20 was the friendly
computer? This is the exact opposite of that.
(image from the Lunduke Journal of Technology)

Speaking of hardware that's well past its sell by date, there's now a BASIC compiler for the ColecoVision, and it's got me thinking about making software for that system. The only problems are the limitations inherent in both the compiler and the console itself. It's unclear how much of the ColecoVision's power can be tapped by CV Basic in its early state of development, but what is clear are the galling limitations of the system's VDP display chip, no matter what you use to write code for it.

The VDP can't do a lot of things that people have taken for granted in video games since the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES can display up to four colors in an 8x8 pixel square... the ColecoVision can only show two colors in that same space, although they can be two different colors per row. The NES has fifty-five colors in its palette, while the the ColecoVision has just sixteen off-putting hues. The NES can scroll graphics smoothly in any direction, while the ColecoVision lurches the screen along in eight pixel increments.

The ColecoVision is hamstrung by the limited graphics hardware of the early 1980s, and that makes effective game design on the machine all the more difficult. Tiles can't just be dropped anywhere you please to create a picture... they must be strategically set so as to avoid color clash, giving artwork on the ColecoVision a stiff geometric appearance. You'll note that compared to the arcade version of Donkey Kong, the home version of DK looks more squared off and compressed into a frame. The designers couldn't make him look more arcade accurate than this... it was literally not possible on the hardware.

However, there are workarounds. It turns out that the ColecoVision's sprites can be used as a Band-Aid, covering up those glaring color deficiencies and resulting in more detailed and natural artwork. CV Basic creator Oscar "Nanochess" Toledo demonstrated this by taking an old drawing of my cartoon character Byron in the jaws of a Heiankyo alien, and turned it into this ColecoVision pixel art.

If this looks a little plain, keep in mind that this is literally as good as the ColecoVision can make this drawing look, and that's with tile shifting and twenty-six overlaid sprites. (If you don't like the drawing itself, sorry, but I can't help you there.)

My point is that even with the aid of a BASIC compiler, making games for the ColecoVision is thirsty work. Things that would come easily on the NES or Master System just don't on the Coleco's system... you have to fight the hardware every step of the way to bring your ideas to life, which is why making a game for this particular system is an unappetizing prospect. 

It's also why I'm so consistently impressed with what Eduardo Mello can do with the ColecoVision, using the Super Game Module for a modest performance boost. Considering how the official port of Time Pilot turned out on the ColecoVision (poorly), his own stunningly close conversion seems like witchcraft.

Good Night, Sweet Putz

 

image from Numista

 

Hey Joe Lieberman, here's something for the ferryman when you board the boat waiting on the shore of the river Styx. I hear he loves video games... I'm sure the two of you will have plenty to talk about on your way to Tartarus.

Titanic Panic

 

Buy up all the third party developers, then kill
your video game brand! Oh, the stupidity!

When you've been in the hobby for as long as I have, you start noticing industry behaviors with predictable outcomes. For instance, when a major game console takes a major price dive, chances are high that the company who made it is already planning to give it the old heave-ho. By way of example, there's the hundred dollar Dreamcast in 2001, the hundred dollar GameCube in 2004, and this, right now.

I bought the budget model of this system, which was already experiencing its own steep price drops. Given the currently dim fortunes of the Xbox brand (and grumbling from third parties who are openly wishing they'd just axe the damn thing and get it over with already), I'm glad I chose to pinch pennies. Who wants to pay five hundred dollars for a game system that's destined to surf on the lip of a two figure price tag a year later?

I'm less glad that I paid $120 for a memory card, when they'll probably tumble to a fraction of that price at Best Buy in three months. Don't think I don't remember what happened with the Playstation Vita's stupidly expensive proprietary storage!

By the way, I remember Chris Kohler, one of the major figures of the second wave of video game fanzines, sharing an anecdote about Trip Hawkins in a feature he wrote for Wired years later. (Yeah, some people actually get paid for doing this "video game journalism" shit. It's increasingly infrequent, and comes with the risk of literally being lynched by GamerGaters, but it happens.)

"I told him that a friend (editor's note: me) bought a 3DO a few years after it launched for $25, and his face just dropped. It was the same face I would have made if I had bought the latest Final Fantasy game and found a copy of Army Men in the box."

Thirty Six Years

 

You'll immediately act to protect
the rights to your games, but when it
comes to actually selling those games
to your customers, you never
seem to be in much of a rush.
Why is that, Nintendo?
(image from Electronic Fun)
(this was from 1982. Yes, Nintendo
has always been like this.)

 

The Switch emulator Yuzu was recently taken offline, after a legal battle with Nintendo that Yuzu's creators Tropic Haze realized they couldn't possibly win. I'm ambivalent about the news. Generally, I'm reluctant to emulate games for a system that's still actively supported... with digital game prices as low as they are, and with hardware demands as high as they are for emulating recent game systems, it's kind of pointless. 

However, the Switch isn't going to be supported by Nintendo forever. Then what? What happens to those games when the system gets orphaned?  What happens when the servers holding the games are shut down and you can no longer download them? What happens when the systems themselves begin to deteriorate and can no longer play games without extensive repair work... work that Nintendo itself won't do, and the average user cannot do?

Nintendo's solution for customers is to just wait for Nintendo to release the games again on a more modern system. And wait we do, for years or even decades, until those coveted titles are released at Nintendo's leisure, for its own hardware, on its own terms. If you're lucky, maybe you'll be able to buy the game you wanted twenty years after its debut. If you're less fortunate, maybe Nintendo will let you borrow the game from its online service, as long as you keep paying the subscription fee. If you're not lucky at all, you won't get it at all... as fans of the Mother/Earthbound series will attest.

The lion's share of Donkey Kong
ports back in the day sucked big
Donkey DONG. The Intellivision port
is an especially tragic example.
(image from My Brain on Games)

 

Everybody's been a victim of Nintendo's fickle and arrogant nature at some point. Personally, I had to wait thirty-six years for Nintendo to put its seal of approval on a worthwhile home version of the arcade game Donkey Kong. Yes, there were home versions including one for the NES, but thanks to the limitations of consumer technology in the early 1980s, none of these were arcade perfect... and very few came anywhere near that standard. Even the Donkey Kong port for Nintendo's own game system came up lacking. (That sure is a funny way to celebrate the game that built your brand, by pissing out a conversion with a quarter of the content removed.)

Eventually, after spin-offs on the Game Boy and shiny CGI platformers on the Super NES and god knows how many regurgitations of NES Donkey Kong on other systems, Nintendo finally got around to giving us the actual arcade version of Donkey Kong, with no compromises and no annoying strings attached.* This took them thirty-six years. I was a child when Donkey Kong debuted in arcades. I was a bitter forty-something by the time I could legally enjoy that experience at home. I went from freckles to liver spots in the time it took Nintendo to give us a Donkey Kong that actually was Donkey Kong.

For the sake of game preservation, some people just won't wait for Nintendo to part the clouds and shine its digital blessings down upon the world. Recently, there was a Virtual Boy emulator released for the Nintendo 3DS, the only system with a realistic chance of replicating the Virtual Boy's unique 3D display. For the record, Red Viper recreates the experience quite well... but the record must also state that for the nine years it was actively supported, the 3DS was never given an official Virtual Boy emulator. 

Nintendo had a golden opportunity to preserve that moment in gaming history for future generations. Because it wasn't an especially flattering moment for them, they simply ignored it... and we're supposed to do the same for the sake of respecting copyright law? If Nintendo won't give its customers fair and reasonable access to its past work, someone else must.

* There's a port of the arcade Donkey Kong in Donkey Kong 64, but the steps for unlocking it reads like the twelve labors of Hercules. Just... just give me the damn thing. What the hell, Rare?

** It was twenty! Twenty years since Ninja 5-0 was released! That comedian on YouTube was right; time sucks.

Virtual Virtual Boy

Someone just released a Virtual Boy emulator for the Nintendo 3DS, the system where it makes the most sense. I just tested it out earlier today, and let me tell you, it's GOOD. Okay, the touch-based file menu really stinks, but the games run at full speed and adapt themselves extremely well to the system's 3D hardware. Why Nintendo didn't officially give us Virtual Boy games on this hardware is a complete mystery. Talk about a missed opportunity.

The Party's Over, and the Third Party Begins

 

"Oh no, Xbox Series!"

Poor, poor Microsoft. All the money in the world and you still couldn't buy a clue. Anything Phil Spencer says in next week's press conference will only serve to confirm gamers' suspicions that the Xbox brand has been dead in the water for years, since Don Mattrick's fateful decision in 2013 to turn the Xbox One into a consumer-hostile Pandora's Box of DRM and surveillance nightmares. 

No game system could recover from that, and although the Xbox Series is certainly a better console than what had come before it, it was doomed by its manufacturer's past mistakes and hubris, just as Sega's Dreamcast was in 2001, and Nintendo's Wii U was in 2017. Yet again, I'm stuck with an abandoned game system, an underdog of the console wars that was run over by its competitors, then scraped off the road and deposited into a shallow grave by its owner.

You'd think I would learn by now. At least I'll have the foresight to scoop up all the heavily discounted Xbox Series accessories I couldn't afford when the system was still actively supported. And I could always segue into PC gaming, where your fate as a gamer is not so heavily dependent on brand loyalty. If I buy the wrong video card, I lose a little performance... no big deal. If I buy the wrong game system, I lose key exclusives, and depending on how badly the machine sells, may not play much of anything for a couple of years. (And let me tell you, the Saturn and Dreamcast were some dry, dry years.)

I'll live. I'll just have to adapt, and right now, PC gaming seems like the right path to take. (Besides, all the home game systems are barely disguised computers anyway.)

Just for the record...

 

Imagine dragons. With Swedish accents.
(from Fandom. Skyrim's fandom, I guess.)

I know video games don't come with instruction manuals anymore (hell, if the rumors are true, video games won't have physical anything in another year...), but I've been playing Skyrim on the Switch, and that game is too damn meaty to not have one. I feel like it should have come with an operator's guide thick enough to be in Knight Rider's glove compartment. Mechanically, this game is as encumbered as your character will be after picking up everything you see on your Nordic-tracked adventures. "Troll fat? Sure, you never know when you'll need it. Wouldn't want to be left empty-handed at a sudden troll barbecue."

I'm enjoying it, though. I'm enjoying it a lot more for the ten dollars I paid at a pawn shop than I would have if I paid the full retail price of sixty bucks. For Skyrim. Yes, it's a good game with nearly infinite playability, and it suffers very little from the problems that often plague demanding titles on the Switch (see also Mortal Kombat 1 and that Batman Arkham collection), but dude, it's thirteen years old. Damn, Bethesda, stop milking it. And don't make me pay no sixteen dollars- the sale price!- for the Anniversary Edition that steps up the graphics. It's a Switch. Half the caves are too dark to see anything. I'm not slipping you sixteen skins for high-definition cave darkness.