Woot posed this question during the Amazon Prime Days sale, and I figured I could squeeze a blog entry out of my answer.
Uh... no, not really? I'm not even the sort to rag on the Switch because of its dated hardware. I just made a ColecoVision game, after all. Specs aren't really all that important to me. No, the reason I won't miss the Switch is that it straddles the fence between console and handheld, and does neither particularly well. It's not a great console experience because of the default controls and hardware that lags well behind the Xbox Series and Playstation 4. It's not a great handheld experience either, because games aren't formatted for the handheld's resolution, making many difficult or even impossible to read. Unless you've memorized all the text from the console versions, there's just no way you're playing Rock of Ages 2 on a Switch.
The D-pad on the Switch Lite is junk, too. So prone to reading diagonals when you don't want them! So prone to not reading diagonals when you do want them! Fighting games are abundant on the Switch, but it's a special kind of hell trying to play them. I'm honestly more comfortable playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the Playstation Vita. That's how bad the Switch Lite D-pad is. It's Nintendo's worst D-pad since the Game Boy Advance SP, but at least that had the mitigating circumstance of a clamshell design, forcing all the inputs on the front of the device to be nearly flush with the shell.
The Switch Lite D-pad just sucks. There's no logical reason for it to be as bad as it is, and that makes the system especially hard for me to love in spite of a dream library of retro titles. It's filled to the brim with arcade favorites... Donkey Kong! Mario Bros! Terra Cresta! Exerion! Moon Patrol! About a zillion Neo-Geo games! And they all play rather shabbily on the Switch, thanks to that lousy D-pad. It didn't have to be that way, it shouldn't have been that way given Nintendo's extensive experience with making directional pads, and yet here I am, not enjoying games I've always loved because the control kind of sucks. It's a cryin' shame, it is, it is.
So no, I won't miss the Switch much if its successor is both backward compatible and can reliably read your inputs, rather than making vague educated guesses like the Switch Lite does. If Nintendo plays its cards right, the Switch 2 could be the preferred way to play original Switch games, just as the best Xbox One you can buy is an Xbox Series.
Oh! By the way, I thought I'd share this image I found on DeviantArt. User TheColorfulKitsune created an arcade-quality version of the extra stage from Donkey Kong Jr. on the Coleco ADAM. Check out the dough presses and the gelatinous dough monsters and the giant mixer and that wood-fired hearth. I'd play that, even if it looks slightly like an advertisement for Keebler cookies. They make 'em in a hollow tree, you know! (Or a factory in the midwest, one of those.)
It seems that after a successful ten years in business, and another ten less successful years in business, the rental service Redbox is no more. Originally conceived by a McDonald's executive, Redbox benefited from the low overhead of its automated kiosks and the eventual collapse of Blockbuster Video... only to itself be obsoleted by the instant gratification of streaming services like Netflix.
Reflective of its fall from grace and eventual demise, the Redbox brand was traded off to a series of increasingly unremarkable corporate parents, from fast food giant McDonald's to the more niche CoinBase to (and I am not kidding about this) Chicken Soup for the Soul, the publishers of those drippily sentimental books that fell out of fashion around the same time as Beanie Babies.
For what it's worth, I used Redbox a few times in my life, but quickly lost interest when it stopped renting video games five years ago. One could hardly blame them... the Redbox booths were a frequent target for scammers, who would keep the discs and feed a printed code into the kiosk to make it think the games had been returned safely.
Eventually, Redbox got wise to the heisting hijinx and sold their remaining stock of games for fire sale prices... I still have a few Playstation 4 games in those familiar clear plastic cases. Except now, they're going to look like relics of a bygone era, like my copy of Battle Arena Toshinden in the Blockbuster box.
By the way! I'm hard at work on another ColecoVision game, Eyebrawls. It's an adaptation of the little seen Rockola arcade game, Eyes. Here's a peek at what's in store in the next couple of months.
I'm not working as hard as Inufuto, though. When this Japanese programmer makes a video game, he ports it to every 20th century game console you know exists, as well as a few systems and home computers you never knew existed. One of his creations, Cracky, is available for at least two dozen machines, including such oddities as the PASOPIA7, the Panasonic JR-200, and the SuperVision, a low-rent Game Boy competitor that always prompted groans whenever it appeared in an episode of The Price is Right. (The crappy late night version hosted by Tom Kennedy, natch.) One AtariAge user described the system as the "video game handheld of the less fortunate," and few gamers were as profoundly unfortunate as SuperVision owners.
What's nifty about Inufuto's work is that it highlights the differences between the various game systems. Cracky is the same on every format... and yet it's not, due to the limitations imposed by each console. For instance, the VIC-20 version is less smooth and a bit more flickery than the others, while the Atari 800 version has brighter colors but a chunkier resolution than its ColecoVision counterpart. It's a fascinating science experiment... albeit an extremely nerdy one.
I was just thinking back to my childhood, as aging men are wont to do, and remembered that the 1990s was a time of pushing the envelope... of human limitations, and of good taste. Extreme sports were the prevailing fad of the time, and professional wrestling made a comeback after experiencing the late 1980s doldrums of constant pay-per-views and NBC's jobber-riffic Saturday Night's Main Event. Cartoons went from half hour toy commercials to smarter, louder, riskier fare, like The Simpsons and Ren and Stimpy. The reliable, safe pop of Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul took a back seat to the angsty war cries of grunge rock and heavy metal.
There was an arms race in pop culture to become the rudest, hippest kid on the block (often to embarrassing effect), and the world of video games was no exception. Take for example, this early release for the Sega Genesis.
This is Kid Chameleon, designed by Sega's American division (and principally by industry legend Mark Cerny, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Gollum in AI depictions). It's the Sega Genesis answer to Super Mario Bros. 3, but instead of a friendly plumber who probably would feel like a plush toy if you hugged him, you get K.C., a leather-clad arcade master who gets a little more than he bargained for when he steps into the cutting edge world of VIRTUAL REALITY. (For you millies and zoomers, "virtual reality" was the exciting new frontier in technology in the 1990s, like artificial intelligence is now. You know, the AI that makes Mark Cerny look like Peter Lorre with jaundice.)
Like Mario, K.C. gets all his power ups from boxes hovering in mid-air, but instead of wimpy costumes like raccoons and frogs your dumb six year old sister might like, they're COOL power ups, for COOL kids like you! You can become a knife-wielding villain from a horror flick, or a German skeleton driving a tank, or a samurai, just in time to capture the imaginations of the first wave of anime fans! Awesome! Except they're not nearly as useful as the Weenie Hut Jr. abilities in Super Mario Bros. 3. Say what you will about a raccoon tail, but at least it gets me to the end of the stage.
Designs like this which favor form and fashion above function plague Kid Chameleon from start to finish, whether it's the edgy but unremarkable enemies (dragons, tanks made from piles of rock, and scorpions) or the title character who croaks "BUMMER" whenever he's hit. Hip for the time? Maybe. But even back in 1992 and even to a teenager, it still smacked of insincerity, like Steve Buschemi posing with a backward hat and a skateboard tucked under his arm.
It didn't take long before the extreme sensibilities of the 1990s crept into the fighting game genre. Originally deeply rooted in the 1980s and bearing a stunning resemblance to its grimy older brother Final Fight, Street Fighter got a sleek anime makeover in the Alpha and Marvel vs. games, then upped the ante by embracing hardcore rap with Street Fighter 3, and ESPN2 culture with Street Fighter Alpha 3. What had been a timelessly traditional Street Fighter experience up to that point had been modernized, to the consternation of picky players like myself. The difference between the introductions of Street Fighter Alpha 2 and its sequel, sponsored by Doritos and Mountain Dew, says it all.
This is a classic example of the simple but effective CPS2 cinematic style, not much more than a slideshow but with dramatic introductions of beautifully drawn martial artists. It tells you exactly what you need to know about these combatants, although in Dan's case it might give you entirely the wrong impression about his abilities. (Maybe that was a plank of Styrofoam he was kicking, rather than concrete.)
This, by contrast, is what you get with Street Fighter Alpha 3.
It certainly makes a statement. An obnoxiously hyperactive and overstated statement, that sounds a lot to these jaded ears like "I'm so trendy, pleeeease love me!" It doesn't help matters when the voice of a snarky MTV veejay pops in and shouts, "STA-REET FIGHTER ALLLPHA THREE!" Let me guess, you're going to jump in from time to time to remind me to "beat 'em up, guy!" and that I have "fists of God." All righty then. When they had to take his voice out of the Game Boy Advance version of Street Fighter Alpha 3 to conserve cartridge space, it felt like less of a compromise and more of a quality of life improvement.
The extreme sports motif of Street Fighter Alpha 3 works in hindsight. That really was an accurate reflection of the trends of 1998, for better or worse, but good grief did it grate on me in 1998.
Perhaps the greatest offender of pop culture pandering in the video game world is when the mediums of video games and television meet. (With all the gristly violence of the two semi trailers sandwiched in the middle of a twelve car pile-up.) The game show Nick Arcade, hosted by the perpetually energetic Phil Moore, was as hapless and harmless as your boomer dad trying to bond with you over a game of Super Mario World, but the same can't be said of Video Power and its spin-offs.
If you think that chair looks uncomfortable, try watching Johnny for more than five minutes. (image from YouTube, and also my nightmares)
Video Power was hosted by Stivi Paskoski, adopting the handle "Johnny Arcade." Imagine a tryst between a smug game show host, Vanilla Ice, and the aforementioned Kid Chameleon, and Johnny Arcade would be the product of this unholy love affair. He is hip. He is with it. He is a merciless test of your patience to watch, whether he's bouncing through vapid product reviews like a glittery rubber ball from a vending machine, or being the master of ceremonies in a video game contest that looks like it was held in a neon-soaked junkyard. There was also a cartoon; a Great Value version of Captain N with Acclaim characters replacing the likes of "is that Mega Man?," "why is Simon Belmont a pilot?," and "Okay, I could see that kid as Pit." Let's not talk about the cartoon.
The 1990s and its propensity for taking things to the edge and beyond are over. As crappy as things are now, maybe that's for the best.
I just came to the disturbing conclusion that the ColecoVision built the foundation, or at least the first floor, of the video game industry as it stands today. Even though the ColecoVision itself didn't last long past the video game crash of 1983 (which the Japanese amusingly refer to as "Atari shock"), it begat enough children to fill a few long, especially boring chapters of the Old Testament.
You know how in the show Xena: Warrior Princess, every fifth woman just happens to look exactly like Lucy Lawless, because the God of War (no, not the bald one. Kevin Smith. No, the other Kevin Smith) had Mortal Fever and couldn't keep it in his codpiece? That's the sum total of the second generation of game consoles*. There's so much ColecoVision DNA in game consoles and computers of the 1980s that it's nuts.
Everybody likes to say that the ColecoVision was made from off-the-shelf parts, but it seemed like everybody was raiding the same shelf. Sega's little seen SG-1000? Nearly identical to the ColecoVision, with Sega ripping off the specs and changing only a couple of minor details. The Master System builds on the hardware of the SG-1000, while patching over many of the system's faults. The richer color palette, smoother scrolling, and an extra helping of RAM effectively make the Master System a Super ColecoVision.
The MSX computer standard, adopted by dozens of corporations and sold throughout the world? That's a ColecoVision with a keyboard, albeit with more memory and an alternate sound chip. You get them both in the Super Game Module, a peripheral that makes the ColecoVision an MSX without a keyboard.
Even the Sega Genesis and Game Gear find themselves stuck in the tangled web that is the ColecoVision family lineage. The Game Gear is a handheld Master System, with very little to distinguish itself from its progenitor. You get some extra colors and a little less screen real estate, but beyond that it's the same hardware, in a (somewhat) convenient travel size. The Sega Genesis uses the Master System processor as a sound chip and is natively compatible with the bulk of its games, which means that it's a Super Master System... and logically, a Super Duper ColecoVision.
You have to wonder if the ColecoVision really was a failure after all. Sure, it couldn't save the company that made it, but its progeny continued to influence the industry deep into the 1990s, until the next wave of cutting edge RISC, MIPS, and ARM processors marked the end of the trusty, but increasingly crusty hardware. Even long-suffering Game Boy players were eager to leave the Z80A in the past by the turn of the century... I know I was unreasonably excited by the launch of the Game Boy Advance, and considering its popularity and healthy sales, I couldn't have been the only one.
* The line between second and third gen consoles seems drawn to coincide perfectly with the American video game crash, and it feels... inaccurate. Disingenuous. Dismissive of other territories, where video games were still popular. Somehow, ALL consoles released after Pong units but before NES are magically regarded as "second generation," when the NES (as the Famicom) was released just one year after the ColecoVision and the same day as the nearly identical SG-1000. Why is the NES regarded as a third generation console, but the Atari 5200, the successor to the Atari 2600, is considered a second generation console? The boundaries just don't make sense.
"The big fish eats the little fish." You don't know how right you are, Shark! Shark! creator Ji-Wen Tsao. (image from Glitchwave)
I'm super, super late on this, but as you no doubt have heard, Atari purchased whatever's left of the Intellivision brand from whatever's left of Tommy Tallarico. They didn't take the Amico part, because you don't board a ship when you see it springing leaks... just hundreds of the company's valuable intellectual properties.
What is Atari getting for their money? Well, there's Burgertime- no wait, G Mode has that one, being the successor to Data East. How about Tron: Deadly Discs? Nope, Disney has those rights locked away in a vault, along with Jim Henson's corpse and that straight to VHS smash, Beauty and the Beast Argue at the Dinner Table. There's all the sports games licensed by professional leagues, which... oh, I think Electronic Arts owns those now.
So remind me again why Atari wants the Intellivision? It's not as useless as the ColecoVision brand, because Coleco subsisted primarily on arcade hits owned by other companies and toy licenses that wore out their welcome in the 1980s. The Coleco brand itself may have some fleeting value, but nothing Coleco made for the ColecoVision lasted past its own 1985 expiration date.
The Intellivision has a bit more value beyond its brand name, but not much more. There are original games, and some very good ones, but not the mammoth amount of hits already owned by Atari, or Japanese companies like Namco, Konami, and Capcom. (No, Atari is not a Japanese company. It's an, um, French company now? I think? I can't even keep track anymore.)
Still, at this point, it's Hungry Hungry Hippos in the world of classic gaming rights, and big companies like Atari, along with smaller but equally voracious ones like Piko Interactive, have to grab everything they can while there's still marbles left on the board. Don't be the last in line... you'll have to settle for Radical Rex, or Bubsy, or Rocky Rodent. There's Awesome Possum too, but it's been bouncing around on the table for years without so much as a bite. Funny how everyone seems to keep their teeth clean of him during this corporate feeding frenzy.
Speaking of old as crap video game references, it's rumored that the Xbox will license its technology to other hardware manufacturers, because that worked oh-so-well for the 3DO and Nuon. People keep thinking they're going to make a standard for video game consoles that will be the next VCR or DVD player, but then again, people kept thinking they could unseat Nintendo as the king of handheld video games in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Ask the Gizmondo and Tapwave Zodiac and N-Gage and Wonderswan and Neo-Geo Pocket and game dot com how well that worked out for them.
(Cybiko? Isn't that what they play at Mardi Gras every year?)
In case you were wondering where I've been for the last month and a half, I've been working on a video game... my first since the Game Boy Advance conversion of GORF way back in 2009. It's called Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons, it's for the ColecoVision and the SG-1000, and it's available free of charge from my Itch.IO page. If you've ever played whack a mole, it's basically that, but with graphics and sound that stretch the limits of these two systems.
The story is as follows: Byron visits an arcade, only to get the shock of his life when he touches a token against the metal edges of the coin drop. That shock is doubled when he realizes that shorting out the machine has won him 256 extra lives... except they're digital copies of himself! It's your job to clean up the mess he made, bopping the holo-Byrons with swings of your electrostatic PEEK-0 mallet. Swat a Byron on the head and he vanishes, but hit him on his butt and you'll lose points. Beware! The pesky bears arm themselves with bombs in the later stages... hit one and it's an instant game over.
I'm talking to some folks about physical distribution, but for the moment, the game can be had digitally for the price of free ninety free. And it's good! It's one of the better games in the ColecoVision library, if I do say so myself. I mean, you would expect me to say that, since I made it, but give it a try and judge for yourself. It sure beats the crap out of Rolloverture, or Gust Buster, or whatever the hell Illusions was supposed to be. Also, try the SG-1000 version! It's got an exclusive Sega-licious intro screen which I think you'll like. I sure liked making it.
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.
