Ex-Box

 

Welp, that's it for the Xbox brand. Turn off the lights when you leave, will you?

Long story short, former Xbox head Phil Spencer and his imminently forgettable second-in-command Sarah Bond have both left the company... Spencer by choice, and Bond after being nudged out by incoming Xbox CEO Asha "Please don't squeeze the" Sharma. Sharma was the former head of Microsoft's AI division, suggesting that 1) She doesn't really give a damn about gaming and 2) She doesn't need to give a damn about gaming; she's the cleaner. Sharma is there to put an end to the Xbox brand, and determine the fate of the numerous third parties Microsoft bought when they thought they could force their way into the industry by purchasing half of it.

Look, we all saw this coming. Anyone old enough to have owned a Dreamcast for the fraction of a second that Sega supported it could see this coming the minute Microsoft informed the world that through the power (?) of cloud gaming, everything is an Xbox. 

It sounds like the logic of a petulant third grader... "Well, MY game system sold the most, because I say everything's an Xbox! So there!" As this figure shows, this attempt to divide and conquer through brand expansion rarely works. The 3DO had multiple manufacturers, but the price of the machine made it a non-starter no matter what company logo was on the front. The N-Gage was a dud right out of the starting gate, and efforts to turn it into a hardware standard for cell phones fizzled out just as quickly. Like the 3DO, the Nuon was made by multiple manufacturers... but around the time it launched, there was already a game system with DVD capabilities and much stronger gaming capabilities. A Sony, even, not some third-rate hardware from Goldstar.

Whenever console manufacturers try to awkwardly expand their brand by, say, making a joystick with the N64 logo that doesn't actually work with the Nintendo 64, or licensing games to a competitor's lousy handheld, it's a sign of weakness. It's a big neon sign flashing "XBOX IS ABOUT TO DIE!," and it's readily apparent that Microsoft is no longer dropping in quarters to keep this brand clinging to life. 

Trust me, I've been into video games for nearly all my life, and I've lived for over half a century. The patterns and behaviors of a game company going down in flames are easy to recognize... lord knows I've seen it enough. When a company tells you "We're behind right now, but we're coming back stronger than ever!," it's an effort to stop the bleeding and keep the customer base placated until the company's finished digging the grave and nailing together the coffin. Sega was telling Dreamcast fans they planned to support the system days before announcing it was pulling out of the console business.

Maybe it's the chin, but this dude looked 
like Sega's answer to Master Higgins.
(Or would that be Wonder Boy?)

Speaking of Sega! Hideki Sato, creator of all of Sega's flagship game consoles, passed away at the age of 75. I loved the Sega Genesis the moment I got one from a Toys 'R Us store in 1991, and I've grown to appreciate what the Master System can do in the years since. Sato took the creaky TMS9918 graphics chip and turbo-charged it, resulting in the most powerful purely 8-bit game system you could buy in the 1980s. Mr. Sato, I salute-o you. Your contributions to gaming will surely revive Zanoni be remembered forever. Hell, the way things are shaping up, people will keep making games for these five machines for an eternity.

It's no contest. (Also, Eye Brawls development journal)

For me, I mean. My latest game, Eye Brawls, was barred from the 2026 SMS Power contest, because it was submitted to SMS Power a day before it started. Or some horseshit. Funny how I'm always slightly too early to join these contests, as if the rules were enforced to specifically bar me from participation. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. 

"But feel free to join the contest next year!" Feel free to pick off the little granules of turd clinging to my butthole hair with your teeth. Putz.

...but anyway. Eye Brawls is out, it's available on Itch.IO, and it sure would be grand if someone gave the goddamned thing some love, because I sure poured a lot into it.

Digitrex Techstar's logo, which looks more
painful to step on than most video game logos.

"And what IS Eye Brawls?," you ask. Well, imaginary reader, it's like this. There was a video game way back in the 1980s, from a little-known Miami game developer called Digitrex Techstar. Its founder, and the man who made all its games, was Luis Sanchez, which gives you a pretty good idea of how small his operation really was. Games from Digitrex Techstar include Gorkans, Lizard Wizard, and the company's headliner, Eyes.

Eyes is best described as Pac-Man, with shooting. That's it, that's the game. As a tiny, confusingly drawn eyeball (I went for years thinking that flattened hat was a cluster of muscle around the eye, as if it had been ripped from someone's socket), you've got to blast a bunch of spastically pulsing objects while keeping one step ahead of the game's unnamed enemies. Some move faster than others, but they're all singularly focused on finding you, then zapping you with an optic blast. Similarly, the twisty maze of Pac-Man has been flattened out to a series of horizontal and vertical bars, resulting in a lot of long corridors and tense shoot outs with the roaming eyes. 

Get an eye-full of this! Heh, that's
the best I can do for a joke at the
moment. 

It's a dumber game than Pac-Man for sure. Enemy behavior never gets more complicated than "AFTER HIM!!!" in Eyes, while in Pac-Man, the monsters were sneaky, cornering you in the warp tunnel and making rare, unexpected 180 degree turns (not constant backtracking, like in Baby Pac-Man. A-hem, Dave Nutting and Associates) to play with your head. However, it's also a more intense and immediate game, with death literally coming at you from all sides. 

A classic? Maybe not, but a sleeper hit for sure. It's better than many Pac-Man clones, including Midway's own Exasperating Exciting New Pac-Man Plus, and it made big waves in Michigan, where Roogie Elliot achieved some small measure of fame by getting over 23 million points in one game. I met him briefly in Lake Odessa, or more accurately, stood next to him as he tried to revive his magic touch on an Eyes arcade cabinet. (Years of being behind the wheel of a long-haul truck left him a little rusty.)

Fast-forward to two years ago. Oscar Toledo Gutierrez, a Mexican IT expert better known to the world as Nanochess, released a BASIC compiler for the ColecoVision, and after getting familiar with the software, I went right to work on Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons, along with a ColecoVision port of Eyes. WESEB got finished, but the newly minted Eye Brawls got put on the shelf for a while.

The Eye Brawls cast, featuring one-eyed puns
for the four wandering eyes. Pops and Pete
are sluggish and have lousy reflexes, but Sandy
and especially Samson are more dangerous.

Fast-forward again to just about now. After frustration with the enemy logic in Pyrebirds, I stepped back from that cliff and attempted something less demanding. I went back to Eye Brawls, adding collision detection, sound, and an improved engine for the onscreen whatzits, now called whirligigs. There's a lot of optical puns, as you can see... the previously unnamed hero is now 20/20, and the four evil eyes are now named after Cyclopean celebrities like Peter Falk, Sandy Duncan, and Sammy Davis Jr. It's silly, bordering on crass, but it felt like it fit.

It took about two weeks of work to convert the Eye Brawls alpha into a full-fledged game, thanks to the power of CVBasic and me having no social life. There were frustrations, to be sure! Enemies absolutely insisted on cutting through the horizontal bars near the center of the screen, and it threatened my already thinning hairline and fractured sanity, held together with duct tape and hope. The solution was to force the eyes to move away from them with a command that superceded all the other ones. That was easily, without a shadow of a doubt, the toughest part of this project.

A tear swings from 20/20's eye-self when he's
hit with an optic blast, one of the additions
Eye Brawls makes to the arcade game. The
other ones you'll have to find for yourself!

In the end, I'd say the Eye Brawls project was a success, and a fitting tribute to a game that didn't get the kudos it deserved. (Boy, can I relate.) Because it's so easy to port a game to other formats with CVBasic, Eye Brawls is available for not only the ColecoVision, but the MSX and the SG-1000 as well. The SG-1000 port I'm regretting in light of recent events, but hey, I'll know better next time.