Showing posts with label Namco. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Games 441-442: Tank Battalion & Battle City

Our next whale, Namco's Battle City, is a minor one, and is one of the earliest third-party games developed specifically for the Famicom.

As it is a successor to an even lesser non-whale, I'll be playing that first.

Game 441: Tank Battalion

Scan by The Arcade Flyer Archive

It's hard to believe it, but this ugly-looking, clumsily-playing maze shooter came out almost simultaneously with the sublime Pac-Man! It feels like it should be a generation older.

I get ahead of myself, but Tank Battalion isn't very impressive.

The idea is fairly original and anticipates some aspects of tower defense strategy, making it a welcome break from the countless Space Invaders clones of the time. You drive a tank through a fully destructible maze and have to protect your base, represented by an eagle insignia, from an enemy tank battalion. This would be impossible if they were smart enough to coordinate and flank your base from multiple directions at once, but the AI is erratic and very stupid, so instead this is merely frustrating. The tanks don't pose much threat to you, but you can't be everywhere at once, your own firepower is limited to one shot on screen at a time, which can easily miss thanks to the enemies' unpredictable movements, and if they land a single hit on the base, it's an instant game over no matter how many spare lives you have. Consequently, there are times when you may want to sacrificially throw your own tank in front of an incoming shell in order to save the base and reset the attack pattern.

Both you and the enemies can destroy walls in the maze, which ought to provide a lot of strategic options that you otherwise wouldn't have. But this feels like wasted potential - you can only strategize so much when the enemies follow no discernible pattern or logic, and methods of reshape the maze to your advantage feel limited to optimizing your own mobility through it. Perhaps there are reliable mazing strategies that come with experience and feel, but thanks to poor framerate and unresponsive controls, I felt no desire to stick with it any longer than I did - after beating the third wave, where the maze walls disappear entirely, I decided that I'd seen enough.

GAB rating: Below average, borderline bad. The concept is decent, but it's clunky and not much fun.

Game 442: Battle City

Cover hosted by Mobygames

I have no idea how this Japan-exclusive Famicom cartridge got over 50 Mobygames votes - that's not a lot, but it's more than the likes of Balloon Fight and Bomberman. Unlike those, I'd never heard of Battle City before.

This successor follows the same formula as Tank Battalion before it, but with a battery of big improvements.

Solid near-60fps framerate and responsive controls
Greater terrain variety
35 distinct levels with level select option
Level editor with cassette saves
Two player simultaneous action
Four enemy tank types with differing levels of speed, armor, firepower, and aggression
Powerup system

Since this has a two-player option - one that's implicitly cooperative with you two against the battalion but with a competitive scoring aspect (and the possibility of "accidental" friendly fire), I played this one with "B," who takes player two in the below video.

And, well, this is a major improvement over the original! It still doesn't feel very strategic, but I can live with that thanks to much smoother controls and faster gameplay, which makes Battle City feel arcadier than its coin-op predecessor. Levels feel more like battle maps than abstract Pac-Man-like mazes, thanks to zanier designs and terrain variety with features like view-obstructing trees and water which blocks tanks but not your shorts.

The new powerup system also provides a strategic element - killing a super tank will spawn one somewhere in the stage, and these are quite desirable, including effects such as freezing all enemies in place, upgrading your cannon, extra lives, or even just clearing the screen. But it might not spawn in a convenient spot, and they vanish after a few seconds - do you disengage from your current melee to get it, do you keep fighting and try to win quickly enough that you still have time to get it, or do you ignore it?

We played for not quite 20 minutes and made it to level 13 before we got bored and decided to quit. "B" played with a riskier, more aggressive style than myself, where he spawn camped and racked up more kills and points than I did, but also lost his own lives quicker.

GAB rating: Above average.

This was fun, and one of the better early-generation Famicom games I've played. I'm sure that the level editor would have provided lots of replay value back in the day. If it were 1985 and my only gaming system was a Famicom, this would have been one of my favorite video games. But it isn't - it got repetitive eventually, and I'm not at all eager to go back and finish any of the unplayed levels.

Friday, July 28, 2023

Game 374-376: Missed arcade golden age classics

Our next whale, Tecmo's 1984 title Bomb Jack, is a lesser one that's probably more famous for its ports to the 8-bit microcomputers in Europe and its NES sequel than for the original arcade release.

The early arcade works of Tecmo - then called Tehkan - are informed by some golden age classics which had been moderately successful in their day but failed to secure much historical legacy, and didn't make whale status. For this post, I am covering these games for the first time, as ancestors.

Game 374: Head On

Developed in 1979 by Sega & then-partner Gremlin Industries, Head On is, in a word, stressful.

Driving a car around and around a course of concentric encircling lanes, your goal is to collect all of the dots while a rival driving around the course in the opposite direction tries his darnedest to crash into you, for some perverse reason.

Similarities to Pac-Man are impossible to ignore, though without any solid evidence that Iwatani took cues here, I'm content to assume them coincidental. But while Pac-Man's mechanics afforded the player occasional breathers from the manic chase - power pills, escape tunnels, and AI patterns that alternate between "pursue" and "scatter" on an interval, Head On offers no respite from its suicidal chicken game. Wind up in the same lane as the red car and miss your opportunity to change lanes, and you crash. Change lanes too late, and you crash. Change lanes too early, and the red car changes lanes right with you and you crash. Misjudge your own lane, or misjudge which lane the red car is going to take, and you probably crash. Fail to enter the lane-changing zone at just the right time, which gets increasingly difficult to reckon as the round drags on and the red car gets faster, and you probably won't be able to avoid a crash.

There's a puzzle-like element seen here determining the optimal route to hit all of the dots without crashing. The red car's AI is simple and almost entirely deterministic, reacting mainly to your changes in position by honing in on it. You can accelerate, but at top speed you may only change one lane at a time while at standard speed you can cross two, which is often necessary in order to survive.

I only managed to reach the third round once, where you go up against two cars instead of one. I didn't last long at all - in fact the entire game lasted not even two and a half minutes. Even this meager victory was neither enjoyable nor rewarding.

GAB rating: Bad. Head On is too simplistic, too stressful, and too punishing. Pac-Man may or may not have been influenced by this, but either way, this just isn't it.

Game 375: Rally-X

Released by Namco a few months after Pac-Man, Rally-X is ostensibly another maze chase game, but unlike Iwatani's pizza-shaped sensation, openly takes after Head On, though it more resembles Pac-Man in all ways except for theme. Racecars chase you through a maze - a four-way scrolling maze far bigger than Pac-Man's single screen - as you try to collect ten flags scattered throughout.

The large maze makes all the difference here, and frankly it isn't for the better. Skillful twisting and turning - or use of the smoke screen weapon - can put several screens of distance between you and your enemies, which was obviously impossible in Pac-Man, but since the screen can't show you the whole maze at once, and the game speed is much faster, you can't really develop Pac-Man's type of complex evasion strategies either. Here, enemies pop in from off-screen, your only advance warning being a small radar display showing their approximate positions, and will crash into you under a second.

Scoring hasn't got much nuance either. Doing well in Pac-Man requires developing tactics to clump ghosts together so you can eat them all in one go, but here, you're rewarded mainly for efficiency - finishing quickly and with minimal use of smoke screen gives you a larger bonus for remaining fuel. The only other factor is a special flag which doubles the value of all subsequent ones, worth up to 4,500 extra points if you collect it before all others, and it is absolutely not worth spending time prowling the maze to find it and ensure you get it first.

Retrogame Deconstruction Zone offers an insightful and more thorough comparison that I recommend for further reading.

I made it to round 6 in my best attempt before getting bored. I'd have stuck with it longer back when I was playing 1980 whales, but for whatever reason I just don't have as much patience for these early arcade games as I used to.

GAB rating: Above average. This is fine, definitely a better game than Head On, but it's no Pac-Man.

I should note - in 1981, Namco followed up with New Rally-X, which is a big improvement over the original. I prefer the original game's earthier colors and music, but New Rally-X plays more fairly, with a gradualized difficulty curve, mazes with fewer dead-ends, fewer cars, and the special flag is highlighted on the radar, making it actually viable to go for it early instead of just hoping you luck into it (a new "lucky" flag supplants that niche). I do think it errs a bit on the easy side - reducing the vehicles makes it takes longer for things to get challenging - but slightly too easy is better than unfairly hard.

Game 376: Phoenix

Phoenix might be the most notable of these missed classics. There's an air of mystery about it.

For one, no other game of its era, or indeed any era, quite looks like this, with so many sprites moving around the screen in erratic unison, animated so fluidly, and yet a bit jerkily, being somehow both evolved years ahead of its time and not quite up to par for its time. This surreal look and feel, motivated by the unconventional technique of using animated background tiles in lieu of hardware sprites to draw everything (a technique which Galaxian also utilized but committed to less fully), is difficult to appreciate when looking back from games of 1984, but we need only compare it to Rally-X to observe just how different Phoenix looks from anything else in its generation.

We also don't know for sure who made this game. Mobygames credits Amstar Electronics (their sole sitewide credit!), but a trade magazine sourced on Wikipedia notes Amstar as the manufacturer of the U.S. cocktail table version as a counterpart to Centuri's upright cabinet version. There are many early and obscure video games whose developers are unknown, especially from Japan, but Phoenix may be unique among them as a multinational hit, which brought its respective manufacturers money and fame and spawned a strong selling console conversion and multiple imitations.

Phoenix's Galaxian-inspired gameplay unfolds in a loop of five stages, and is possibly the first of its kind to.

In the first, things indeed look very much like Galaxian. Small, flying aliens, more resembling bats than the Space Invaders of old and with a slick wing-flapping animation, flit about the screen and swoop down to attack. Unlike Galaxian, these are no simple, predictable dive-bombing passes, but chaotic dances that makes it even more of a challenge to hit them.

Aliens that make it to the bottom tend to linger there for a little while, where they may try to kamikaze your ship, or just hover above at a close range so that hitting them is easy, but avoiding fire should they shoot as you pass below is nearly impossible, making it risky to pass. To help the odds a bit, you have a shield, but it's difficult to use defensively as like so many other shields, by the time you realize you need it it could be too late. It can be used offensively to ram them, but this carries risks too - it immobilizes you for the duration of the shield's pulsations, and sometimes it doesn't even work and the enemy or its shots go right through the shield and destroy you!

The second round is just a repeat of the first round, but you have double the firepower. Both rounds have some tricks to score extra points, but it's peanuts compared to what you can get later. Except for one trick which I've never been able to pull off and is probably a glitch - shooting three aliens in rapid succession during the right animation frames gets you a massive 200,000 points!

The next round introduces the phoenixes, large, swooping birds in an eternal cycle of fluidly animated birth, life, and rebirth. Until you shoot a laser up their smug little beaks.

Despite their predictable motion patterns, it is difficult to hit them at any part of their sinusoidal flight paths except at the very crests, which tends to put you in the corner where you are most vulnerable.

Some decent points can be scored here by clipping the birds' wings before finishing them off. The payoff is random and not worth taking unnecessary risks to pursue, but if the opportunity presents, go for it.

Round 4 is just a repeat of round 3 except the birds are pink.

The final round is an attack on the mothership, whose outer hull and inner shield must be blasted apart before landing a shot on the purple commander. You've got three zones of death here - the center, where the mothership fires, and as usual the corners, where you can only escape in one direction when things get hot. The flier support will do its best to drive you into these danger zones!

This fight offers the real jackpot - 8000+ points - and it's risky but well worth it, even if you lose a life in the process. The mothership descends throughout the stage, and each pixel it advances not only makes its bullets harder to dodge, but also shields the fliers from your own bullets, making them deadlier as well. To score big, you must allow it to descend to the lowest point possible before landing the killing shot!

One pixel higher and you get nothing.

Easier said than done, but the best method is to punch away at the center hull early on while it's still possible to dodge the return fire, and then chip away at the rotating shield from the edge where you're safer, and cannot accidentally hit the commander. Kill the fliers when you can - the more you can kill, the less you'll have to deal with while waiting out the mothership's final descent.

I was only able to clear a single loop before feeling done with this game - once again, I think I'd have had more patience and more will to improve had I covered this game years ago rather than now.

GAB rating: Above average. In a way, Phoenix feels like an evolutionary dead-end, building on Space Invaders and Galaxian in areas that the industry wasn't quite ready for. It's a visual spectacle, and offers a gameplay variety that anticipates Gorf of the following year, but I can't help feel the overall experience is a bit unpolished. Galaxian consistently rewarded precision and strategy, but the chaotic enemy movements and sometimes unreliable hit detection make Phoenix feel random and frustrating. And the longer a round goes on without thinning out the enemies, the worse it exacerbates. It's worth playing, but it isn't my favorite.

Friday, July 1, 2022

Game 323: Pac-Land

Buy Pac-Man Museum, which includes a slightly modified version of Pac-Land (sanitized of disputed IP's Ms. Pac-Man and Baby Pac-Man) here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1665130/PACMAN_MUSEUM/

Pac-Land represents a missing link between Konami's Track and Field and Nintendo's seminal Super Mario Bros... maybe? The two games could hardly seem less alike, with little in common but the side-scrolling perspective that had been used hundreds of times before either of them, but it is widely understood that Track & Field directly influenced Pac-Land, even if the only sign is Namco's strange decision to borrow its arm-breaking button-mash controls in a precision-demanding platform game.

It is not difficult to imagine Pac-Land's influence on Super Mario Bros. either. Side-scrolling platforms had been done before, and were typically "runner" style games that emphasized jumping over and avoiding obstacles more than navigating platforms, like Moon Patrol, B.C.'s Quest for Tires, Jungle King, and arguably Smurf Rescue and Pitfall!. Pac-Land more or less fits into this category as well, but distinguishes itself from them in a number of ways that seem to anticipate things to come:

32 levels split into eight "trips," each with four levels corresponding to a particular biome offering a sense of progression (e.g. city->forest->mountains)
Greater emphasis on precision platforming, in certain levels
Inertia-based physics, allowing Pac-Man to run at multiple speeds which also affect his traction and jump trajectories, and allow a degree of mid-air trajectory control
Ability-granting power-ups
Obscure secrets and mechanics, thankfully none of which are needed to progress but will help boost your score

All that aside, it's of an interesting note that in the interim years between the original Pac-Man and Pac-Land, the franchise had a regional split. Namco's own follow-ups, Super Pac-Man and Pac & Pal, were massively overshadowed in the U.S. by distributor Midway's Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, and Jr. Pac-Man. Pac-Land, you could say, converges these branches, as it is once again in the hands of Namco, but takes its artistic direction from the U.S. properties, especially ABC's Saturday morning cartoon series.

Pac-Land, like Track & Field, has no joystick, instead requiring you to tap buttons in order to attain full speed, and although the physical demands are less intense than the former game, its marathon length makes it just as wearying. Pac-Man has three speeds - a walk, performed by pressing and holding the "run" button corresponding to the direction, a jog performed by double-tapping and holding it, and a full run when tapped repeatedly. Tapping the reverse direction button while moving will slow him down and eventually stop and reverse direction. Jumping height is determined by how fast you are running when you hit the jump button, and does not care how long it is held, but unlike many early arcade platformers, your speed (and therefore trajectory) can be adjusted midair with the movement buttons, and this is crucial for making tricky jumps in later rounds.

At first I played Pac-Land's U.S. version, and I played it quite a bit too, managing to complete the first four "trips" on a single set of lives, though I afforded myself pause breaks between stages.

Then I learned that the original Japanese version has some gameplay differences along with aesthetic ones. Most crucially, the U.S. version appears to be about 20% faster!

I opted to replay using this version, which had some ups and downs. The lower speed meant less arm strain in maintaining Pac-Man's stride, fewer cheap deaths from running headlong into ghosts or traps coming off-screen with no time to react, enabled me to make riskier maneuvers through the gauntlets of obstacles and enemies, and, if I'm not mistaken, avoided the occasional deadly input drop. Overall, the Japanese version feels more balanced.

On the other hand, this leisurely pace de-intensifies the experience, and even the sped-up U.S. version already wasn't the most thrilling game on the market. The early levels became kind of boring to play, though this could just as well be attributed to my over-familiarity with them.

The U.S. version also features an exclusive level select option, but only for the first five "trips" out of eight. It's the latter four where Pac-Land gets really nasty, so the inability to start on one of them could be irrelevant or sorely missed depending on your approach.

And frankly, Midway's redesign of Pac-Man himself is better. Especially the hat choice.

My best attempt at a fair playthrough got me to trip 6, and I've recorded the video.

To play through the rest of the stages, I simply used an unlimited lives cheat. Save states under my usual rules proved boring, and I think the resulting death-filled video better illustrates Pac-Land's cheap nature than a quantum immortality playthrough.

Trip 1

Pac-Land begins innocuously enough, presenting nothing more challenging to jump over than harmless fire hydrants. Landing on the hydrants spawns point-scoring cherries. The ghost Sue will pursue you relentlessly, but so slowly as to be nonthreatening as long as you don't dawdle, giving a new player plenty of time to figure out Pac-Land's somewhat odd controls. Before long, the hydrants give way to deadly oncoming ghost traffic, but with their simple patterns and slow driving speed, they aren't much threat. Yet.

Most of the ghosts can be safely jumped on and even ridden, but not Sue.

Power pellets, as usual, turn the ghosts blue and vulnerable to being munched. One secret I discovered is that if you can corral five or more ghosts in the same spot before eating, Sue included, and then eat a string of them ending in Sue (who can be distinguished from the rest by not having a hat and some other properties), you'll score a hefty 3,200 point jackpot on her plus whatever you get for the rest of them, and you'll also spawn a pickup that refills your timer and gives you a further point bonus based on whatever you had left.

If you run out of time, you don't die instantly, but Sue will speed up and almost certainly kill you if you aren't very close to the exit.

Next you have airplane-flying ghosts who drop little ghosts on you. There is a way to unlock a helmet powerup that protects you from them, but the method is so obscure that I never bothered with it on the grounds that I'd have never figured it out on my own.

A church, not seen in the "World" version, marks the city outskirts.

Round 2 opens with a desert where you hop over cacti, and then contend with UFO-riding ghosts whose parabolic patterns offer slightly more challenge.

The forest comes next, and its canopy can obscure pogo-stick bouncing ghosts whose erratic bouncing patterns are trickier to avoid. Stumps also litter the path, are sometimes concealed by the foreground trees, and you'll need to time/aim your jumps over them so that you avoid the pogo ghosts.

Round 2 in the mountains has you cross moving bridges and later a collapsing bridge while ghosts fly overhead the whole time.

These springboards caused me a lot of grief early on, but the slower Japanese version is more forgiving. To get maximum air, which you'll need most of the time to clear the pools, you'll need to approach them at full speed, jump pretty close to the very edge, and, very importantly, never stop tapping the forward run button. Cherries mark the minimum safe trajectory, and going at the absolute maximum speed will overshoot them, but I'd rather overshoot and miss the cherries than risk undershooting and miss the pool.

A power pill on the other side, collected with good timing, yields five snacks and some big points.

At the end of every third round, a fairy queen gives you magic boots for the return trip.

The fourth round is an abbreviated version of the previous rounds, played in reverse, but now you can perform mid-air jumps, making the platforming a lot easier. Ghosts spawn more aggressively, and the long stage duration makes running out of time a credible risk, especially if you go out of your way to collect all the fruit.

How convenient, these cactii got taller!

Nearly there.

No place like home!

Trip 2

Even though it may look it at first, Pac-Land's "trips" are not merely repeating loops with a higher difficulty.

Round 5 has you leave the city again, and a palette change suggests something happening later in the day. The ghosts spawn much more aggressively than before, and there are some new tricks - namely fire hydrants that shoot water at you, and some of the ghosts now drive double-deckers.

Round 6 is mainly a series of springboards and pools, but there's a new theme right after.

This half-constructed bridge is full of precarious ledges, leaky fire hydrants, and splashing waves to knock you off them. Unfortunately, Pac-Land's controls are awkwardly suited for precision platforming. Far too often, I'd find myself on a narrow platform, try to back up a bit to give me more running space, only to drop right off the left side.

Make it to the end and you get the magic boots again for the return.

No need for springboards here!

Trip 3

Round 9 skips the city and begins in the desert, where after some ghost bombers and springboards, a nasty trap awaits newbies.

There's quicksand around the skull and I guarantee it will kill any player unaware. You've got to hit the ground running and on the right spot and keep mashing the run button to not get sucked under - and even that doesn't always work - and also pray you don't run headlong into a randomly-moving ghost on the other side.

Round 10 is a nighttime forest level. Nothing new here.

The mountains beyond have, after a series of collapsing bridges, moving cloud platforms. These threw me off at first but can be crossed without much difficulty if you take it slow and do most of your jumps from a standing position, using mid-air speed adjustment to cross the distances.

Pac-Man Flappy Birds his way back home in the return trip.

Trip 4

This begins in the city once again, and there's a notable difficulty spike.

By riding the fire hydrant spray, you can parkour the rooftops and avoid some of the ghost traffic below

...but not all of it

The next round is a whole new biome and theme!

This castle level has no enemies except for Sue, but instead challenges you to solve a maze of keys and locked doors, and your main threat is running out of time. This isn't too bad if you don't overly concern yourself with not wasting keys or missing fruit, but it's a long level and you don't have a lot of time to spare.

More precarious scaffolds await on the other side.

A chokepoint delays Pac-Man's return. Running out of time here is a real threat.

Trip 5

This is the halfway point of the game, and things start to get really difficult.

Oh come on!

A collapsing bridge is the hardest part of round 18.

The castle maze returns for round 19, but now the outer wall obscures your view, showing only Pac-Man's own cone of vision. Cool effect? Yes. Annoying as hell? Also yes.

Huh. Where are all the ghosts?

The return on round 20 is weirdly devoid of ghosts for most of it. But eventually, possibly after going out of your way to collect a few scattered apples, you realize something. This trip is so long that you can't avoid running out of time! Once this happens, you've got to beeline home at full speed before Sue gets you.

Trip 6

This was the furthest I could make it honestly in the Japanese version. I had to use save states to progress past round 23 here.

The city has its usual tricks and traps, just more of them.

Wait, is this Pitfall?

Death by airplane collision if I jump now, death by Sue if I wait for Clyde to pass.

I'm so dead.

Of course, caution can be deadly too.

The return trip is mercifully easy in comparison.

Trip 7

I had to use an unlimited lives cheat to reach and progress from these last two trips. And they pose an actually interesting challenge, but you're just not going to pass these without memorizing much of these levels. It makes me wish that Pac-Land offered the ability to continue, and not just to start on Trip 5 like the US version does.

The forest at night. As always, foreground trees can conceal stumps and spoil your attempts to duck under the pogo ghosts.

Now this is unfair. A springboard launches you into ghost-infested air...

...over two screen-widths worth of quicksand. Good luck, because skill won't save you.

Narrow platforms give little leeway for avoiding ghost planes.

I almost swear this jump isn't possible.

If obstructing topiary wasn't bad enough, now you've got darkness too.

But the return trip isn't too bad.

Trip 8

The final trip starts off cruelly. You must ride a ghost's plane to get across the lake, and if you miss the first time, not only do you forfeit a life, but it will be harder on subsequent tries. Your jumping height being tied to running speed doesn't make it any easier.

Eventually the way is dotted with cloud platforms, which wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that some of them are spaced too far apart to cross with a standing hop, and the controls for "slow down so you don't careen off the right edge" and "walk right off the left edge" are exactly the same.

One last castle maze, and this time the keys are rare. You really do need to worry about not wasting them, and may well still get stuck and run out of time.

The penultimate stage is a bridge level, and it's horrible, combining narrow ledges with nonstop water jets and the most aggressive ghost planes yet.

The final return is just one big flight over a lake, and it's not too bad as long as you aren't overly concerned with missing the fruit. Try to catch 'em all and you run a big risk of death and restarting the entire level, which has no checkpoints.

And that's all the levels. Beat this one and it loops back to trip 5.

At just over two weeks, this is possibly the longest amount time I've spent yet on an arcade game. This is partly because of my decision to replay the Japanese version (and I can't imagine the horror of trying to finish the later levels in the quicker US version), but owes much to its epic length.

GAB rating: Above average. Pac-Land, once you get a grasp on its often slippery controls, is a pleasant experience, at least for the first few trips before things get nasty, and it anticipated, if not outright pioneered, many elements of the sidescrolling platformer as we'd soon come to know it. Its 32 levels show impressive variety and little obvious repetition, and continuously delivers new gimmicks and even one-off set pieces right up until the end. But it never quite reaches the heights of excitement or inspiration needed to reach the ivory deck. The most interestingly designed levels are, sadly, also the most unfairly difficult ones, demanding memorization and a precise execution that its own controls just aren't equipped for. The US version, owing to its even less fair difficulty, gets knocked down to average.

The next game, concluding the summer of 1984, gets back to good old Infocom interactive fiction, which I figure will be a light snack compared to Pac-Land's extravagance.

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Sunday, March 8, 2026

Superauthenticity: Arcade game aspect ratios

Atari

Breakout

Centipede

Star Wars

Marble Madness

Paperboy

Gauntlet

Namco

Galaxian

Pac-Man

Dig Dug

Xevious

Pole Position

Midway

Wizard of Wor

Tapper

Spy Hunter

Konami

Super Cobra

Frogger

Gyruss

Rush'n Attack

Gradius

Nintendo

Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong Junior

Popeye

Mario Bros.

Williams

Defender

Robotron: 2084

Joust

Sega

Zaxxon

Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom

Space Harrier

Capcom

1942

Commando

Ghosts 'n Goblins