We’re jumping a bit ahead of schedule as this past weekend, I had an opportunity to play 1985’s Space Harrier on an original deluxe motion-cabinet at Funspot, NH, and wanted to do a writeup while it was still fresh in my mind.
Space Harrier was never my favorite Sega game, though my experience with it until now had only been through ports and emulation. It seemed quite repetitive, with little to distinguish the moment-to-moment gameplay of its 18 stages other than visual variety, the pseudo-3D shooting action clumsy, imprecise, and full of unfair deaths, and its much-praised Super Scaler technology just felt visually incoherent, providing nothing to look at but a vast, empty void with a large number of smoothly-scaling objects flying at you at warp speed. It's very colorful, sure, but the monochromatic wireframes of Star Wars and even Elite offered a far better sense of 3D space and perspective.
This deluxe sit-down cabinet, similarly to the deluxe cabinets of OutRun and After Burner (which also feature at Funspot and are placed right next to it), tilts and pivots as you push the flight stick to move your character around the screen. It's definitely an added dimension to the trippy experience that emulation can't replicate, but it's not quite as immersive in this early iteration. OutRun's moving seat bounces as you drive across bumpy terrain and physically leans into your turns, and After Burner's moving cockpit syncs with the chase-camera perspective, tilting and pitching as your F-14 Tomcat does, but here, the pseudo-3D perspective isn't tethered to your character's movements as he zips around the screenspace, and the cabinet motion doesn't feel as connected to the action as it might have. One suspects it might have made more sense in the first prototypes where you actually flew a harrier, instead of a guy with a jetpack and a space bazooka.
I played through Space Harrier's 18 stages for the first time at Funspot, and while the motion cabinet doesn't do anything to enhance the gameplay, it does enhance the experience. I'll note that I'm very grateful for the tertiary fire button located physically on the cabinet, as repeatedly squeezing the joystick trigger gets very, very tiring. I then played through for the second time at home, using a USB flight stick to steer and the left-ctrl button on my keyboard to shoot. The game has no limit on the number of times you're allowed to continue, and no penalty when you do. Therefore I had no incentive to replay and try to play more optimally or use fewer of them.
The game controls quite well with either setup, but is still very shallow and very repetitive. Each of the 18 worlds has a distinct color scheme and visuals, but it makes little difference whether you're shooting at giant Moai heads while dodging their fireballs and avoiding stone pillars on the ground or you're shooting at harriers while dodging their missiles and avoiding steel towers on the ground. Basically, never stop moving, never stop shooting, and try not to move into oncoming obstacles.
Space can be a tough place, and you will eat flaming laser death.
Bosses, at least, provide a bit of gameplay variety, but they're pretty brief and a lot of them are still samey. There are also two rounds where you ride a Luck Dragon and just try to smash through as many obstacles as possible for bonus points, and the final stage is a boss rush and considerably easier than the stages before it. There is, of course, no plot and no context at all for why you're here or what you're doing.
I will give some credit here, for lack of a better place to mention it. Space Harrier's audio design is quite excellent, with a psychedelic FM soundtrack, clear voice samples (AHHHHH!!! .... get ready!), lots of rumbly explosions, zippy cannonfire, a distinctive 'bloop' sound of enemies unloading clusters of fireballs in your general direction, and convincing stereo separation effects behind it all.
GAB rating: Average. Another cutting edge Sega game pushes their signature sprite-scaling technology even harder than Hang-On did, but colorfully trippy visuals and break-neck speed can't make up for overly simplistic and monotonous gameplay, and unfair quarter-munching design.
Sega's legendary designer Yu Suzuki's wrote his first game for Sega's not-so-legendary SG-1000 console, a contemporary of the Famicom with the graphical prowess of the ColecoVision. Retrospectives tend to consider the later Master System as Sega's true answer to the Famicom, and reduce the SG-1000's role to its forebear if it is even acknowledged at all, and truth be told, I don't see myself exploring the SG-1000 library much either. No whales originated on it, but this ancestor is a rare opportunity to emulate it.
Game 423: Champion Boxing
"B" and I played a few matches in MAME and recorded our last and probably most exciting one, in which he plays the taller boxer and wins by decision.
The game is a bit simplistic, but overall it's not bad! The controls have a strange design choice where button 1 punches and button 2 cycles between punch types (jab, straight, uppercut), but they're fast and responsive, and the animations are fluid and readable. Action tends to oscillate between attack and defense; land a hit and you're in a good position to follow up with another, but you've got to mix up your punches with high and low blows to keep him guessing how to block. Block successfully and your next blow will come out faster than his, making the ideal opportunity for a counter-offensive. Or, if you just can't seem to block your opponent's string of punches, you can back off and leave him swinging at air, forcing him to come to you while you take a breather. The strategy isn't by any means deep, but it's something.
GAB rating: Above average. Like Urban Champion but better, I enjoyed this sparring match more than I expected to.
Game 424: Hang-On
Sega's arcade ventures are well known for being early adopters of pseudo-3D and eventually 3D technologies, often relying on bespoke, pricey hardware, but some of their earliest attempts don't hold up terribly well. Turbo, for instance, powered by the sprite-scaling VCO Object board, plays awkwardly and looks primitive compared to Namco's Pole Position from just a few months later, and Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom looks flashy but is otherwise a chaotic mess.
Enter the famous Super Scaler board, or at least a progenitor to it - a 16-chip, dual-CPU beast designed for one purpose - to one-up Pole Position (itself a monster of a PCB). Truth be told, considering Hang-On is three years younger, the improvement is almost underwhelming, but it goes to show how much arcade technology stagnated in the interim years between 1982 and 1985. But make no mistake, it succeeds at this goal; Hang-On's 3D perspective is just as convincing as Pole Position's, but runs smoother, speedier, and is much more colorful than anything before it, and the technology would only get better.
Photo by SegaRetro
Nearly as important to the graphics technology are the cabinet externals, which feature analog bike handlebars for steering, a twist throttle, and braking lever. The deluxe ride-on model, shaped like one of the ingame motorcycles, goes even further for immersion and is controlled by tilting the assembly with your whole body weight - an impressive feature all but impractical to emulate! ACAM of New Hampshire has such a model, but it remains inoperable, sadly.
To emulate this as best as I could, I brought out my Logitech steering wheel and pedals, which probably allows easier control than the real thing did. My wheel would steer, my gas pedal would throttle, but I mapped one of the paddle shifters to the brakes. You need analog throttle, but you don't really need analog braking.
And, it works! It works quite well - this is easily the nicest-feeling arcade racing game I've covered yet - much is because unlike Turbo and Pole Position which use free-spinning, centerless wheels, I can comfortably map Hang-On's steering to a standard wheel, but the action feels responsive, sufficiently weighty, and fast. Sliding through a hairpin turn at just the right speed so that you don't understeer and drive off the road feels great, and even better if you pass another biker or two mid-turn.
Granted, this is still the Turbo-mode of gameplay and pseudo-3D physics, where the road is flat, turning is an illusion, and rival bikers are mere obstacles to be passed rather than true opponents. But a good illusion goes a long way in an arcade racer, and this is the best illusion of turning yet.
Hang-On is intensely unforgiving - you cannot afford a single accident if you hope to get through to the end, and even if you never crash or bump into another rider and spend most of your ride at maximum throttle, you can still lose because you took turns too cautiously, or even because a road segment was congested with bikers and forced you to wait for an opportunity to pass. Luck, in the form of the bikers and when you encounter them, plays a role - they can be easy to pass, risky to pass, or impossible depending on when you reach them, how many there are, and whether they're off to the sides or actively changing lanes at the time. Many of my attempts were doomed by a rival bumping me off the road and into a rose bush or a signpost as I futilely tried to pass him.
I'd say it took me at least 30 tries to get through the entire course for the first time, and I made it twice - the second time is shown in the recording. A crash flings you from the bike which dramatically explodes in the background and effectively costs you eleven seconds - five to recover, and six to get back up to speed - and both of my successful runs were accident-free and finished with fewer than ten seconds remaining.
Both runs also involved a hidden secret; one that requires me to describe the runs as "accident-free" rather than "crash-free." During the fourth leg of the race, you'll eventually see a Sega logo on the left curb, followed by H-A-N-G-O-N letters. Crash into the 'G,' which is rather easy to accidentally swerve around instead of into, and you'll put twenty seconds back on the clock. Without exploiting this secret, both of my successes would have been failures.
GAB rating: Good. Hang-On is a Sega milestone, marking the start of their long-reigning position at the forefront of the coin-op scene's cutting edge. While the driving isn't obviously more advanced than Turbo, or even Atari's Night Driver, presentation and feel makes it fun.
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.
I'm very curious what Sega was thinking here. "Donkey Kong made a killing nearly two years ago. What if we remade it with Zaxxon's hardware, in isometric perspective?"
To be fair, it's not exactly the same as Donkey Kong. For one, you're not trying to rescue a damsel in distress or do anything noble. You're after revenge.
See how you like the destruction of your habitat.
The Donkey Kong motif only really holds up for one level too. Verticality quickly becomes de-emphasized, and the fourth, final level feels more like Frogger.
When I played Zaxxon, I had some issues with its 3D collision detection, and although Congo Bongo mostly avoids Zaxxon's problem with ambiguous positions of objects relative to the terrain (although the falling coconuts can be tricky to judge), hitboxes are a bigger problem given that you have to maneuver around enemies closely and can't just shoot them from far away. It's often just not very clear where you can stand and not get killed. One time I even slid off a ledge while walking parallel to it!
I beat the loop once, but couldn't finish the first level on the second loop, and didn't feel motivated at all to try again and do better.
GAB rating: Average. Congo Bongo's biggest issue is that the stage design is a bit dull. Three of the four levels are almost completely flat, which on one hand avoids potential difficulties in wondering where the platforms and ledges exist in 3D space, but it doesn't make them very interesting to look at or play. If the levels had been more inspired, I might have felt more inclined to master its frustrating collision detection and enemy movement patterns, but alas, I didn't.
I have to wonder if Congo Bongo was popular in the UK. In a few years, sidescrolling became the de facto standard for platformers by both US and Japanese developers and stayed that way for the better part of two decades, but around the same time, axonometric platformers like Congo Bongo became a regional phenomena closely associated with the ZX Spectrum, much in the way that sidescrolling platformers became associated with the NES.
Sega is well known for their trailblazing and often ahead-of-their-time work in 3D video game graphics. Even Zaxxon, their breakout video game and earliest whale on this blog, explored the use of pseudo-3D axonometric perspective long before it was commonplace. Before the age of emulation, this was lost on me; my first exposure to the company name was through the Sega Genesis, which to me was basically an upgraded NES, with similar sidescrolling action games but with much improved visuals, audio, and slicker, zippier gameplay. Their achievements in 3D graphics continued in the arcades, and spilled over a bit into the Genesis' library, but this did not characterize my view of the platform the way that 2D sidescrollers did.
Zoom 909, released internationally as Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom (with zero connections to the long running multimedia franchise except the cabinet artwork), is the second Sega whale, and takes 3D perspective to the next level, offering a speedy third person perspective with parallax scrolling starfields in the space stages, convincing 3D terrain and obstacles in planet surface and trench stages, and some not so convincing sprite scaling effects everywhere. This isn't the first game to offer this kind of perspective, but no such game before it has been so steadily fast, or had so much stuff going on at once. This is very much an ahead of its time game, which isn't really a good thing.
Planet of Zoom plays like a rail shooter, though your relative freedom of movement depends on the stage type. Space zones control like Star Fox, with free up-down-left-right movement, but your general direction is ever forwards-moving. Trench stages are largely about lateral manuevers to avoid obstacles, with very limited up and down movement. Planet surface stages allow turning in any direction, though there's nothing on these planets to make them worth exploring. All stages allow you to adjust your engine speeds in a range from 1 to 99, but this ability is easily forgotten.
The pseudo-3D graphics are powered by an upgraded version of the PCB that powered Sega's Turbo in 1981, now running at 60fps instead of 30, with 1024 onscreen colors, and a 512 pixel wide resolution. The sprite scaling, unfortunately, is this game's Achilles heel. Unlike Turbo, where objects were always on the road, Zoom's got free-flying objects of every altitude zipping about all over the place, and consequently the game's representation of 3D space makes no sense at all.
Sprites routinely overlap your spaceship when they should be in the distance. Even shadows of the enemy ships, seen during trench and planet surface stages, will overlap your ship. The schizophrenic 3D collision detection allows you to pass right through some obstacles, while others will kill you for being in the same time zone, and judging objects' depths is impossible even in the stages where they cast shadows on the ground. In the above shot, just how big are those space mines anyway? Are they just utterly ginormous, or did I get hit by one in the foreground? In most of the stages you can also forget about shooting enemies accurately; just keep firing and you'll hit what you hit.
Make it to the eighth sector, and you fight a very large but pathetically easy boss, if your brain can handle the nonsensical perspective where your ship and your missiles are drawn behind it despite also being in front of it.
Sega's "VCO Object" hardware, used for the last time in this game, supposedly involves analog sprite scaling circuitry, but that could have fooled me. Sprites do not scale smoothly, but "step" through a small number of discrete sizes. This is extremely obvious in the boss stage, but evident with all sprites except for explosions, which do scale smoothly. I thought at first this might be an emulation issue, but video footage of real hardware shows this is accurate.
Zoom is one of few arcade games of its time that allow continuing from your current location on a game over. Unusually, continuing does not reset your score, making a high score achievement completely pointless. Anyone, with enough quarters, can get a high score no matter how badly they play. It doesn't take very long to flip the score counter either; I managed on round three.
GAB rating: Below Average. Planet of Zoom might be historically important, and its presentation may be unprecedented, but like its hardware predecessor Turbo, it does not play well at all. I'd go as far as to call it mechanically broken, and perhaps saved from a Bad rating only by merit of being a rather easy game, which isn't good, but I'd rather a game be too easy than be hard for the wrong reasons.
The first time I ever heard of “Sega” was in late 1990, when a friend introduced me to the Sega Genesis. Until then, Nintendo had been more or less synonymous with video games in my mind, and the Sega games, with their massively improved graphics and audio, blew my mind. This was, in effect, my first exposure to next-generation gaming.
For a long time, I viewed Sega as a relative newcomer to video games, existing mainly as a competitor to Nintendo. I later learned of the Master System, which I viewed as a predecessor to the Genesis, and understood existed as a response to Nintendo. I became aware of their prolific and often cutting-edge arcade game output in the 80’s, but viewed them as ephemera with less lasting appeal than the Nintendo games I had been playing at home during this time.
Imagine my surprise, when I learned that Sega not only been making video games for years before Nintendo, but had presence in the arcade scene long before Atari existed!
Their earliest arcade games were electromechanical machines, with their first international hit Periscope released in 1966. Based on an earlier Namco electromechanical game, also called Periscope, players launch torpedoes, represented by lines of electric lights, at a convoy of model boats moving through an ocean diorama. This game design survives today as Midway’s Sea Wolf, which is emulated in MAME, but the periscope peripheral can’t be properly emulated, and without it, it isn’t much fun to play.
Photo by SegaRetro
Following the huge success of Pong, Sega was among the first of many companies to copy its design. They released Pong-Tron to Japanese arcades in 1973, making it their first purely electronic video game. Updates later that year included Pong-Tron II, which added a singleplayer challenge mode where the player aims for a field goal in the middle of the left-hand side of the screen, and Hockey TV, which gives each player two paddles (but only one knob per side to control both, unlike Pong Doubles in 1974).
Over the next few years, they would transition away from electromechanical games, phasing them out by 1976. Some of their games released over these years included light gun games such as Balloon Gun and Bullet Mark, and sports games such as Goal Kick and Last Inning. They would also license games from American developers, such as Clean Sweep from Ramtek, for Japanese distribution. Moto-Cross was one of their more important games of this period, a pseudo-3D motorcycle racing game with sprite and background scaling. It was rebranded as Road Race, Man T.T., and most famously, Fonz. All of these games are based on TTL logic, and none are emulated.
In 1977, Sega created the VIC Dual system board, which powers their earliest emulated games. Here, I feel, the history of Sega games truly begins.
Game 116: Depthcharge
Among the first games published by Sega for their platform, Depthcharge was developed by Gremlin, who previously developed Blockade; an important ancestor to the Snake game genre. It’s difficult to know how much Sega was involved in the development of any of these games, but I have to imagine that, being new hardware designed by Sega, they must have had some involvement in creating the earliest games for it.
The concept is like Periscope in reverse – you control a destroyer, and drop proximity charges on convoys of submarines below, which blindly launch surface mines. Atari released a conceptually very similar game the same year, and it’s unknown which came first, but in Atari’s game, you had little control over the destroyer, the subs did not return fire, and it featured actual depth charges, with depth fuzes that had to be set before dropping. Sega’s game gives you direct control, and you simply drop your charges from the port or starboard, which automatically detonate on contact with a sub.
Depthcharge is a very slow-paced game, but doesn’t lack for challenge. You can have a maximum of six charges in the water at once, which is indicated on the UI, and I found I had better results by dropping blankets of charges than I did by trying to estimate how far a sub would travel by the time my charge would drop to its depth. Often, my extra charges would wind up hitting previously unseen subs – generally a good thing, but sometimes it meant that a low-scoring sub ate multiple charges intended for a higher scoring one.
That said, low-scoring subs are worth more than it seems. When the time runs out, you will receive a 30 point bonus for each sub sunk, which effectively means each sub is worth 30 points more than its score tag says. The game grants extended time for scoring 500 points, and the bonus does not count toward this, so you will want to prioritize high-scoring subs accordingly until you’ve reached this threshold.
Getting hit by the floating mines won’t end your game, but will cost you 100 points, and potentially much more. This is because during your destroyer’s sinking animation, you can’t move, and each additional mine that hits during this time will cost you another 100 points. They’re slow and easy to avoid, but hit detection is a bit off and you can sometimes get sunk by one that looks like it should have been a miss, so it’s better to stay far away from them until the explosion animation ends.
The controls aren’t as fancy as Atari’s Destroyer, let alone Periscope and its pedigree; all you get is four pushbuttons, two to move the destroyer, and two to drop charges on either side. The hit detection is kind of wonky too, on both sides. Despite this, I found it more fun than those games. There’s a sense of strategy, balancing the act of keeping charges in the water with having enough reserves to deal with unexpected and unpredictable shallow-sailing subs. The sound design is excellent, and the animations, though few in number, are pretty elaborate considering this is a game from 1977.
GAB rating: Above Average. I like it, but don’t feel too strongly about it.
The majority of VIC Dual games were also developed by Gremlin, until late 1978, when they merged with Sega.
Game 117: Deep Scan
The original version of Deep Scan is not emulated in MAME, but rather MAME emulates a dual-game machine with Deep Scan and Invinco; Sega’s take on Space Invaders (as seems was standard for all Japanese developers of the day). Deep Scan’s sound effects, sadly, are not emulated or sampled.
It’s a remake of Depthcharge, but abandons the penny arcade structure in favor of the now more familiar format where you play until you run out of lives. To ensure that you do run out of lives at some point, the subs get more numerous and more aggressive as they start to get away.
Compared to Depthcharge, Deep Scan plays a bit faster, has more colorful graphics, albeit with less animation. Hit detection now appears to be pixel-accurate, which makes hitting subs much harder. Subs now become destroyed instantly, and do not block multiple charges, which actually discourages cluster bombing, as all but one will probably miss and leave you disarmed until they hit the bottom of the ocean. Once subs start getting away, they’ll become more numerous, and therefore more of them will get away, quickly and exponentially ramping up the difficulty until survival is impossible.
The destruction bonus is now 50 points per sub, but it is no longer automatically gained at the end; you must hit a red submarine to cash in, and taking a hit costs you the entire bonus. The bonus far outstrips points gained normally, but I wasn’t able to achieve it even once.
I don’t especially like the positive feedback loop mechanic, where small errors quickly beget more and more errors until the difficulty reaches critical mass and you’re screwed. Arcade games must have some built-in mechanism for ending the game to keep the quarters flowing, but I’d rather difficulty spikes come from player success than player failure.
GAB rating: Average. It has positive points, but I like it less than Depthcharge, and still don’t feel all that strongly about it.
Game 118: Carnival
A shooting gallery video game, with some gimmicks made possible by the video game format.
The bezel provides some instructions:
There are actually two bonuses – one for hitting all of the pipes, which starts out large, and decreases over time, and another for spelling B-O-N-U-S, which starts out small, and increases with each target you hit (but stops increasing once you hit the B, and is forfeit if you hit any of the letters out of order). In addition, sometimes a yellow frame with bonus bullets or points appears, and can be worth upwards of 500 points or the bullet equivalent if you hit it fast enough, which is as good as a reasonably quick pipe bonus.
Ducks are a real nuisance, and ensure that you can’t just sit in one spot and hit the pipes at leisure. And the B-O-N-U-S letters just seem to be ridiculously easy to hit when unintended, therefore ruining the spelling bonus, but nigh-impossible to hit when you’re just trying to hit them so you can clear the board and finish the round.
GAB rating: Average.
I found this game more annoying than fun. Things are always getting in the way or being a distraction. That’s where the difficulty comes from, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying to play. And while it was nice of them to provide a way to turn off that annoying carnival music, it’s just a time-waster as you have to move all the way to the far right of the screen and shoot the music box to turn it off, and it turns back on again at the beginning of the next round. It’s fun enough that I can rate it Average, but also annoying enough that I can’t rate it more than that.
Game 119: Space Fury
Sega’s take on Asteroids is frantic, chaotic, and colorful, but what might be its most notable feature (apart from allegedly tending to catch on fire!) is the almost alarmingly clear voice synthesis, which emotes and inflects, even if does sound more like a Buzz Lightyear toy than a fearsome alien warlord. Sound emulation isn’t perfect – it’s too fast, too high pitched, and clips at the end of each syllable, but even with these flaws it’s still almost uncanny considering the era.
The game itself feels pretty wack. To finish a wave, you have to destroy all onscreen enemies before reinforcements come, and reinforcements seem to come almost immediately when you start shooting, and hit detection on both sides is unreliable, so you just wind up spraying and praying. Between rounds, you have the option of picking a “dock” to upgrade your weapon capabilities, and woe betide you should you overshoot your target and begin a round without one – you will in effect be doomed, unable to take on the endlessly respawning destroyers with your stock pea shooter.
Each of the three upgrades, when taken, will be unavailable for the next phase, until you have taken each one, at which point they’ll all be available again. The blue upgrade, which allows triple forward-fire, is clearly the best, and therefore best saved for the very difficult wave 4. Once wave 4 is completed, if you have taken all three upgrades, then all three upgrades come back and you can take the blue one again for the fifth round against the “entire fleet,” which as far as I can tell is endless.
GAB rating: Below Average
It’s inoffensive, but the play is marred by weird mechanics, poor hit detection and is otherwise unremarkable.
Game 120: Turbo
This strikes me as a pseudo-3D remake of Monaco GP, an earlier TTL-based Sega game that through some voodoo accomplishes more graphical tricks than should be possible without a CPU.
You’re driving in a very long endurance race against seemingly unlimited opponents, all of them incapable of hitting high gear. Passing them wouldn’t be a problem, except that they drive like they’re drunk and it’s easy to slam into them, again and again, costing precious seconds. Your goal is to pass 40 before time runs out, which grants extended play, but with a nasty surprise; now crashing kills you. Lose two lives, and your extended play (and game) is over.
Like Monaco GP, controls are twitchy and annoying, and crashes just don’t feel avoidable. I played with a keyboard, as I don’t have a steering wheel, but I don’t think a wheel would have helped much; the crashes came less often from my inability to control the car and more often from my inability to predict where all those road hogs were going to be as I tried to not be there when it happened. The constant perspective changes are kind of neat, but the transitions are abrupt and jarring, and another source of unavoidable crashes.
GAB rating: Below Average, for the sum of its annoying play mechanics.
Game 121: Zaxxon
Sega’s earliest whale is, according to Wikipedia, the very first video game to employ an axonometric projection to convey a 3D effect. Mathematically, all isometric projection is axonometric, but not all axonometric projection is isometric. In true isometric perspective, any two lines that would intersect at 90 degrees in the 3D space will intersect at exactly 120 degrees in the 2D projection.
True isometric perspective is rare in video games, and most of the games labeled this way are merely axonometric, but Zaxxon is in fact both.
And this seems like an odd choice for this kind of game, a 3D variant of Scramble. Gauging depth is nearly impossible in a truly isometric perspective, and this is a critical skill in a shmup. To aim at your enemies, or avoid crashing into the terrain, you must know where your ship is relative to these things. An altimeter on display doesn’t help very much, as it doesn’t really indicate anything relative to the terrain.
Fortunately, there are a few tools; your shadow indicates the ship’s X,Y position, and most of your targets are on the ground – pity your only weapon is a laser gun, and you don’t have bombs! The laser gun also helps determine your position relative to the terrain; often you must pass through a small opening in a wall, but firing your laser gun will either impact on the wall or pass through the opening, as will your ship on its unadjusted trajectory.
Once you understand how to deal with brick walls, you’re fairly safe in the air. But, if you spend too much time at a high altitude, a homing missile will fly right at you, so it’s best to stay at low altitude where you can shoot at the ground targets for points and fuel, as you do in Scramble. Fuel drums are wide targets but must be hit close to the center to count, while merely brushing up against them is enough to kill you. High scoring targets are risky; laser guns pointed in your direction don’t shoot often, but if they do, dodging may be impossible. The most valuable targets are the satellite dishes, which are often out of the way and close to dangerous terrain, requiring fancy flying to swoop in, shoot them down and swoop out fast enough to pass through the next obstacle without crashing into it.
But at the midpoint of the loop, forget it. There, you’ll encounter a dogfight against up to 20 fighters in deep space, and without shadows as a visual aid there’s just no good way to align them in your sights. The game cheats on the isometric projection a bit by enlarging or shrinking the sprites as they climb or dive, which doesn’t normally occur during a true isometric projection, but it’s not enough. Your fighter also displays a targeting reticle, complete with an audible ding, when a fighter is in your sights, but they’ll fly out of your sights too quickly for human reaction time. Fortunately, their shots are just as unlikely to hit you as yours are to hit them, so flying around wildly and shooting a lot, hitting whenever you happen to, seems to get pretty good results.
At the end of the loop, you’ll face Lego Robby the Robot, who is indestructible and armed with a single homing missile. Shoot the missile six times and it will explode, and cause the robot to run away, granting you a pathetically small 200 point bonus. It’s not terribly difficult, but you don’t have much time to find the correct altitude and alignment for blasting it out of its launcher, a task aided by your shadow and laser impact points on the robot itself.
Then, the loop repeats on a higher difficulty.
GAB rating: Above Average
Zaxxon has a pretty steep learning curve, but I had fun with it once I learned how to survive for longer than a few seconds. It won’t make my list of all-time greats – it hasn’t got the gameplay depth of Defender and Stargate, or the variety of Scramble and Super Cobra – but it was entertaining enough for a few hours.
Interestingly, despite its importance as an early hit, Sega hasn’t done much to revisit this IP. There aren’t very many 3D shmups out there, but with a polygonal 3D engine, I could see Zaxxon working out as one, and a true 3D perspective would solve some of the issues plaguing the original. In fact, Coleco used a pseudo-3D, behind-the-ship forward-scrolling perspective when they ported Zaxxon to the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. Sega would use the same perspective and also support stereoscopic 3D glasses in their much later Master System port. The next and final Zaxxon game, on Sega’s failed 32X console, did in fact use 3D polygons. Paradoxically, it lacked 3D gameplay, confining the action to a flat isometric-projected plane.
My longtime friend and occasional Data Driven Gamer partner "R" and I took a trip to Laconia, New Hampshire this past weekend, to visit the American Classic Arcade Museum. Located on the second floor of Funspot, a massive amusement center near the scenic shores of Weirs Beach, the museum boasts nearly 200 classic arcade machines, with half again as many circulating in and out of storage and repairs, including most of the arcade games that I played on this blog so far, and quite a few rarities and unusual cabs.
If you’ve read any of my posts on arcade games, or my “what I do and why” page, then you already know I am a big supporter of emulation as a means of preservation and accessibility. I roll my eyes at the usual arguments that it isn’t good enough – that low-resolution graphics only look right on a CRT, that you’re supposed to play video games on the couch with a gamepad, that emulation just doesn’t feel right, etc.
But I would hardly deny there are compelling reasons for preserving the original hardware and making it accessible to the public. Nowhere is this more evident than in the sector of arcade games, and the farther back in time you go, the more evident this is.
On one extreme end, there are electromechanical games and pinball, where the physicality is integral to the experience and can’t be emulated. Pinball simulators exist, but there are limits to how accurately a computer can simulate the laws of physics that they run on, they don’t replicate the feel of a steel ball slamming itself around a spring-loaded table, and to my knowledge there has been no serious attempt to generally simulate electromechanical arcade games, which constitutes a history unto itself.
There are purely electronic arcade games which haven’t been emulated yet. Atari’s early CPU-less games like Pong and Breakout have only been accurately emulated fairly recently, and there are plenty of gaps, such as Computer Space and Tank. Other developers who made their first electronic games in that era include Bally, Sega, Taito, and Nintendo, and their first efforts are mostly or entirely unemulated. There’s always the possibility, as long as there are still functioning boards out there, but this window won’t last forever, and may already be past for some of them.
Then there are arcade games which offered unique controls or cabinet designs that were integral to the gameplay experience. Discs of TRON might play fine with a gamepad in MAME, but without that walk-in cabinet, with the fluorescent lighting, the surround sound, and that bizarre 3D motion disc controller, it’s just not the same experience. These types of games have made a comeback of sorts in the post-Dreamcast era, when arcade games could no longer offer superior graphics to home consoles and computers, but could offer unique peripherals or thrill ride-like experiences.
Even when the gameplay experience translates flawlessly, the cabinets themselves are works of art worth preserving for their own sake. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might play perfectly in MAME or XBLA, and look fine on your big screen HDTV, but that big illustrated control panel with color-coordinated joysticks and buttons is an aesthetic detail that Konami put a lot of effort into making especially for the game, and you’re missing out on it by not playing the game on it. Is it a relatively small aesthetic detail compared to the amount of effort and floorspace needed to maintain and preserve an antique machine that only plays one game? Absolutely.
And so ACAM, a former commercial business turned nonprofit museum, preserves and exhibits games of all of these categories. And it feels very much like a museum with interactive exhibits, more so than an arcade; the air is filled with the noise of vintage arcade games and their recognizable sounds, but the patrons, mostly GenX’ers, their kids, and a few of ages in between, are quiet and reserved, a far cry from the crowded and noisy scene downstairs filled with kid-pleasing redemption ticket games, which octogenarian founder Bob Lawton confirmed is what brings in the real money. I can only imagine how incapable the multi-hundred machines at ACAM are of turning a profit; it’s no secret that even commercial arcades have been struggling for decades. $20 bought us 125 tokens, which lasted a pretty long time as the machines mostly only cost one token per game. I can’t imagine the arcade games can even pay for their own electricity at that rate, let alone the maintenance – quite a few of the games on the floor were out of order, and many others had badly functioning controls.
The full experience of visiting the museum proved far more interesting than the sum experience of playing the games in it, which individually didn’t offer a better gameplay experience than emulation could, for the most part. Certainly there’s an intangible aspect that emulation can’t cover; the ambience, the feeling of walking to machine to machine, seeing the cabinet designs and artwork in person, the curation and arrangement, etc. Even disregarding custom controls and cabinets, having 200 dedicated machines holds a romantic appeal that a single setup with access to thousands of ROMs just doesn’t offer; hence we have frontends like 3D Arcade and New Retro Arcade. But as for individual game experiences, only a fraction left me thinking “that wouldn’t be the same on my MAME setup.” My reaction to playing ACAM’s famous Donkey Kong machine was more like “yep, that’s Donkey Kong alright.”
I’m going to discuss the games that stood out to me, but focus on tangible aspects that DID leave me thinking “yeah, that wouldn’t be the same on my MAME setup.” I won’t be delving very deep into gameplay on any of them; with so many games available, I didn’t spend more than a few minutes with any given game. The trip was absolutely worth it, and I’ll be going back some time, but I couldn’t do the comprehensive experience justice with words. Think of the rest of this post as not being about ACAM, but about the game-specific experiences that may be missed by settling for emulation, as we often must.
Computer Space
Computer Space was one of the major reasons I wanted to go to ACAM in the first place. It’s a seminal game that led to the founding of Atari, it’s rare compared to Pong, and it is not emulated. “R” held the camera while I played. Appropriately, this was one of the first machines I saw in the museum, very near the entrance, and was the first that I played.
I had played Ironic Computer Space Simulator, a remake of sorts running on a PDP-1 emulator, and discussed it in some detail as the second entry on Data Driven Gamer. Most of my observations here concern differences between that and the real thing.
The controls, which look really cool in the dark, consist of four buttons, not arranged very ergonomically, and are difficult to press, which may be due to the machine’s age. They move easily enough, but unless you push them right in the center and directly down, they’ll fail to make contact and won’t register.
The playfield is vertically larger than the screen. This makes gameplay confusing when you or the UFOs are near the top or bottom; anything close to those edges gets cut off from view.
Like in the simulator, you can only fire one missile at a time. Unlike the simulator, the missile does not disappear when it hits a UFO, which means you always have to wait for it to reach its maximum distance before firing the next. All too often I would score a hit, and then be unable to fire a follow-up shot to the next UFO when I wanted to. The missile range seems to be shorter too, and a lack of trails makes it hard to spot.
Scoring more than 9 points in the allotted time wasn’t hard at all, but the score counter glitches out when you do.
Hyperspace mode doesn’t seem to work as it should. Supposedly, if time runs out when you are ahead in score, you’re awarded bonus time and the screen colors invert during this period. I had no trouble meeting this requirement, but instead of seeing inverted colors, the screen’s white pixels just became finer and the score/time counter got rendered in a funny and illegible way.
Pong
We had played Pong on DICE, but struggled with the controls. Would a real machine be better?
This machine was in rough shape. The playfield was off-center, making the left side of it partially obscured by overscan. The net and the right paddle were rendered askew, seemingly distorted by the movement of the left paddle. The top and bottom portions of the screen were once again cut off, hiding the positions of the ball and paddles as they got close to the edges. And the screen was displaying white-on-light-grey rather than white-on-black. There’s video footage of Pong in action at ACAM, and it didn’t look like this, so this may just need some recalibration. But the day we played it, Pong wasn’t very playable.
Pong Doubles
I never played Pong Doubles before, but this is like Pong, except with four dials, which control four paddles; two per side of the screen. A “doubles” game costs two coins, but a single coin will begin a standard two-player game. So, just like Pong, right?
The machine functioned better than Pong, but there was one big problem; the paddles don’t move all the way up or down! Angled shots could be impossible to hit back, and often were.
At first I thought this might be a machine calibration issue, but later in the week I tried it in MAME, and the result was the same; the paddles don’t move all the way up and down. I imagine this is a deliberate balancing design for the doubles mode; you might not be able to hit an angled shot with your paddle, but your partner can. But in the standard singles mode, this is just unfair.
Tank
Another unemulated Atari game! This two-player cocktail cabinet was one of the first video games purchased by Funspot, and was located at the D.A. Long Tavern, where ACAM’s founder-owner Bob Lawton was chatting with the guests and his granddaughter served beer.
A predecessor to Combat, Tank has some intricacies not found in the VCS game. Most obviously, the controls are more flexible and immersive, with a pair of two-way joysticks, each controlling one of the tank’s treads. The maze is larger and more interesting than either VCS maze, with an open region in the middle full of mines. It also has some pretty realistic sounding tank engine noises and explosion sounds.
Unfortunately, it’s not that much fun to play. The big maze takes forever to traverse to reach your opponent, and like the VCS game, there’s not much strategy. Whoever gets hit first gets stunned, giving the other player a good opportunity to line up another shot and hit them again and again until the machine warps them through a wall to another random part of the maze. The VCS game mixed things up with a multitude of gameplay modes, the most interesting of them being the Tank-Pong variants, which was ultimately a better addition than any of the arcade game's bells and whistles.
Gun Fight
This features a unique control panel design with two joysticks; an 8-way digital stick for moving the cowboy, and a two-way analog stick that looks like a pistol grip for aiming the gun up or down, and a trigger underneath for firing.
Unfortunately, the second joystick would not register any movement except “down,” limiting that player’s mobility quite a bit.
This cabinet did not produce Marche funèbre on each successful kill.
Indy 4
This was the centerpiece of ACAM’s collection.
Photo by Funspotnh
It’s been emulated, and I covered this in my DICE post, but keyboards are a poor substitute for steering wheels. Steering on this machine just felt really good. On the downside, using the brakes while standing up is tricky, especially if you're trying to hit both the brakes and gas at the same time, so the drifting technique that I discovered playing in DICE doesn’t work too well unless you've got very large and nimble feet. We didn’t really use the brakes at all, just letting up on the gas when needing to take hairpin turns.
LeMans
I didn’t play this one, and I wish I did, because it isn’t emulated, and is a descendant of Gran Trak 10, another landmark unemulated game. Maybe next time!
Death Race
A rarity, with only 500 cabinets ever produced. This machine was near the entrance, right next to the Computer Space machine. Player 1’s steering wheel didn’t work right, so the only way to play was to insert two coins and play alone on the right wheel. I held the camera while “R” played.
This was one of the more fun games of the TTL era! It’s not so much a race as a macabre twist on a destruction derby – a bit like Atari’s Crash ‘N Score from a year earlier. Scoring kills becomes more difficult over time as the playfield is dotted with gravestone obstacles which impede you, but not your victims. “R” showed an uncharacteristically sadistic glee, cooing “you can’t escape death!” as he ran the stick figures over in his motored hearse.
It’s a bit hard to imagine that this bloodless carnage passed for controversial even back in the day. The mechanical dying screams are downright bloodcurdling, though, and not quite done justice by the recording. The mismatch between the realism of the sound effects and graphics is a bit disturbingly surreal too. The machine was placed, appropriately enough, to Exidy’s other game about murdering helpless people, the far more gruesome, and yet somehow much less controversial Chiller.
Sea Wolf
Sea Wolf’s graphics and gameplay are emulated in MAME just fine, but the real fun is the periscope, which serves as your torpedo sight and rotates to aim. A glowing red LED display seen through the periscope shows your torpedo status. This setup can’t be reproduced by emulation, and without it, the game’s nothing to write home about.
Triple Hunt
A pretty impressive looking display, more of a diorama than a computer monitor. Unfortunately, this was out of order. But if it worked, then a pixelated video bear would be projected into the 3D scene of trees and foliage, which you’d try to shoot at with a realistic looking rifle prop.
Also on display was a nonfunctional, cordoned-off electromechanical game from the 40’s called Shoot the Bear, which featured a mechanical bear that would walk through the forest diorama, with a photoreceptor on its side for you to shoot at with a light gun.
Destroyer
Sort of a counterpart to Sea Wolf, having you drop depth charges on submarines from a destroyer. Like Sea Wolf, the fun is in the unique controls, though they’re not nearly as fancy as Sea Wolf’s periscope.
Photo by iCollector
The lever controls your destroyer’s speed, and the wheel is rotated to adjust the depth at which your charges explode.
The monitor has a multi-layer cardboard art inserts, giving it a 3D diorama feel that emulation doesn’t replicate.
Monaco GP
By far the most technically impressive TTL-based arcade game that MAME doesn’t emulate. Full color graphics, realistic sounds, a headlight effect when you drive into tunnels, and it just boggles my mind that the CPU-less technology that produced Pong could produce this. ACAM had a deluxe sit-down model with score and sound displayed on a fancy looking dedicated LED panel.
Asteroids
MAME plays this fine from a gameplay perspective, but this was my first time seeing it on a real vector monitor. MAME gets the look all wrong, and I now know I’ve been living a lie.
What really blows me away here isn’t the smoothness of the vectors, but the brightness effect. Those shots, which look like moving dots in MAME, look like brightly glowing photon torpedoes on a real vector monitor. The video doesn’t do it justice, and I doubt any flat panel or raster display could truly reproduce the effect. But they could certainly do a better job of approximating it. You’re probably watching this recording on a flat panel, and I’m sure you can tell from it that the bullets should be much brighter than the asteroids. Emulation just draws everything at uniform brightness, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t do better than that.
Video Pinball
Unfortunately this machine wasn’t playable, because the plunger didn’t do anything. But the cabinet was interesting to look at. I could see that there was a 3D foam pinball table at the top of the cabinet, and the image reflected off a mirror below it, giving the virtual pinball table a 3D physical look to it, and the video ball and flippers were projected onto the mirror image from below.
Bandido
A re-release of Nintendo’s early milestone game Sheriff.
There’s an 8-way joystick for moving, and a dial for aiming the gun. But the joystick is STIFF. Pushing it takes some effort – this would NOT be evident when playing in an emulator, and when you do push it, there’s a noticeable delay before the sheriff actually does anything, though that would be evident when emulating.
Hercules
I’m not really a pinball fan. I’ve always found the tables kind of samey, with little to distinguish one from another but the artwork and gimmicks. I never last long enough to really appreciate gameplay flow, and the gimmicks only last for so many plays before I’ve seen them all. The Addams Family is my favorite, but it still holds less lasting value and playability than most of the Atari VCS games I’ve played so far.
ACAM’s got a row of pinball tables, with a few electromechanical tables like Old Chicago and Sky Jump, but most are well known solid state machines, like White Water, Black Knight, Black Knight 2000, Joker Poker, and three of Atari’s six normal-sized pinball machines.
But then there's Atari's other pinball machine, not on the ACAM floor, but positioned right outside of it near the entrance. This is the one known for its gimmick and not much else; Atari’s Hercules.
The gimmick, of course, is the mammoth size, with jumbo pinballs to match it. Note the comparative size of the vintage pinball table to its left, which is inoperable and for display purposes only.
Herc's got a very slow feel compared to most pinball tables. Ironically, the flippers feel weak, unable to deliver the force needed to send the ball all the way up the table. That’s about all there is to make the table stand out, really.
Missile Command
My MAME setup has a trackball, but I wanted to see if an authentic cabinet would feel any different.
In this case it does, but not in a good way. Spinning it to the left didn’t so much make the reticle move to the left as jitter around the screen in a somewhat leftward direction. I didn’t last terribly long here.
Wizard of Wor
I’ll be playing this game in more depth later on, but we played a coop game on real hardware while we were here. The biggest thing that emulation doesn’t replicate is the joystick, which is pressure sensitive. Tap it only slightly, and your worrior turns to face that direction but doesn’t move. MAME instead offers an additional button which can be held to prevent movement, which is fine for gameplay purposes but isn’t an authentic emulation.
Neither of us could make out what the Wizard was babbling on about during gameplay, his synthetic voice drowned out by the game’s music, and the noise of the arcade games on the floor. The starfield in the background had a shimmering look to it that MAME doesn’t quite match, but I don’t know if this is deliberate, or if this is due to wear and tear on the starfield circuits.
Battlezone
Another Atari game with a gimmicky cabinet and controls. You look at the monitor through a gunner’s sight, which helps you line up your shots and provides immersion (and a diegetic HUD which convincingly guises itself part of the tank sight), and the controls are similar to Tank’s, with a two-way joystick controlling each tread. Unfortunately, the left joystick did not register in the down position, making it impossible to reverse or pivot left. The vector graphics were smoother than what MAME offers, with none of the blocky vertices or aliasing artifacts present, but didn’t blow me away as Asteroids did.
Warlords
In an effect similar to Video Pinball, the castles are 3D objects projected onto the mirrored screen and overlaid with video. It’s even more striking, as they had more depth than a pool table. MAME sort of reproduces this with artwork files, but they’re only flat images and it’s not the same.
Mouse Trap
The sound effects were remarkably realistic for a 1981 game. I didn’t remember ever hearing them before in MAME. I did replay in MAME later, and the sounds were there (is this a thing that got added recently?), but they didn’t sound quite as clear as they sounded on the real thing.
Tunnel Hunt
It’s not a particularly good game by any means – all you do is shoot at unlicensed TIE Fighters, using an analog joystick to move crosshairs, while trippy rectangles in the background give the sensation of floating through a tunnel. But the unique cabinet makes this even more immersive than Sea Wolf and Battlezone.
Photo by centuri.net
The blinders keep sound and light out of your peripheral, and you need to lean forward into the alcove to see the angled screen. A magnifying lens on the cabinet causes the display to fill your field vision, sort of like a prototype for virtual reality. The effect is really immersive, and not just a little bit dizzying.
Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace, Cliff Hanger, Us vs. Them
This set of laserdisc games was arranged in a neat row. Sadly, the machines have been gutted and replaced with computers running Daphne (I’m assuming), as the laserdisc players stopped working months after the machines arrived. Or maybe it’s not so sad; I think you may be hard pressed to tell the difference. The LED screens used for displaying scores still work, etc.
One difference in Space Ace that was evident to me is that although the control panel has buttons for selecting a difficulty, they don’t do anything. And I’m fine with that; the default ROM used by Daphne disables them on purpose because the difficulty switch was badly implemented in the first place. All it would do is narrow the timing window for your inputs, causing some of them to nonsensically require input before you can even see what Dexter is supposed to be reacting to. If an arcade operator was so inclined, Daphne could be configured to use the original ROMs where the difficulty selection works as intended.
I never played Cliff Hanger or Us vs. Them before. Cliff Hanger is hot garbage, and I say this having enjoyed Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. Those games aren’t to everyone’s taste nowadays, but they worked because the animation was designed to be played, not watched. The scenes are composed so that danger approaches in orthogonal directions, possible directions to move are likewise easily mapped to the directions on the joystick, and timed so that you know when you are expected to make a move. Cliff Hanger’s video is sourced from the feature film Castle of Cagliostro, which wasn’t animated with any of these considerations, and the timing and inputs needed to pass a scene are pure trial and error.
The death animations, which in Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace were lovingly animated to show you how Dirk or Dexter bought it at the moment where you were supposed to do something, are absent, and in their place awkwardly choppy transitions. For instance, when Lupin (sorry, Cliff) is driving a getaway car and I failed to press a direction before the car was supposed to make a turn, it did not show the car drive off the cliff, as no such scene had been animated for the film. Instead the screen turned blue and declared “YOU BLEW IT!!” and then showed a closeup of a generic explosion.
Us vs. Them has a different approach. It’s a rather bad and forgettable 2D sprite-based shoot’em up with a video backdrop showing the terrain you’re supposed to be flying over, sometimes switching back and forth between chase perspective and overhead perspective. The sprites do NOT blend well with the video backdrops, especially not during the chase cam perspective scenes, where the angles and positions of everything just looks entirely wrong. On the plus side, the video at least looks nice, with non-interactive cut-scenes that are pretty well produced, and occasionally quite funny, such as a silly parody of American Gothic.
Food Fight
An arcade game with a joystick that looks like a standard 8-way stick, but in fact it recognizes 49 different positions. MAME just expects you to use an analog joystick and automatically maps various ranges to the 49 different positions.
I played this to see if it felt any different from using an analog joystick. Other than the bat-shaped grip, it doesn’t.
Star Wars
ACAM has two Star Wars machines, an upright cabinet and a deluxe sit-down model. Both use an unusual yoke controller, which gives a different feel from an analog thumbstick without really doing anything that the thumbstick can’t do. Oddly, the controller has four fire buttons, but they all do the same thing. Kind of a missed opportunity, as the X-Wing has four laser cannons ingame, but they just cycle regardless of which buttons you press.
Tapper
This machine was placed, appropriately enough, in the tavern instead of the main ACAM floor. It’s the Budweiser model, not the tamer and more widely distributed Root Beer Tapper, and has beer taps on the control panel instead of buttons. A gimmicky detail to be sure, but one that ensures emulation isn’t quite the same.
Wacko
This cabinet stands out because it and the control panel are askew. Other than that, there’s nothing special about the game or its controls. Playing it felt about the same as playing it on my own MAME setup with a trackball and joystick, only with the slight annoyance of a non-level control panel.
Crossbow, Cheyenne, Chiller
This trio of Exidy shooters was near the entrance, right next to the Death Race and Spacewar machines. Cheyenne was out of order, but Crossbow and Chiller worked perfectly, a big surprise to me as we had terrible luck with light gun games. Crossbow just feels murderously hard; aiming is difficult, and your heroes kick the bucket in the blink of an eye if you don’t hit the tiny projectiles and monsters as soon as they appear on screen. Chiller on the other hand just feels murderous, with you blasting the flesh off naked and defenseless victims chained up in a torture chamber for no reason except the game asks you to.
Punch-Out!!
The control panel is kind of interesting because the “knock-out” button is positioned far away from the normal buttons used to deliver standard punches, and takes more than normal force to press. Once the announcer shouts “put him away!,” you need to really reach over and smack that button. Compare to the emulated experience, where the knock-out punch is just another button on your controller.
Star Trek
It seems there’s just no escaping Star Trek games for me. Gameplay does seem to be inspired by the mainframe title, but it’s in realtime, and there’s no exploration aspect, you just warp from sector to sector clearing each of enemy warships while defending the space stations. It’s a deluxe sit-down cabinet with a captain’s seat that looks like it came out of a TV set, a weighted spinner on its left arm for steering the ship, and an array of pushbutton controls on the other for activating phasers, torpedoes, engine, and warp drives.
Marble Madness
Singleplayer mode plays fine on MAME with my trackball, and feels about the same. But Marble Madness was meant to be played with two simultaneous players, and the only right way to do that is to have a control panel with two trackballs (and I don’t), or play on a real arcade machine.
720°
Notable for its odd controller, a 360-degree joystick that only moves in a circular motion, and is incapable of returning to the center. MAME just treats it like a generic paddle controller, which is probably accurate electronically but doesn’t reflect how it feels to use the thing.
Flower
I’d never heard of this game, and according to Funspot’s website only two were ever made. But it’s nothing special to play, just another vertical shoot’em up with a weird floral theme as menacing flowers in space drop lethal petals on your space ship. MAME emulates it, and there’s nothing special about the cabinet or controls to make this game worth the trip for any reason except the novelty of playing the real thing.
Night Stocker
This was actually the first arcade game we saw, as it was placed right at Funspot’s entrance, next to a display case detailing the history of Bally Sente, with a bunch of placards, a golf control panel, and an exposed cartridge PCB. The game is controlled with a steering wheel and light gun, anticipating Namco’s Lucky & Wild by several years. We played a round, with “R” at the wheel and me shooting. Unfortunately, the light gun did not work at all, so we didn’t last too long.
Operation Wolf
This game was actually only recently emulated correctly in MAME. For years, a copy protection chip was unemulated, and key ingame moments did not trigger correctly. That’s changed by now, though, but even accurate emulation is no substitute for holding a big toy Uzi in your hands.
Operation Wolf is infamously hard, and I couldn’t beat the first stage. It’s possible that the gun wasn’t calibrated correctly, and it’s possible my aim was just that bad. Maybe both. I didn’t really last long enough to get a chance to look into it.
After Burner
The deluxe sit-down cabinet is possibly the epitome of an unemulatable game. The entire cabinet shakes, tilts, and pivots as your fighter does, and your controls are a heavy duty yoke and throttle. But I have no idea how you’re supposed to play this game effectively. Every time I try, whether using MAME or not, I keep getting shot down and I can’t even see what hit me, or figure out how to prevent that from happening. It also didn’t help that the missile button was broken and didn’t do anything.
S.T.U.N. Runner
Another sit-down cabinet, or more accurately, a sit-on cabinet, and it has a sense of immediate speed that you don’t get from sitting on a normal couch or chair. The control device is a yoke, the same one used by Star Wars, but it didn’t work very well for steering left and right, and may have been broken. Tilting it up and down for aiming your guns worked pretty well, and it had a more limited vertical range than the yoke in Star Wars, corresponding exactly to the range that the guns can be aimed.
It may seem like I’m being harsh on ACAM, or perhaps on arcade games in general. The place deserves to be gushed over, but I'm not very good at gushing, nor is that especially interesting to me. There's plenty of gushy reviews of Funspot at Yelp, if you would like to see articulate praise of the place and experience as a whole. And this is far from a comprehensive list of games I played; I left out the several dozen joystick-and-CRT machines that I played, because on an individual game-to-game basis, there was nothing novel about them to discuss. Most of these games play the same at home as they do at ACAM. And yet, being there at ACAM and playing these games in that setting was just as much an integral part of the experience as playing any of the most unique and irreproducable games
From a perspective of gameplay experience in the individual games, maybe I’m not even being harsh enough. None of the games I played and deemed troublesome to emulate have a great deal of substance to them. A single CRPG from the early 80’s has more substance than a dozen novelty arcade cabinets, and it would take much less effort to preserve and distribute a thousand such CRPGs than it would take to preserve and exhibit a single Atari sit-down game. It seems like the more challenging it is to preserve a video game, the less substance you actually preserve by doing so. But maybe that’s for the best. Imagine a bizarro-world where cabinets of Death Race, After Burner, and every other rare or deluxe sit-down game are available everywhere and can be delivered to your home and somehow don’t take up any space. And in the same world, Ultima IV can only be played by taking a trip to a museum that preserves the last remaining Apple II computers which run games off of the last floppy disks, and the keyboards don’t always work right. I think that would be a very poor trade!
But although I’m grateful that so much substantial gaming history is preserved and made trivially accessible through emulation, I’m also grateful that places like ACAM exist to preserve the side of gaming history that’s not so easily preserved. In one day, I had a chance to have many gaming experiences that can’t be had any other way, and would certainly be resigned to the dustbin of history were it up to purely commercial interests. And I’ll be back; there’s plenty I didn’t see, either from lack of time, energy, or because they were out of circulation that day. These games won’t be around forever; they rely on custom parts that haven’t been manufactured in decades, and must be cannibalized from other machines when repairs are needed. Once these parts run out, these experiences will be lost forever. Or perhaps they’ll retrofit these machines with emulators someday, much like they did with the laserdisc machines, and replace other failing parts with approximate 3D-printed substitutes. Or perhaps someday Funspot itself will fail as a business, and be forced to liquidate its collection. I don’t know, but for now it’s there, and tirelessly fulfilling its mission to collect, curate, and preserve the history of classic coin-op games.
We’ll be going back to the regular schedule of whale-watching soon enough, starting with a 1980 port that achieved whale status independently of the arcade game it was ported from.
