Why did Taito think we would want to play a game about elevators?
Elevators are the opposite of action. The term elevator music is used as a metaphor for anything boring and uninteresting. Sales
performance, nonetheless, proved they were right.
You
play Agent Otto, a guy who looks like a silver fox in the title screen
but an ordinary shlub ingame, which would be perfect for a secret agent,
but unfortunately for him, everywhere he goes is infested with
fedora-wearing counter-agents who want to kill him. Your mission is to
infiltrate a 30-story tower by entering from the roof, descend to the
basement, stealing all of the intelligence along the way, all of it kept
in rooms marked with red doors, and escape in the getaway car parked in
the basement's garage.
Your main method of descent is an overly
complicated network of ridiculously unsafe elevators. Some floors have
stairs, but for the most part you'll be riding lifts down the shafts.
Counter-agents will shoot you on sight, but their bullets can be easily
ducked under, or somewhat less easily jumped over, and they aren't so
good at evading your return fire. In later levels they'll learn how to
go prone, which will evade even your crouching shots, but eventually
they'll stand up, or you can shoot them while descending. Trying to
guess whether they'll aim low or high can be a problem sometimes; most
of the time it's high, but you can't easily jump from a crouching
position. You also can't crouch on the elevators, but you can change
direction as they shoot at you.
An oft-noted tactic is shooting
the lights out, but I'm not really sure what this accomplishes. You'll
still get shot at in the dark.
I cleared three buildings and scored 32,550 points before getting bored.
GAB rating: Above Average. Elevator Action is a
bit slow paced, repetitive, and primitive looking, but quite playable
and there's a bit more depth here than it seems. There's just not much
longevity.
My first thought playing this game was, wow this guy does not inspire confidence as a soldier. He walks like Charlie Chaplin, doesn't know how to hold a gun properly, doesn't fasten his helmet straps, and makes this weird, annoying ringing sound as he walks, like he's got bells strapped to his legs.
My second thought was, change the controls! The original arcade game has, to the left of the movement joystick, a rotating dial with 8 positions to aim your gun, just like Nintendo's Sheriff, and like Ikari Warriors would a few years later. MAME emulates this as a second 8-way joystick, which is fine, except this is mapped as the left joystick for reasons I can't understand.
I was never good at games like this - namely Ikari Warriors and Commando. I don't know if these games are generally considered to be significantly harder than average, or if it's just that this style doesn't click well with me, but I always found myself struggling to gain ground against large groups of enemies with the exact same abilities as myself, and taking it slow just meant they'd spawn behind me. This was my experience with Front Line as well. Playing aggressively seemed to work better than advancing with caution, but it's still perilous. I did realize at some point that your gun has a longer range than the enemies', and success is really dependent on that. You have unlimited grenades as well, but they're slow and unreliable against foot soldiers, and tossing one over a barrier at a group is just as likely to kill them all as it is to explode harmlessly as they shuffle a few pixels outside its tiny blast radius, wasting precious time as more of them close in behind you.
To my surprise, the first time I made it past the initial area and entered the Tank Zone, I found things much, much easier, and made it all the way to the end of the stage on my first try. The gameplay gets speedier, but the enemy tanks just seem to be more predictable than soldiers. Getting into a tank protects you from a hit, but even on foot, I found dodging shots and countering with grenades to be easier than fighting foot soldiers. The large tank is basically impervious to machine gun fire - just get out when it starts to smoke, and get right back in. The final turret at the end can't move and only fires in eight directions like the other tanks, making it a cinch to bait it into firing a missed shot, and then knocking it out with a grenade as it cools down.
My best attempt reached level 3 and scored 22,000 points, but the recording crapped out early on level 2 and I didn't feel much incentive to try again. Point values are doubled on the second round and tripled on the third - I don't know if this gets capped later on. You get a maximum of 5 lives; three to start, and another two for reaching 10,000 and 15,000 points.
GAB rating: Average. Sorry if this post feels phoned in, but I just don't have strong feelings about this game, and can't think about much to say of it. I guess it plays okay, albeit with a weird difficulty curve. The graphics are kind of ugly and the sound is torturous, though that may just be emulation - a video of real hardware on Youtube suggests convincing gunshot and explosion sounds, at the very least.
I have to assume that Bo Derek’s Razzie-winning Tarzan the Ape Man, released in 1981, was a big influence on this game, at the very least by revitalizing interest in the character. Jungle King isn’t a Tarzan knock-off – he is Tarzan, right down to bellowing Johnny Weissmuller’s renowned yell in low fidelity at the start of every game. It’s little surprise that Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. sued and forced Taito to rebrand later releases as Jungle Hunt, with seriously toned-down iconography.
Perhaps Pitfall! was influenced in a similar manner to a lesser extent – the swinging on vines through the jungle is at the very least an unmistakable homage, and even has a Weissmulleresque leitmotif. Raiders of the Lost Ark seems to have been a greater influence, though, with the South American setting and treasure hunting. Jungle King, in turn, features a stage with boulders rolling down a hill (albeit with you running up the hill), while Pitfall! merely features non-lethal rolling logs. The two games were released so close together than I think it unlikely one had any influence on the other, but the thematic similarities are strong indeed. Even the vine-swinging animations look nearly identical.
Jungle King is still, as far as I can tell, an original gameplay concept. There are four looping stages that can loosely be categorized as “platformer” gameplay, but they all play quite different from each other, and aren’t quite like anything earlier that I’ve seen either. The design seems to anticipate a certain fashion of later console platformers, where stages would introduce new themes and gameplay concepts throughout the playthrough, but doesn’t commit to a common set of controls or mechanics as they often would.
Stage 1 involves jumping from vine to swinging vine, and is easy if you’re patient. The vines have varying lengths and swinging speeds, and may swing back and forth several times before getting close enough to make a good jump. Annoyingly, you can’t climb down to increase your trajectory – all you can do is hit the jump button at the right time. You will slip and fall if you wait too long, which renders the ingame timer kind of pointless. Subsequent loops add monkeys to some vines, which climb up and down and will knock you off if you touch them.
Next, your hair and loincloth change color as you dive into crocodile-infested waters. Stabbing them isn’t too difficult - the hitbox seems to extend a bit above your sprite, so it’s easiest to stab them from below. It’s easy to forget you need to breathe, so surface whenever it’s safe, so that you don’t suddenly hear the low oxygen alert when you’re caught between an undertow and a deadly alligator. Later rounds make the crocodiles move around faster, making it sometimes better to avoid them than to try to stab them.
More palette shenanigans as you ascend a hill and jump over rolling boulders. It’s all about timing your jumps to avoid the rocks, though you can also move left and right, which isn’t really needed during the first loop. Bigger boulders bounce higher and are easily ran underneath. You can also duck, which for some physics-defying reason causes the rocks to roll down the hill faster, and is handy for dodging the large boulders in later rounds.
Finally, everything about the player sprite’s palette changes as you encounter some cannibals who move back and forth, and must jump over them at just the right time to not only avoid touching them, but when you jump over the second you have to touch your girlfriend, precariously suspended and being raised and lowered like a yo-yo over a boiling cauldron. If she is too high up when you jump over the second cannibal, you’ll miss her and land in the cauldron instead. Everything moves in a fixed pattern, so if you’ve figured out the timing to clear this once, it will work on each new playthrough. Later rounds have different patterns.
Succeed, and you get an innocent peck on the cheek, and a replay with much more difficult gameplay.
GAB rating: Below Average. Jungle King is, unfortunately, kind of boring. Unusually, there’s no randomness at all, which is a good thing for speedrunners, but a bad thing when the stage-to-stage gameplay is so basic. In three of the four stages, there is no interaction with the game world whatsoever – in fact they are based entirely around waiting for an opportune time to jump, which is performed with a single button press and success or failure is determined entirely on whether you jumped at a good time or not. This is hardly engaging gameplay. And what’s with the constant Jungle King palette switching?
I understand the rules fine. There is a space on the screen occupied by a psychedelic entity called the Qix, which flutters about its territory. You control a cursor that can freely move around the perimeter of the Qix’s territory, and can enter the space to draw lines and form shapes, but if the Qix touches any of your lines while you’re still drawing, it kills you. Once you return to the perimeter, then you claim any space that your lines fenced in, and it becomes a barrier to the Qix and the lines you drew become part of your perimeter. There are also multiple enemies called Sparx which circumference the perimeter, forcing you every now and then to draw or die. Two buttons are used for drawing lines, one makes you move you fast, one makes you move slow, and any shapes drawn only with slow lines will be highlighted red and worth double points.
Your goal, on the first two levels, is to claim 75% or more of the Qix’s territory, which ends the level. Big bonus points are awarded for each percent beyond that, but the last big chunk has to be claimed in one motion. On level 3 onward, you have to deal with two Qix, and can win the normal way, or you can win by separating them into two compartments and double your score, but if you don’t claim much territory then you won’t get many points, and doubling a small score is still a small score.
I even understand some strategy, in theory. Claiming the Qix’s territory chunk-by-chunk until you meet the winning threshold is a fool’s gambit. The more territory you claim, the less room you have to maneuver, and the less distance the Sparx have to travel in order to reach you. Furthermore, it’s risky to claim chunks from the Qix’s turf, so you’ll want to move fast to minimize your risk, but if you grab big chunks with fast movement, you lose out on points. It’s much better to draw long, narrow rectangles to ensnare the Qix into a small zone with a small exit, get it stuck, and then seal off its exit with the slow draw to score a huge red zone worth loads of points.
But in practice, I just don’t get it. To trap the Qix into a small enough area to win the level, you eventually have to encroach into its territory to box it in, and I just don’t see a better way to do this than to repeatedly move into its territory while the Qix is moving away from you, draw a small box inwards to partition the space further, and just hope the Qix doesn’t slam into you while you do this. Whenever I tried to build elaborate mazes, as Qix strategy guides suggest, it would just twirl around in its comfort zone, never quite moving into any of the passageway traps I constructed. And the longer I spent on a level, the harder it got to keep avoiding the Sparx.
My best attempt beat two levels with a good bonus, split the Qix in the third level with a mediocre score, and then sealed in the Qix in level 4 together for a good area bonus at a 2x multiplier but with no additional multiplier. Then I failed on the fifth level. This was one of many, many attempts, and whenever I beat a level with a good score, it didn’t feel like I had formulated a good strategy, but rather it felt like the Qix just happened to be cooperative.
Starting off the year 1980 is the Atari VCS version of Space Invaders. I’ve already done the original arcade version by Taito, but the Atari conversion qualifies as a whale of its own.
Like so many other Atari games, there are several gameplay modes. This time, it’s an incredible 112.
Of course, it’s another one of those situations where Atari just counted every possible combination of gameplay options as a separate “game mode.” There are essentially seven base game types (and four of them sound pretty stupid to me), and four game rules which can be turned on or off for 16 possible combinations, giving 112 total combinations of game rules and game types.
I did begin to try the 16 singleplayer variants by myself.
Mode 1
It’s Space Invaders, alright, just uglier. There are some tangible differences; the invaders only shoot one kind of projectile, and your own fire just passes through it, rather than negating or being blocked by it. And there are three shields instead of four. And the shields instantly vanish once the invaders descent far enough. The laser base can’t quite move all the way to the edges of the playfield, so there’s only a brief opportunity to shoot down the outer invader columns, which you'll need to take when you can.
Mode 1 was pretty easy, certainly easier than the arcade game. Starting in round five, the invaders start so low that you don’t get any shields. And from round six on, they begin one descent away from landing. At this point, you absolutely must eliminate the bottom row ASAP, which can be done pretty quickly albeit dangerously if you focus on the bottom row or two and keep moving from column to column. If an invader decides to shoot while you’re under it, then you’ll probably have no time to react and will just die. Once you have some breathing room, you can focus on eliminating the columns from the outside-in to slow down their descent.
I scored 10,000+ points pretty easily here, flipping the score counter. The game doesn’t change after round six, so theoretically I could play forever.
Mode 2: Moving shields
The shields move back and forth, which mainly just causes them to get in your way more, especially when it comes to shooting the UFOs. This is a moot on round four onward, because at this point you lose the shields anyway. It really just means it will take longer to flip the score, since the prime opportunity to score points by shooting UFOs is in the earlier rounds.
Modes 3-4: Zigzagging bombs
The invaders’ projectiles move left and right randomly as they descend. This mainly slows you down by forcing extra precaution, and kills you more often when you aren’t. It’s hard to predict where the projectiles will land, forcing you to stay farther away from them, or risk getting caught off-guard and blown up.
Space Invaders actually felt like a cover shooter in these modes. Normal shots had been easy enough to weave through, and it actually felt like a relief when the invaders got close enough to disable the shields, because they were no longer in my way. The zigzagging shots had the opposite effect; hard to dodge, and making me feel vulnerable once my shields went away. In addition, while moving shields just got in the way more in mode 2, here they helped a bit, as they blocked the zig-zagging shots more often.
Modes 5-8: Fast projectiles
Now Space Invaders gets hard, and I didn’t last long at all once I reached the third round. There’s just no time to react to low-flying invaders if they happen to shoot when you’re under them. Modes 7-8 have an especially deadly combination of fast-moving, zigzagging bombs.
Modes 9-16: Invisible invaders
I’m pretty sure this is a joke. I can’t even clear one round on mode 9. I didn’t bother with the rest of the modes here.
Later, I played some of the two-player modes with “B.” Modes 17-32 are just throwaway modes, featuring pointless alternating play.
Modes 33-64: Two-player competitive
The manual says these are competitive modes, but the only impetus for competition is the fact that you get separate score counters. You don’t even get separate life pools, and the game ends when a total of three laser bases have been destroyed regardless of the player who loses them, making competition even more pointless. We played as if it were cooperative, working together to try to repel the invaders with double the firepower.
The basic modes with slow and straight invader shots were pretty easy, unsurprisingly.
The modes with fast and/or wavy shots were really hard. Having double the firepower did NOT make up for being twice as likely to get hit.
Invisible mode, once again, got us with that last lousy invader slipping past our fire.
Modes 49-64 add a restriction that you and your “opponent” must alternate shots. You still have more damage potential than you would playing solo, because two laser bases means less moving around. But a missed shot has worse consequences, because neither of you may fire until your missed shot reaches the top of the screen.
You could also play these modes solo. A modern controller’s got more than enough buttons for two laser bases. I tried it too, using a d-pad and left bumper for the left base, and face buttons and right bumper for the right base. Conclusion: I’ve got enough fingers to play this way, but not enough coordination.
Modes 65-112: Partnership
Scrolling through the list of game modes to get here is rather tedious. All of these modes grant two players partial control over a single laser base.
In modes 65-80, one player controls left movement, one player controls right movement, and either can fire, but the single shot limit remains.
In modes 81-96, you surrender control to the other player whenever you fire, and the other player surrenders control back to you when they fire.
In modes 97-112, player one is responsible for movement, and player two fires the gun.
These modes were all as dumb as they sound. The first set of modes just got us killed, as often we’d both try to move in opposite directions to dodge a shot, and the base wouldn’t move at all. The second set isn’t very interesting, with half of your playtime spent waiting for your partner to fire. In the final set of modes, we were able to work more or less in harmony, but it was still pointless. I’d rather have had co-op modes with two laser bases, just like the competitive modes, only with shared points and lives.
Overall, I’m glad I played this port of the game, even if the mode count is ludicrously padded. The challenge of fast and wavy shots is novel, the invisible mode kind of stupid, and the entire set of “partnership” modes a waste of time, but the “competitive” modes played cooperatively are what really sold the package.
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.
Space Invaders, designed by Taito engineer Tomohiro Nishikado, is the next whale, and it’s the first one made in Japan. Taito had produced a number of arcade games prior to Space Invaders, some of which were distributed in the US by Midway. In turn, a few of Midway’s games from this period were also distributed in Japan by Taito. None of these early Taito games from before Space Invaders are playable anymore, but one’s legacy lives on through its Midway adaptation.
Unplayed: Western Gun
In 1975, Nishikado designed Western Gun, a two-player arcade game about cowboys shooting at each other in the desert. Like all of Taito’s games before Space Invaders, it ran on discrete CPU-less circuitry, and isn’t emulated on MAME or anything else.
Its Midway adaptation Gun Fight, on the other hand, runs on a CPU by Intel, is among the first arcade video games ever to use a CPU (and is often claimed to be the first, but this has been disputed), and is emulated in MAME.
Game 17: Gun Fight
I played a few rounds with a friend. The game has an unusual control scheme:
Digital 8-direction joystick for moving the cowboy
Analog 2-way joystick for aiming the gun, with a trigger for firing
This mapped pretty well to a modern gamepad, with a D-pad for moving, the right analog stick’s vertical axis for aiming, and a shoulder button for firing. Aiming is a bit fiddly and probably works better with the original 2-way joystick, but this setup works.
The cowboys each occupy one half of the screen, separated by an invisible barrier, and have 70 seconds to try to outscore the other by shooting them. Each round adds more cactus obstacles to the arena, which can block one bullet but then disappear, and eventually a stagecoach starts patrolling the center of the screen, blocking all shots. Bullets can be ricocheted off the top and bottom edges of the screen. Each cowboy gets no more than six shots per round, and if both run out, the round is a draw.
This was a fun game, with fast and immediately accessible action, a good mix of skill and strategy, and amusing visuals and sound. In a way, with two horizontally opposed cowboys on either side of the screen, projectiles flying left and right and bouncing up and down, it’s like a violent Pong.
It makes me wish we could play the original Western Gun. From the scant footage available, we can see that it played differently, and that Gun Fight isn't a straight port. Western Gun's arena seems to be more complex and more free-roaming. In addition to shot-blocking cactuses, there are shot-deflecting rocks. Nishikado felt his version was more fun, but was impressed with Gun Fight's animation and graphics, and was inspired to develop subsequent games with a programmable CPU too, starting with Space Invaders.
Game 18: Space Invaders
Space Invaders is the earliest game that I would call a genuine classic without reservations. Sure, there were earlier games with entertainment value, but none have the enduring popularity and veneration of Space Invaders. And there have been earlier games that were popular and are still well known, but I don’t think they’re a lot of fun. A lot of early 70’s arcade games have become obscure thanks to their unportability (is that a word?). They weren’t just bound to the hardware, they were the hardware, with no code that could be ported to run on newer systems. Only Pong and Breakout remain in the collective memory, thanks to being remade and often ported.
If Gun Fight is like a violent Pong, then Space Invaders is like a violent Breakout. There were earlier games about shooting rows of targets, but Space Invaders alone arranges the targets into a grid-like phalanx, has them advance, shoot back, and eventually invade.
There’s a joke in the attract screen that most players probably won’t see playing in MAME. Just as in Gun Fight, where a cowboy shoots the “INSERT COIN” display…
…so does a Space Invader here.
As a singleplayer game – two-player mode simply alternates players – I
could play Space Invaders any time, for as long as I wanted. As there’s
no ending, my goal was simply to play until I was fairly confident that
my performance would not improve.
My best attempt took me to the fourth round. I found my best strategy was to eliminate the invaders one column at a time, taking out the outermost column ASAP, which required shooting through my own barriers. After that, the rest of the columns were a lot easier, until the last few invaders go into panic mode and become fast and tricky to hit. The mystery ship was a target of opportunity, but I’d only try to get it if it was convenient, and after the first round this wasn’t often. I got good enough that I could consistently survive the first round, but each subsequent round starts the invaders off lower to the surface, giving you less time to finish them off before they invade, and less reaction time to dodge their fire.
This is actually the earliest game I’ve played where rounds get incrementally more difficult. It’s not the first time that the game gets incrementally harder over time; Pong accelerates the ball when it’s been in play long enough, and Breakout gets downright unfair once the ball hits the top of the screen by shrinking the already tiny paddle. Gun Fight got more complex in subsequent rounds, but difficulty was up to your opponent. Space Invaders seems to be the game that codified the ubiquitous concept that later levels get harder.
I understand that really good players use tricks I haven’t tried, such as predicting when the mystery ship will appear, and manipulating the pseudo-RNG to maximize its point value. And exploiting a trick; that when the invaders reach the lowest possible row, their shots won’t harm you, and you can pick them off one row at a time. The downside is that a single missed shot means they’ll land and end your game, but it’s probably the only way to survive later rounds. These tricks don’t seem like they’re in the spirit of the game, which really just expects you to plunk in a token and then not occupy the machine for too long.
Space Invaders set the template for shoot’em ups, though it lacks several elements that would be crucial to the genre. Movement is only horizontal, and a bit slow. There are no stages, just the same formation of invaders repeating, forever. And you shoot one bullet at a time, which at times can make it seem like an eternity of waiting for the next shot, even more so when you miss. But the game is carefully balanced around these elements. Space Invaders would be much too easy if you could flood the screen with your own bullets as in later shmups, where the challenge is often in dodging bullets, and firing blindly will whittle down the enemies as long as you can avoid their shots. Here, dodging enemy fire wouldn’t be too much of a challenge, even with your slow movement, except that you really need to make every one of your own shots count. You simply don’t have time to be inefficient, and it’s difficult to focus on the invaders’ positions while also ducking their fire, and you can’t easily zip in and out of a shooting position without very careful timing.
For all Space Invaders did for the industry, I think it may get too much credit. Wikipedia states Space Invaders is the first video game existing as a video game, as opposed to a “digital representation” of something else. Really? What’s Breakout a simulation of, then? How about Gotcha, or the infamous Death Race? Or Computer Space? It also claims that Space Invaders has continuing influence on the first person shooter genre, which I really don’t see. One citation there claims Space Invaders introduced “surviving while shooting everything that moves” as a gameplay concept, but that strikes me as clearly specious considering Computer Space had players shooting at hostile AI targets so much earlier. I think “survive while shooting everything that moves” as a gameplay concept is self-evident and innate to the DNA of arcade video games. It wasn’t introduced by Space Invaders, but has been part of the format since the literal beginning of it.
It’s also been the source of quite a few urban legends. The most widely heard of them are that it caused a 100-yen coin shortage in Japan, and that the accelerating descent of the invaders as you thin their numbers is a CPU timing glitch. The former is probably not true. The latter may or may not have been true in early development, but the final ROM code contains a routine that deliberately counts the remaining invaders and increases their speed at specific thresholds, so it’s clearly not a glitch in the final product.
In spite of some exaggerations and urban legends, Space Invaders is a fine game, and deserves plenty of credit for legitimizing video games. It’s designed well, feels elegant rather than austere in its simplicity, has a distinct and recognizable sci-fi theme and aesthetic, plays fair for the first round or two, invites strategy as well as skill, and numerous famous developers from both the US and Japan have cited Space Invaders as a major influence on their careers.
