Just a silly random observation, and also a test of my ability to write one of these posts mostly using my cell phone.
Dr. Mario is a puzzle game for the original Nintendo console, a little like Tetris. It makes it onto my list of favorite video games, though it’s probably rated even higher by my parents, who had a lot of fun playing each other in it after my brothers and I were in bed.
The original game had only two tunes to use as background music.
I recently realized that this music sounds a lot like the song “Lady Madonna” by the Beatles! The two tunes are different enough that it’s not an exact copy, but I think the inspiration had to be there.
A lot of video games are patterned after movies, with voice acting, cutscenes, and creative use of camera angles. The goal is to make players feel as if they are controlling the events of the scene they are watching, or even to imagine themselves as a character within the game’s world. One of the things I love about old video games is that the best of them accomplish this in creative ways, even in a very limited medium.
One of the oldest games on my top 80 list is Air Fortress for the original Nintendo. The concept is simple, but it combines two different video game “genres” in a clever way and uses music to tell a suspenseful story.
The first thing you’ll see in the video is the poorly translated story of the planet FARMEL, which was having the GLORIEST DAYS before it was attacked by these mysterious AIR FORTRESSES. In a plot development that gets used more often than you’d think in video games, the leaders decide that because this mission is so dangerous, the best course of action is to send one person to take on the fleet by himself.
That man is the intrepid HAL BAILMAN with his LIGHTBRASNER. (Based on another version of the game with a better translation, they meant to say “LIGHT-BLASTER.”)
I love those cheesy stories for old video games– they can be hilarious! Needless to say, this game does its best storytelling without using words.
There are eight levels in the game, one for each Air Fortress in the fleet. The video shows you level 1, and believe me– the makers of the game were being kind to the player in this level. Later levels get more difficult very quickly. I don’t remember if I even made it halfway through this game back when I used to rent it as a kid.
Every level has three basic parts:
1. Approaching the Air Fortress by rocket sled. This part of the game is a side-scrolling shooter, like Gradius, Defender, and other classic arcade games. The screen scrolls by itself, and you have to pilot the sled to avoid the walls of the fortress and the enemies that fly around and try to shoot you down. If you collide with any of these things, your rocket sled is destroyed, and you only have three of them. It’s crucial at this stage to pick up the energy (E) and bomb (B) power-ups for you to use in the next section.
2. Inside the Air Fortress on foot. Here, the game turns into more of a standard platforming game, in which you can explore in any direction. The goal is to find the main power reactor of the Air Fortress and destroy it. I like the way the energy meter doubles as fuel for your rocket boots in this part of the game. This means that you have to be careful about how much you use the boots, because draining your energy puts you at more risk of being destroyed by an enemy. It also places a limit on the amount of flying you can do; if you run low on energy, you will need to stay on the ground for a while as your energy recharges.
3. The escape. This is where the game really draws you in to the story. When you destroy the main power reactor, the whole fortress goes dark and quiet, unsettling music begins to play. The Air Fortress is going to explode in a few minutes, and you need to find your rocket sled and escape before it does! In the first level, the game designers were feeling generous, so they put the exit right behind the reactor. But in most of the levels, you have to go searching for it. You might pass the exit on your way in to the reactor, or it might be in a part of the fortress you haven’t seen yet.
The game doesn’t give you a timer, so you can’t know for sure how much time you have to find the exit. After a while, you start to hear a low rumble and the screen begins to shake. The shaking gets gradually more severe and the rumble grows louder until it almost drowns out the music. The screen begins to flash white just before the end until the entire screen is washed out, and — GAME OVER.
The game is great at building tension, and it’s here that you reap the benefits of collecting (E) capsules during the rocket sled section– the more energy you have, the more you can use your rocket boots to hurry through the air fortress.
When I was a kid, I lived just outside a small Pennsylvania borough called Danville. (I just realized that I can’t officially call it a “town,” because nearby Bloomsburg always claimed to be “the only town in Pennsylvania.”) It was a great place to live!
It seems we are all shaped by the times and places we remember while growing up, to the point that some of them become almost synonymous with childhood. One of the things that was like that for me was a store in downtown Danville called McWilliams.
Mill Street in downtown Danville. If you walk a few blocks down the road, McWilliams will be on your left.
McWilliams was an eclectic combination of different things that seems a bit odd now. At ground level, part of it was a drug store, while the rest of it was more of a bookstore (but a very small one). But the best part was downstairs in the basement– the movie and video game rental section. The walls were lined with empty videotape and game boxes, and if you brought one to the counter upstairs, they would give you the movie or game (along with instruction book) in a clear plastic container. I think the cost of a rental went from $0.99 to $1.99 during the time I lived in Danville.
The best occasions came at the end of a semester or year in school. If you brought your report card and had good grades (I think it had to be B’s or better), you could rent a game for free. My brothers and I would each pick out a game, and we’d have a fun weekend trying to beat them.
That’s how I first discovered a great many of the NES games on my list of favorites. When I got older and started collecting games for myself, I was surprised to discover that at least one of the games they had was actually quite rare, and it had been a neat privilege to be able to play it whenever I wanted.
That sort of memory is very time- and place-specific. I’m not all that old yet, but my memories of renting games at McWilliams already belong to another generation. As far as I know, small stores eventually got out of the video and game rental business because of chains like Blockbuster– and then those stores went bankrupt because of all of the other options people have for seeing movies thanks to the Internet. (McWilliams is still there, by the way, but I’d be surprised if it still rents movies and games.)
It’s not worse the way it is now; it’s just different, and it somehow makes my memories of trips to McWilliams more special to realize that it couldn’t happen that way today. At the time, though, it seemed like the most normal thing in the world.
I don’t know if this sort of memory ends up being boring to share; it might be if your experiences aren’t similar. What memories of childhood are uniquely part of you because of where you lived?
The most important quality for a video game to have is for it to be fun. But can it also be beautiful?
Maybe it’s just an effect of being from a generation raised with video games, but I think a good video game can be a work of art. One of the video games that really impressed me the first time I played it (15 years ago!) was Donkey Kong Country for the Super Nintendo.
The game was made by a British company called Rare, and while it’s probably their most famous game, it’s far from the only game of theirs to make it onto my favorite games list thanks to its creativity.
In DKC, you play as Nintendo’s famous gorilla, Donkey Kong, and his chimp friend, Diddy, as they try to get Kong’s banana collection back from King K. Rool and his band of crocodile pirates.
Hey! I didn’t say the story was a work of art!
The big innovation in this game came in its graphics. All of the characters, enemies, and objects in Donkey Kong Country were initially rendered in 3-D on a computer before being converted to 2-D animations (called “sprites”) for the game.
The result was that the graphics looked much more detailed than would have been possible with the Super Nintendo alone. (If I keep doing this list long enough, I’ll eventually get to some examples of what 3-D graphics generated by the Super Nintendo look like. Donkey Kong Country went far beyond these limitations by creating the illusion of 3-D graphics.)
So the graphics were innovative for their time, but what I really enjoy about the game is the way that the graphics and the sound work together to create atmosphere. The levels in DKC take place in a wide variety of settings, including jungles, caves, ancient temples, evergreen forests, and factories. Every setting has its own musical theme that gives it a certain mood.
My favorite is used in a mountain level where it gradually begins to snow more and more the further you go, until you’re in the middle of a blizzard:
The whole level makes for a neat artistic effect. The music from that level is one of the tunes I think of when I watch the snow fall.
The game does some other subtle things to make the settings seem more immersive. The various indicators so common to video games (like the banana counter) only appear on the screen for a moment and then disappear, leaving the screen without any clutter at all most of the time. And many of the sound effects seem to be designed to blend with the music rather than clashing with it.
For example, the sound effect made by the clam enemies in the underwater levels almost sounds like it’s a percussion instrument playing along with the music:
Isn’t the underwater music relaxing? The first time my brother played this level, he was distracted by the rich background and didn’t realize that the first fish in the level was an enemy, so he ended up swimming right into it!
But anyway, that’s why Donkey Kong Country is my 21st-favorite game!
———-
By the way, chances are good that if you are much younger than me, then you are thinking “What is he talking about? The graphics and music in that game are terrible!“ I can only say that they were very impressive for their time.
There’s a character in Donkey Kong Country that pokes fun at video game nostalgia like mine. Donkey Kong’s grandfather, Cranky, shows up in the game to give you hints about where to find secrets. But not without ranting about how easy you have it these days with your fancy graphics and 3-D animation. Cranky remembers the good old days of arcade gaming when games were actually hard, and you had to get by with 4 frames of animation! So it was inevitable that one day even Donkey Kong Country would look dated, and I’d end up ranting just like Cranky.
In previous posts, I’ve mentioned a couple of games that are near the topand middle of my all-time ranking, but what sort of game is just barely good enough to make it onto my list of 80 favorites? I’m glad you asked!
The answer is A Boy and His Blob for the original Nintendo, which is at the same time one of the most creative games ever and one of the most poorly made. The hero in this game is the eponymous unnamed boy, who happens to have a pet blob from another planet.
The pudgy, white blob (named “Blobert”) follows the boy around everywhere, either out of loyalty or because the boy keeps feeding him jellybeans. He loves jellybeans (unless they are ketchup flavored, and really, who can blame him for that?).
Each flavor of jellybean causes the blob to transform into a different object, which introduces the puzzle aspect of the game. For example, a licorice jellybean will turn the blob into a ladder, a punch-flavored jellybean will turn him into a hole in the ground (punch a hole; get it?), and a cola jellybean will turn him into a giant bubble. There are about 15 flavors of jellybeans in all, which is a good thing, because the boy is pretty useless on his own. He can’t even jump.
What little story exists in the game goes like this: You need to search the caverns underneath New York City for treasure, which you can then use to buy vitamins at the store. Then, you can turn the blob into a rocket and travel to his home planet of Blobolonia, which for some reason is overrun by candy-based enemies. (Hence the need for vitamins, I guess? The game’s overall position on the “healthy vs. unhealthy” food debate seems a bit murky, since jellybeans, peppermints, and vitamins help you, while marshmallows, cherries, and popcorn kill you. Besides that, everything makes perfect sense, of course.)
Here’s a sample of the gameplay:
There are some things to like about the game. The puzzle aspect can be a lot of fun. Also, it’s cute the way the blob follows you when you whistle. Especially funny is how the blob’s smile instantly turns into a frown if you throw a jellybean that he can’t catch. I also like how the game plays little musical stings sometimes when the blob transforms. (On the other hand, the entire game uses basically the same tune with just a little variation once you reach the blob’s planet.)
But you don’t have to play the game long to realize its flaws. When confronted with enemies, the boy’s only options are to run past them or die. Deciding where to punch a hole is a process of trial and error, since there’s no way to know how long a drop there will be aside from painful experience in prior lives. And it’s way too hard to control that bubble underwater!
It’s been a few days since I posted anything, but this time it’s not because I can’t think of anything to post. I stumbled across a website full of simple yet creative ideas for video games, and since then I’ve been working on coming up with my own idea for a video game. (I don’t want to tell you too much about it yet because it’s still in a very early stage of planning.)
When I get an idea for a project like this that really captures my imagination, it can seem like there’s not enough time in the day to read and think about it. There’s a cartoon I saw in a magazine many years ago that I have always really related to: A mom and dad are watching the New Year’s Eve celebration on TV, and their little boy is standing in the room with a wagon full of toys and a frustrated expression on his face. “But I’m not finished with THIS year!” he says.
Will I finish this project? Honestly, chances of that are very slim. I usually get to a point where I run out of ideas and have to put an unfinished project aside; sometimes I will come back to it much later after a period of not thinking about it and find I have some fresh ideas.
Sometimes I think that when I get to heaven, one of the first things I’ll want to do is finish all of the projects I have from throughout my life. (The first one would probably have something to do with traffic lights and road maps.) Time would no longer be a limitation keeping me from exploring, thinking, and building.
But I know that’s probably a pretty silly thing to think of doing first in heaven. Maybe the things to do there will be so amazing that I’ll forget all about the video games I thought of making long ago and be seized by ideas that are so wonderful and exciting that I can’t even imagine them now.
I’m going to talk about a second cognitive theory of autism, one that I identify with quite a lot. But first, I want to show you a video game that (sort of) works as an example. ; )
Klax is a simple but quirky puzzle game that was released in the arcade as well as on a lot of home video game systems. Here’s how it works:
A whole bunch of multi-colored tiles are tumbling down a ramp toward the player.
The player needs to catch each of these tiles on a small white paddle by moving it left and right.
If you miss one of the tiles, it screams (!) as it falls off the ramp and one of the lights on your “drop meter” turns on. The game is over if you miss three tiles.
When you catch a tile on the paddle, you can drop it into the playing area by moving the paddle left or right and pressing A.
The object is to line up three tiles that are the same color– you can make a vertical, horizontal, or diagonal line. When you do that, you get points and the line of tiles disappears (giving you the room you need to work with as more tiles come tumbling down the ramp). Bonus points if you make a line four or five tiles long!
You can stack up to five tiles on top of the paddle. Once you reach that limit, you have to drop one of them, or you won’t be able to catch any more.
Every level has a slightly different goal. Sometimes only horizontal or diagonal lines will count. Sometimes you need to get a certain number of points.
As the game goes on, the tiles come faster and faster, and the number of different colors increases too.
As a last desperate measure, you can fling tiles back up onto the ramp by pushing the up button. But it’s only up there for a few seconds before you have to catch it again– along with the other tiles that were coming anyway!
Got all that? Well, here’s a video showing the game being played. This person doesn’t have much trouble at all until level 3.
It’s a fun game that starts out easy but gets steadily more difficult. There’s an interesting balance of things you need to keep track of– moving to catch each tile, deciding where to drop it in the playing area, keeping the playing area from getting too full, achieving the specific task the level asks for. It’s fun to play with a friend every once in a while to see who gets overwhelmed first!
And incidentally, that’s why Klax is my 67th favorite video game.
Okay, on to the main point of my post. ; )
As complicated as I made the game sound in my description above, I find it easier to complete 30 levels of Klax than I often found it to organize the everyday tasks in my life when I had my first experience living by myself during grad school at Texas Tech. Why?
Part of it is that I was able to describe everything you need to know in order to play Klax in that fairly short list of rules. You can come up with general guidelines for all the things you need to do in day-to-day life like shopping for groceries, doing laundry, paying rent and utilities, getting haircuts, keeping your car in good shape, and fitting this in around a work and school schedule. However, I could never make enough rules to deal with the specific tasks I might be faced with each moment, and as a result, even simple things could cascade into major problems:
I can’t wait to start following the NHL playoffs. The Penguins haven’t had as good a season as they did last year, but they did make it into the postseason. Their likely opponents in the first round are the hated cross-state Philadelphia Flyers.
I’m also excited to see what the Columbus Blue Jackets are able to do in their first ever trip to the playoffs.
More immediately, the Redhawks of Miami University are about to face off against Boston University with a chance to win the first NCAA Championship in school history.
In honor of all this, I’d like to present a few minutes of the greatest hockey video game ever, Ice Hockey for the NES:
Cool things about this game:
It lets you play as one of six international hockey powers: the United States, Sweden, Poland, Canada, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia. This video lets you watch a game between two countries that no longer exist!
This game has some of the happiest music ever. : )
Choosing your team involves a lot of strategy. Just like in real life, there are three types of hockey players– skinny, medium-sized, and fat. Skinny hockey players can skate fast but can’t shoot with much power. Fat hockey players can shoot the puck really hard, but they don’t skate fast. Medium-sized hockey players are a nice balance of skills. The skinny guys are better at faceoffs (I think), while the fat guys will always get the best of a collision.
It’s simple to pick up how to control your hockey team in just a few minutes of playing. On offense, you always control the player with the puck. Use A to pass and B to shoot. (Hold down B for a few seconds to fire the puck really hard.) On defense, use A to knock the puck away and B to switch players.
The only tricky part is remembering that you also control the goalie, so you need to remember to look at where he is whenever the other team attacks.
If the game is still tied after overtime, you have a shootout to decide the winner. If it’s still tied after that, you play another overtime with no goalies.
You don’t have to watch the whole video, but try not to miss:
The fight at 1:07 and a player being sent to the penalty box.
The furious end to the second period at 6:40.
The Zambonis getting the ice ready for the third period at 7:15.
Definitely a fun game that you can just pick up and play with a friend. It manages to capture the essence of what makes ice hockey fun without getting complicated. That’s why it’s my 17th favorite video game. ; )
