Power-ups and Bickering

Capitalism!

Besides being the title of this blog, this is what we consider to be one of the core tenants of great cooperative gameplay. Arguing about who gets power-ups and life refills is something that we spent most of our childhood doing. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much of this yet. Joust was far too difficult, and too much attention was spent not killing each other to worry about getting points. Battle City and Ice Climbers had little interaction: the level driven structures of the games, combined with the lack of resources to compete for, made for very little discourse between us outside of commenting on the game. Exed Exes was too inane: our boredom mixed with the relative difficulty resulted very little attention being paid to jockeying for power-ups.

We hit our stride, for the first five games, with Mario Bros. Our previous familiarity with the game, combined with the mechanics, creates plenty of moments of joyful point stealing. Due to the fact that you get points for making the "kill" by running over a defeated enemy, and no points for actually defeating enemies, it is very easy to kill steal from your partner. When this is tied into the fact that points, which are rewarded for defeating enemies, grant extra lives, it means that jumping on your partners head to slow them down becomes personally useful. This extends to the bonus levels, where you are rewarded points based on the number of coins individually collected.

What works so well here, that doesn't occur in other games that we've played so far, is that we are able to get in each others way, make actions that interrupt one another, without completely ruining everything. Joust would have had some fun competition to get points in a hurry, if touching another player didn't equal instant death. Ice Climbers and Battle City lacked any kind of real competition against other players, making for struggle between the players and the game instead of each other. While this is cooperative gameplay by definition, it doesn't create the friendly struggle that is so endearing. Exed Exes, while having all the right elements, including power-ups, just fails to capture the attention at any meaningful level.

Bosses

Well, "H" may not be terrifying, but it's a start.

I have come to see bosses as an integral part of most genres, especially in the arcade format. They act as an end-piece to a level or stage or world, and a final challenge before progressing. I think that some of the lack of bosses that we have seen so far is directly related to a concept of these games as games. What I mean is that something like Joust or Mario Bros. is designed to be a diversion, like solitaire. There are a set of rules that mandate an increasing difficulty level after every round. The goal of the game is to do well and polish your skills and occasionally benefit from lucky breaks when a game employs a RNG.

Because I grew up alongside the rise of the NES, I expect most games to have some kind of goal. I am used to bosses and endings of one kind or another, even if it is a "second quest" like in Zelda or replaying the game with harder enemies, like in Super Mario Bros.

We had especially come to expect this from arcade games, due to the quarter crunching nature of the games we grew up with. Beat 'em up and shoot 'em up games are often designed with nightmarish segments that are designed to kill all but the most experienced player, making it difficult, if not impossible, to reach the end of the game on a single credit. These often come in the form of bosses with deadly attacks, and the like. So far, the only bosses we have encountered were in Exed Exes, and these bosses felt more like prototypes than the screen filling death traps we will in encounter in later games.

Continues

Today is a good day to die.

We think of the phrase "Insert Coin to Continue," or something like that, as an essential part of arcade culture. It is a screen that comes up constantly, especially in the quarter-draining beat 'em ups and shoot 'em ups that are more prominent in later years. When we originally discussed this, before playing any games, we talked about a 5.00 limit, split between us. We set this as a high, but not totally unrealistic amount to be able to spend in an arcade session from our youth. While we would rarely, if ever, spend all of our money on a single game, it is still a useful round number for the purpose of this blog. All of this being said, as soon as we started with the project, we were bluntly reminded that games did not always have continues.

I developed a love of pinball during college that has given me some appreciation for this style of game, with the entire focus being on your high score for a single round. Even so, many modern pinball games are able to be toggled into a mode that support continues, albeit at a higher price. There may be delineated high score tables, to differentiate between a "pure" game and one bolstered with additional money, but still, there is some form of a continue.

Why does this matter? For games like Battle City and Ice Climbers, which are designed around self-contained levels, continues wouldn't do much, and would even trivialize them to a large extent. While we were able to get through enough of Mario Bros. to see the entirety of enemies and obstacles, we were unable to accomplish the same in Joust, due to the sheer difficulty of the game. After doing some supplemental reading on Exed Exes, we learned that, while were able to continue in the game, doing so dashed any chances we may have had of actually "beating" it by achieving 5,000,000 points.

Hard Work Makes the Time Go By

In light of the previous post, I'm going to spend the this time writing about gameplay mechanics. During the play through of the first five games, we talked extensively on what we saw as trends developing between games. Due to the somewhat arbitrary nature of the games we are playing, you can read this blog as a side-story to the end of the golden age of the arcade and rise of the modern era. I have written up our observations on the various mechanics, and those should be published throughout the week.

PAUSE SCREEN

Pretty much exactly like this.

So, we're currently stalled on this project. Samchez is on the other side of the country for another few weeks, so we have no real opportunities to get our game on. That being said, we will try to do what we can until then to get this blog into a more presentable status.

Game 9: Exed Exes (1985)

Exed Exes, also released under the name of Savage Bees, is the first of many Shoot 'Em Ups we'll be playing over the course of this project, and man does it leave a lot to be desired. The game is extremely rudimentary, and almost crude in it's simpleness. It's not just the graphics; Exed Exes is missing what I have come to consider as basic concept: things like like bullet and enemy patterns, sweet power ups, bombs and massive bosses with glowing weak spots, etc.That being said, this game has some of these elements, just without any of the later sophisiciation and refinement. As a result, it's barely recognizable. For what it's worth, I am in love with Mars Matrix, and generally prefer "bullet hell" over other genres, but grew up playing plenty of Gradius and having exposure to Treasure games and various other classics. We're looking forward to getting to these games, and this served more to whet our appetite than to satiate our hunger.

Something is happening that is not happening.

The gameplay and graphics reminded me a lot of Xevious, albeit without the ground targeting, and with more variation in gameplay. I mean this in the sense that there were discrete levels, and the backgrounds and graphics had a generic kind of "future/sci-fi kind of feel." There are a lot of elements that we'll see in later games, but we still are lacking things like "endings." After reading through various pieces online, I found out you can "end" the game by getting 10 million points. We got nowhere near that, and I really don't find this game enjoyable enough to want to plug away at if for that long.

Projectiles, power-ups, and explosions. We have a SHMUP here, boys.

The setting for this game was exciting: after the first four games we played, this felt the most like a modern game. There are discrete and separate terrains, and you get to scroll over them and encounter a variety of enemies. The enemies have a general "insectoid" theme, and that's great. It is more logical and consistent than the crabs and flies of Mario Bros, and less abstract than the knights of Joust. Graphically, the game isn't stunning, but it's not offensive, and shows significant effort. The insectoid theme is echoed in both the enemy designs, and the terrain and background art. This would also explain why this game was released in the US under the name of Savage Bees, a vastly more appropriate name.

So much geometry.

All of this being said, this game really didn't do it for us. All of the basics of what we crave in Shoot 'Em Ups is there, but the rudimentary feel of the game combined with a lack of real goal or feeling of progression made this game grow tiresome. The basics of cooperative gameplay were there, like many other Shoot 'Em Ups in the future, but we mostly spent the time playing this talking about all the games we'll be playing down the road.

My favorite kind of area.

To be completely honest, I would have never played this game if not for this project. I have not learned anything significant about the growth of the genre or cooperative gameplay. The best I can say about it is that is not offensive and stands as a base to compare later games to. We're still in the category of games before we were born (1985 for me, 1990 for Samchez), and it's frankly a little weird to be in such unfamiliar territory. Looking ahead, we're going to be covering quite a few unfamiliar arcade games, but will soon move into familiar NES territory.

Game 8: Battle City (1985)

This game was a complete unknown to us and we had not heard of it until browsing through the list on Wikipedia. That being said, it was by far the most surprising of the first few games we played, coming off as an updated version of the Atari 2600 game Combat. While I never owned Combat, or an Atari, I still played it a few times at neighbor's houses, and it was one of the best games anyone I knew owned for the Atari, mostly due to having enjoyable two player action. The basic gameplay in Combat and Battle City is simple: you kill other tanks and avoid getting blown up in the process.

Pew pew pew, shooting through the terrain is pretty neat.

Battle City adds the twist (at the cost of alternate vehicles) of being able to destroy terrain, making the levels more flexible and reactive. It also comes with plenty of different levels, ranging from the simple to the slightly less simple. In addition, there is a rudimentary level editor, which is pretty interesting in its own right. This is the the first level editor we've seen, and the earliest one that I am personally aware of. I was not able to find a history of level editors with quick Google search, but I'd love to hear about earlier ones.

Varied terrain and obstacles, and explosions falling off the screen.

The graphics in this game are rudimentary at best. There is nothing horrible about them, and they are quite adequate in all things considered, but they are blocky and nothing looks that nice. There is no real animation to speak of. The sound is similar. Once again though, we were more surprised by the level editor and the general strangeness of this game. Like Ice Climbers, there is no goal, despite the plethora of discrete stages to conquer. You can play the levels in any order you like, and there is no objective beyond "EXTERMINATE." This isn't surprising, but I am looking forward to a day when we can actually "beat" the games we play.

I am always excited for level editors, and then I realize I have no plans.

All of this being said, I'd like to stress how unexpected and surprising the level editor was for us. It is not something I remember from console gaming until the fifth generation of consoles, almost a decade after this release. While it's clear that there were earlier games that had a level editing capabilities on the console, the first that I remember is Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. I was aware of level editors for PC games, especially FPS and RTS ones, but as we grew up in a Macintosh household, most of this was unavailable for us. What I do remember about the THPS2 editor was the disappointment I felt when using it.

We started to write Power-ups and Bickering, but ran out of space on "w."

It's not that the editor was too hard to use, or too complicated, or anything like that. It was the simple fact that I had no idea what I wanted my level to be. To add to that, no ideas came pouring out of me, like I had hoped they would. I was sure that I was going to design an AWESOME TOTALLY RAD MONDO COOL level to skate around in and show off to my friends, but nothing happened. I felt the same absence of creativity when playing with the Battle City editor. Our relative newness to the game, combined with our lack of a plan, resulted in us having no idea what to do with the editor, besides screw around and take the above screen shots. That being said, there is still interest in this game. I present to you, Binary City: