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:

Game 7: Ice Climbers (1984)

OK, I'm going to be blunt. I only vaguely remember this game from childhood, and didn't think about it until the Ice Climbers were added to SSBM. I didn't really enjoy this game that much, and we barely played it for the minimum 30 minutes before moving on. There is nothing inherently boring about the game: it is a straight forward arcade style platformer, but it just didn't click for me. The graphics are charming and clean, there is some nice little music and sound, but something is still missing.

It also helps you learn how to count.

To start with, it's boring. You climb up. The title is quite literal in that sense. You are on the inside of a mountain, I guess, and slowly making your way upwards. You can knock out the blocks above you and move up to other platforms, and attack enemies with a mallet. When you reach the top of the stage, you have the chance to get more points in a bonus round in blizzard like conditions. This is significantly harder, but it is the main way to get points in the game. Due to the strict level based structure of the game, there appears to be no use for points, unlike Joust and Mario Bros., where points were used to earn extra lives and get further in the game.

Action shot.

Technically, I can't complain: this game looks great, has the most complex sound we've heard yet, only slightly awkward jumping, and a multitude of levels to choose from. The graphics are honestly fantastic: while there is a certain existential feel (am I between mountains? Are the mountains stacked? what are these numbers?) inherent in mostly older games, the sprites are cute, clean, well animated, and everything else. This game has the best music of anything else we've played. The controls feel right, although the jump parabola isn't ideal and feels clumsy, but nothing serious.The problem is, I just couldn't summon any enthusiasm to play this game. You are able to select which level you want to play when you start, and there are 32 in total, with varying levels of difficulty. I couldn't tell you the difference between them though, even if you held a gun to my head.

This is as boring as it looks.

I understand that this is a classic Nintendo property, but there is nothing here that makes me want to play it again. Maybe there is something magic here that I'm missing, I'd like to hear from someone who truly enjoys this game. Samchez enjoyed it significantly more than me, will hopefully be able to post his thoughts later. This also marks the beginning of a lot of repetitive games that we are going to slog through, on our quest for the shoot 'em up and beat 'em up gems we started this project for.


Maybe some of my ennui comes from the lack of goal in this game. At least in Joust and Mario Bros., while the games are endless and only get harder, you get rewarded with additional lives. I know that, within a few years and not too many more games, we'll start to see things like endings and continues. For now though, we are going to be in the weird abstract pre-narrative era of games.

Wha' Happen?

As all zero of you may have noticed, we disappeared for the last month. Nothing serious was happening besides the usual business of life, such as moving and having guests around. Samchez is currently on the other side of the country visiting friends, and I'll try to fill out the next few games in his absence.

Game 6: Mario Bros. (1983)

The second game we played, Mario Bros., was by far the most enjoyable game of the first five that we've played. We still haven't hit the era where games are beatable, but just the fact that we do not instantly kill each other is a nice step up from Joust. While I look forward to being able to actually beat a game and be "done" with it, this was still fantastic to play. There are still a lot of weird little things in this game that will change in games over the next few years. For example, there is still no continuing. There is no boss, and you can not change your momentum while in the air. While the inertia in jumping is "realistic," it feels bizarre compared to later control schemes

JUMPUP!!

This game takes place in a Bizarro World version of Mario, where Mario and Luigi have not yet learned how to effectively jump on top of enemies. There are also no mushrooms, flowers, stars, toads, princesses or goombas. Just endless streams of proto-Koopas, flies, and crabs. I am not aware of any explanation of this, nor do I expect one to be forthcoming.

Nothing too bad.

But seriously, this game isn't that hard. Compared to Joust it is a walk in the park, in the sense that we did not needlessly kill each other. There is some awesome teamwork to be had here, in the sense you can bounce an enemy down to your partner and dispatch your foes easily. You can also bounce on each other, although that often comes off as an annoyance more than an asset. There is also competition for getting points, especially during the bonus levels. Points lead to extra lives, and this level competition is fun. The modern age of achievements and multiple game round stat tracking has dulled some of the fun of this; if I do better this round than the last it doesn't reflect anything outside of a development of my own skills.

So many points.

I wish I could say that I don't care about achievements, but this would be a blatant lie. I love to track my stats from round to round of something like Team Fortress 2, for example. It is an addiction, doubtlessly rooted in my love of baseball statistics growing up. The instant gratification that comes from obsessive stat tracking and watching bars fill up is far too rewarding to want to give up. While I appreciate classic games because of their depth of gameplay derived from simple rules, I do feel a lack of the reward treadmill and ending.

Do the Mario!

The sheer weirdness of this game is fun though. I like to imagine how this can be fit into the overall Mario "mythos." I like the idea that this is some kind of endless Karmic purgatory. Maybe this is the true final adventure of Mario: there is no end, there is no princess to kiss. Mario has been sent here for a lifetime of killing and destroying countless Koopa and Goomba lives. This is a sisyphean task set before the Mario Bros. by the gods of the underworld. There is no ending in sight, and the task only grows more difficult as Mario fulfills it. If he doesn't fulfill it fast enough, fireballs come out to attack him, until he finishes the current task, only to start once again on a similar, but slightly harder task. Incidentally, this theory explains 90%+ of the games from this era, where things like "endings" or "goals" were non-existent.

Wrap around hell.

This could also be a chronicle of Mario's death. One day, a plumber goes into the sewers to deal with a nascent turtle infestation, and eventually takes a wrong turn and gets lost. As he goes deeper and deeper into the serpentine corridors, the pungent odors start to affect his thinking, and the turtles appear to be the roughly the same size as him. His eyes, deprived of natural light, begin to see red and green fireballs, and the creatures around him take on unnatural hues. As he delves deeper into the pipes, he begins to see oceanic crabs and flies bigger than he is. Eventually, as he stumbles and slides through the labyrinthine passages, he begins to imagine his locomotive difficulties are caused by rapidly forming ice patches. He begins to hallucinate that he has an identical twin, who dresses and moves the same as he does and occasionally gets in his way. There is only one way out of this: death. Death is a sweet release, and leads to the idea that Super Mario Bros. is the reward. Mario, now in some sort of afterlife, is still entranced with dreams of plumbing, but now dreams in bold colors and creates a narrative to structure his life. His hallucinatory twin no longer is seen at the same time, but still exists to follow Mario's footsteps. I would like to think that the rest of the Mario Universe is the plumber's dying dream, a long hallucination after a treacherous and slow death at the hands of hallucinatory fireballs and flies.

Kick off ALL the pests?

Either way, this game, while featuring Mario and having some basic elements of Mario gameplay (jumping, turtles, enough inertia to slide), is also pretty weird and has a lot of things that won't be seen in a Mario game for years (flies, color coded "mad" enemies, crabs). It is the best game that we've played so far, which isn't saying much, but I would gladly play it again without a second thought.

Game 3: Joust (1982)

While this may be titled "Game 3," this is actually the first review on the blog. We encountered severe apathy when attempting to play Dungeon and Moria, and perhaps this will change in the future. For now, we are starting off with Joust:

Hal Laboratory shows there used to be no shame in an arcade port.

Joust was originally released for the arcade in 1982, by Williams, and for this review we played the NES release due to technical issues with the original. From what I've read online, despite the 6 year gap in the releases, there are no serious gameplay differences, and we can always come back to the arcade version later when we get it working. I remember renting this game once when I was younger and enjoying it enough not to be mad at picking it, but not enjoying it enough to ever rent it again. Recently, I have had the opportunity to replay it in its arcade glory at Ground Kontrol and it is still painfully easy to die.

Easier said than done.

Joust is really hard. To our modern sensibilities, it feels impossible. We watched the attraction screen that explains the basics, and attempted to start playing. We were killed almost immediately after started, and noted there are no continues or "respawn invincibility," features which we took for granted until playing this. This game also features the contemporary "one-hit kill" style of gameplay. The goal of the game is straight forward: you are a Jouster, and you must kill the other Jousters. When you kill a Jouster, it will hatch an egg that will eventually turn into another Jouster if you do not collect it. There is also friendly fire, making cooperative play a perilous venture.

It starts out simple enough.

 The game starts, like other games of the era, deceptively simple. You (and your friend) are represented by a small blue jouster, and there are some green jousters who spawn and then haphazardly float around. If you defeat all of the jousters in a wave, you progress to the next one. Given that this is an arcade game from 1982, none of this is unexpected. Platforms are removed after certain waves, and the lava will be revealed, giving the player less and less "safe" areas to fly in. Additionally, every few levels, a new enemy will appear. These enemies are generally less idiotic, and more likely to fly towards you rather than get killed by the lava. There is also a "bonus" stage where the screen is filled with eggs that need to be collected before spawning enemy jousters. Because we are still able to kill each other during the bonus stage, we split up the level in terms of layers, to avoid the fatal joust.

Points!

One of the biggest challenges we faced in playing this game cooperatively was each other. The very nature of the game's physics and rules made playing cooperatively a detriment rather than an advantage. We continually killed each other without meaning to, and the quickness of death and lack of continue only adds misery to this plight. At one point we realized that we were having more fun killing each other than trying to get through the waves, and we happily explored that venue for a few lives.

The audio in the NES release is sparse and blippy. The title music is a nice fanfare, but the game is mostly quiet. While this is on par for a 1982 arcade release, it feels dated for a 1988 NES release. The same can be said for the graphics.

In the end, we played the game for about an hour before getting too frustrated and moving on. This puts us over our previously stated 30 minute minimum, but we were unable to achieve our secondary goal of seeing all of the enemies or level variations. As a side note, this is the first game we've played that has a bonus stage, Wikipedia informs me that Galaga included a bonus stage in the previous year

Looking Forward and What's Behind Us

Shadow of the Ninja: great tunes and awesome
gameplay and graphics.

 Looking forward on the list it looks like our first game is going to be Dungeon, followed by Moria and then Joust. I am unfamiliar with the first two games or PLATO, but it looks like cyber1.org will let us check them out to some extent. I'm looking forward to seeing where this project goes, as we move into more familiar territory and get to the games that we grew up with, in one form or another.

The Nintendo was the first console our family owned, and it had a great library for playing with a friend or brother. Although co-op games were rare due to hardware limitations, there were enough memorable ones to start the impetus for creating this blog. While games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game were lacking in audiovisual quality compared to their arcade counterparts, it was always made up for by the fact you didn't have to worry about quarters and stood a chance of progressing in the game. 

And it wasn't just Nintendo games that we played; we went to arcades together, moved on to later consoles, and eventually had our own computers to network. While we played many games competitively, there is still something enjoyable about beating up on the computer.

Hello World

This blog is an attempt to chronicle playing through every game on Wikipedia's List of cooperative video games in chronological order, as far as modern day emulation allows.

In almost all ways, this is inspired by The CRPG Addict. Like Mr. Addict, we will attempt to faithfully attempt and progress in every game on the Wikipedia list, with room for additions. We will limit ourselves primarily to PC, arcade, and console games, generally using the "best" version of the game as determined by our admittedly quick research. We will attempt to complete every game on our list, or at least get bored enough to say why.

So far, are rules as are follows:

1. We follow the Wikipedia list in chronological order when possible. If we find other sources later, we will adapt them to our internal list.

2. Since many of the games are released on a spectrum of systems, we will attempt to play the original version, and make note of other releases as needed.

3. We will limit ourselves to games we are able to get running with modern hardware.

4. While many games are unbeatable (outside of a kill screen or something similar), we will attempt to play games until we've seen the available gameplay or we get bored of them. We are currently setting our limits at around 30 minutes before moving on; this will probably grow as games get more complex.

Stay tuned for upcoming updates!