Star Comma Eight

Screenshot of the day: Space Harrier

Long before Yu Suzuki made Shenmue, he made this arcade shooter. The quasi-3D graphics were a revelation at the time and led directly to the even more impressive Afterburner and Outrun. But how, exactly, is this guy flying -- and what does any of it have to do with Harriers?

Screenshot of the day: Brataccas

Brataccas is one of the first 16-bit games I ever saw; it was being demoed on an Atari ST at a computer shop round about 1986. I never actually played it, and by now I kind of don't want to, because the idea of Brataccas seems more interesting than the game itself could be. It belongs to a time when the potential of computer games seemed to be infinitely expanding as a result of the leap to 16-bit, and the graphics -- a bit ugly to my eyes now -- impressed with their big, tall, colorful sprites. The detail on the hero's space helmet, for example, was still something you didn't see too often in games. Beyond that, Brataccas seemed not to belong to any existing genre. Was it a platformer? An adventure game? A beat-em-up? An RPG-lite? It seemed to be none of those things. In retrospect I guess it appears similar to a pre-SCUMM adventure like Labyrinth but with some living-world stuff thrown into the mix. Whatever labels you might retroactively put on it, at the time it just seemed gloriously oddball, following its own peculiar path. Maybe I will play Brataccas someday on an emulated ST or Amiga, but if I do, I'll have to bid farewell to the indeterminate Brataccas in my head. Thanks to Mobygames user "Luckspeare" who uploaded the screenshot.

Screenshot of the day: Psi-5 Trading Co.

I've been trying to get this game to run emulated for quite some time. Back in the '80s my family had -- purchased legally, I think! -- the Commodore 64 version of Psi-5 Trading Co., which was released in 1986 by Accolade. Accolade games tended to use the C64's high-resolution mode, which rendered images at a razor-sharp 320x200 pixels (same resolution as the mighty Amiga's standard mode!). The tradeoff is that you didn't have free reign of color usage; within a certain block of pixels you could only use a certain number of colors. I don't understand the details but the visual effect was that hi-res games tended to look boxy, with blocked-out color regions not quite matching what was supposed to be happening onscreen. Observe the wiring in the middle of the screenshot above -- those blue and white chunks of color -- and you'll get a sense of what I mean.

I never played much Psi-5 in the day but I watched others play it enough for it to make a strong impression. The strongest impression it made was of the tremendous personality that all of the crew members had, with their own names, dossiers, and animated cartoony portraits. Also, Psi-5 beautifully captured the sense of controlled chaos that you want in a spaceship simulator -- that sense of everything going wrong, of a fire in engineering, shields about to fail, and a sweat-beaded crew desperately trying to hold things together for just a few more minutes. Subset Games's superb indie title FTL captures some of this feeling, but without quite as much personality. Also, Psi-5's musical score, by Ed Bogas, is rather wonderful.

Because I have been unable to emulate this game successfully, I had to scour Mobygames for the above screenshot. I hope the attribution and linkback will be sufficient payback for my usage. I have also just discovered that this particular screenshot -- which I grabbed weeks ago -- happens to have been posted by a user named 'snuf.' Well, 'snuf,' it turns out, is my brother, Dan Cameron, whom I really need to call up and wish a belated 'Happy Birthday' (his birthday was just a week ago). Snuf, by the way, is short for Snufkin, a character from the Moomin books by Tove Jannson.

Screenshot of the day: CyberTracker

My exploration of 8-bit music creation continues with CyberTracker, another C64 program, which can be downloaded here and which -- critically, for me -- actually has an online instruction manual, here.

Running down the bottom of the screen are three parallel columns, each representing one of the Commodore 64 SID chip's voices. You can see the note designations -- C-5, etc. -- on the left extremity of each column. The other numbers contain additional parameters which I don't fully understand yet. A half-hour's noodling around resulted in the loop you see above, which can be heard here.

Screenshot of the day: Pac-Man

Its sequel, Ms. Pac-Man, was the better game, but this screen remains to me the iconic image of the Golden Age of arcade games. In its bright plain colors, its symmetry, its self-contained universe, it is perfect. It speaks to us across three and a half decades like an indelible piece of pop art. Nothing in human culture before 1980 looked like this. Hats off to Mr. Toru Iwatani, who in his way changed the world.

Screenshot of the day: Shroud of the Avatar

I'm all for character customization, but "philtrum width"? Well, okay...

Screenshot of the day: JCH Music Editor

My exploration of emulated Commodore 64 music creation continues. Above is one of many music editors coded for the Commodore 64 -- this one by Jens-Christian Huus. You can find many such programs here if you are willing to download a C64 emulator to run them. Unfortunately, tutorials for this type of software aren't so easy to find although there continues to be a thriving online community of SID enthusiasts. If I really wanted to, I could probably figure out how something like this works. I'm not sure yet if I want to make the effort. At this point, just writing the darn thing in BASIC looks less threatening. I have that feeling you sometimes get when you glimpse a rabbit hole and are tempted by it, and can't decide just how far you want to climb in.

Screenshot of the day: Commodore 64 BASIC

I'm working up a blog post (or posts) about chiptunes, and decided to do a bit of preliminary research. Though I've been an avid chiptune fan since back when chiptunes were just called 'game music' because the games were brand new, I never actually learned much about how sound production worked on old computers. So I dusted off (metaphorically speaking -- they were in PDF form) the Commodore 64 user's manual and a few issues of Compute's Gazette, to learn a bit more about my favorite chiptune chip, the MOS Technology 6581/8580 Sound Interface Device, better known as the SID. This is the chip that powered the Commodore 64's sound, and therefore powered the epic compositions of artists like Martin Galway, Rob Hubbard, Jeroen Tel, Dave Warhol, and Ben Daglish. That music is the very pulse of my childhood and even in adulthood I still keep finding new things to admire in it.

So the above screenshot is of a little program I wrote on my Commodore 64 emulator, WinVICE, to play a few notes in very rapid succession. The "POKE" commands on lines 40, 70, 90, and 110 tell the computer to play the pitches C, E, G, and C -- a simple C-major chord broken up into an arpeggio. The lines with "FORT=..." determine the length of time each note sounds, and it turns out that "1TO10" is a very short time. Line 130 loops the four notes over and over again. The end result is a very fast, rippling arpeggiation sound -- something that would become essential to the texture of SID tunes, especially those by Galway, and which plays exactly to the strengths of computerized music because of course no human could play the notes that fast, at least not without getting tired pretty quickly. Well, maybe Liszt could.

Anyway, the program in the screenshot above results in this sound.

It was a delight just to make this little foray into an obsolete form of computer audio technology which still, 35 years later, seems like incomprehensible wizardry. I wish that, as a 10-year-old, I had actually read the damn manual for my family's C64 instead of just playing games all the time.

Screenshot of the day: The Magic Candle, redux redux

Yesterday I pointed out that the very first choice you can make in Ali Atabek's brilliant 1989 role-playing-game The Magic Candle is whether to play the game at all. Today's screenshot shows what happens if you choose "no" -- if you say to the King of Deruvia: "Thanks all the same, but I'm not really interested in saving the world."

As the above screenshot shows, the King is understandably disappointed. After hitting the space bar you are given an option to reload the game. You don't get to, you know, have a free-form career as a pirate after choosing not to take on the quest, or anything like that.

It just makes me chuckle to think that Atabek and his team bothered to consider the possibility of a "no" response and how that would make the King feel, and they coded all that in.

Screenshot of the day: The Magic Candle, redux

So this is an actual in-game graphical screenshot from The Magic Candle, although it's really more of an opening cutscene. You can see a few things about the game's graphic design. First, much the same tileset that's used to render a mostly-top-down, Ultima-style game window is also, here, applied to something much more pictorial, with the "camera" essentially at eye-level facing forward. The individual character icons are identical to what they will be later, so it's really just that wall in the background that shifts the perspective. In a sense, The Magic Candle tries to have its tileset cake and eat it too: it plays like a top-down game but sometimes feints visually toward something more isometric. Also, as we can see, it's not a very pretty game, at least in its Commodore 64 incarnation. Some 8-bit titles achieve tremendous visual economy and even elegance with their limited means. This is not one of those games; it's colorful but jumbled, and the characters are even more stick-figure-like than usual, particularly the green guy with the feather in his hat. At the same time there's a vague aura of good humor; this isn't a game that takes itself too seriously.

The real reason I chose this screenshot, though, is in the text box. You are at the very beginning of your quest; you haven't even had a chance to move your character or do any kind of input at all. Presumably you spent your hard-earned money on the game (you did, riiiiiight?) and are excited to start playing. So the very first choice you get to make is whether to do the quest at all -- whether, in effect, to play the game you just started! And there's a "no" option! What a charmingly weird moment. So what happens when you say "no"? Tune in next time...