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Computer Chronicles Episodes Highlight Classic Games

Posted by simoniker on from the zorkity-zork-zork dept.

Thanks to Waxy.org for its weblog entry highlighting some of the classic gaming-related episodes of the Computer Chronicles TV show, all freely downloadable courtesy of the Internet Archive. Waxy.org particularly highlights the Computer Games episode from January 1985, where "The authors of Sargon and Millionaire demo them on the original Mac, and talks to Pitfall creator David Crane about Ghostbusters and David Lebling discusses Zork and other text-based adventure games. The short piece on the fledgling Lucasarts (then named Lucasfilm) is great, which had just released its first two games a few months before, the groundbreaking Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer" Also noted is a Software Piracy episode from 1985 including "a spirited debate between an Activision exec against a developer of a cracking utility", and another gaming episode from 1984 including "Electronic Arts' Bill Budge showing off the classic Pinball Construction Set."

34 comments

  1. Ballblazer and Fractalus by AtariAmarok · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus (or Ballblaster and Behind Jagglines) were excellent in their design and playability.

    The "scariest videogame moment" for me to this day is what happens when a guy you are trying to rescue in "Jagglines" turns out to be a monster and smashes the windshield of the spaceships.

    A sequel to "Ballblazer" came out during the 1990s, but I never heard if it was any good. Any word on this one?

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
    1. Re:Ballblazer and Fractalus by Black+Hitler · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think the sequel you refer to was Ballblazer Champions. Which sucked. BattleSport was a sort of spiritual sequel to Ballblazer and was a MUCH better game, but I'm not sure it ever came out on any system besides the 3DO.

  2. Drive the Hedge Trimmer by AtariAmarok · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Almost forgot about this one: David Crane's "Ghostbusters", as mentioned in the item.

    Anyone else play this one? It usually worked OK, but was plagued with occasional Commodore 64 sprite glitches. The 'Buster's ambulance would sometimes appear as a graphic mess that looked like a picket fence in front of a flowering hedge....going down the road. The Hedge Trimmer, we called it. When when it moved from side to side, it did not erase itself.

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
    1. Re:Drive the Hedge Trimmer by nmnilsson · · Score: 1

      I had totally forgotten about it - thanks for that drive down memory lane.

      Ah, my old C64...
      Reading imported Compute! Gazettes and be amazed by the dazzling game advertisements;
      the hours spent in loving labor, typing in machine code for a game (afterwards realizing I didn't know how to save it to tape :-);

      I thank Infocom for roughly half my English vocabulary.

      I'm going to find me an emulator...

      --
      No sig to see here. Move along.
  3. back in the day by kurosawdust · · Score: 5, Interesting
    While we're reminiscing about the Computer Chronicles show, anyone remember the short-lived feature where you could download shareware programs via your TV card and some utility that converted encoded TV signals into data? about 1/4th of the screen would be this static (the "data" that you could grab with your TV card) and the rest of the screen was some guy describing all the shareware that the three people who actually had a TV card, bought that conversion software, were watching the program at that particular moment, and interested enough in the shareware to launch it were downloading. Talk about niche.

    I'm not crazy, I swear. This was really a segment on a computer show (I'm not *positive* it was Computer Chronicles, but that sounds right).

    1. Re:back in the day by bigbigbison · · Score: 1

      Yes I remember it. It was computer chronicles. I remember it being the entire screen though. I thought it was cool at the time and wanted one but luckilly had no idea where to get one (this was way before i even knew what the internet was)

      --
      http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
  4. He Slimed Me! by GreenHell · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I remember that game, either it or Space Taxi was the first time I had ever heard synthesized speech on a computer. However, I never had the aforementioned problem.

    Then again, it's been so long since I played it that I may have just forgotten.

    --
    "I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
    1. Re:He Slimed Me! by paulcammish · · Score: 2, Funny
      Synthesized Speech! Ha! That was sampled!

      Now, the Currah MicroSpeech cart/plugin/'big black thing' for the Sinclair Spectrum... now THAT was Synth Speech.

      I can still hear it to this day...
      "The ban-shee way-uls at yoo und no-thing happ-uns."

      Oh, and the hours upons hours of fun typing:
      LET S$="Would you like to play a nice game of thermonuclear war"

      Those were the days...

    2. Re:He Slimed Me! by GreenHell · · Score: 1

      Sampled? Interesting, I (obviously) never knew that. It would make sense as to why it sounded so good though.

      Now, I still know nothing about whether or not Space Taxi was synth or sampled.

      --
      "I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
    3. Re:He Slimed Me! by John+Harrison · · Score: 1

      Do you have a reference for that? I didn't know that there was such a thing as sampled speech for the C=64. There were several speech synthesis packages for it though.

      --
      Lasers Controlled Games!
    4. Re:He Slimed Me! by paulcammish · · Score: 1
      Well, compare and contrast:

      Sampled vs Synth.

      I havent found a speech synth that could do a good Maniacal Laugh yet, either...

    5. Re:He Slimed Me! by John+Harrison · · Score: 1

      The difference could be easily explained. This is not general purpose speech synth. It is one or two sounds in a game. They could have put a lot of time into the functions used to generate the sound without acutally sampling it. I am unaware of any sampled audio on the C=64.

      --
      Lasers Controlled Games!
    6. Re:He Slimed Me! by iocat · · Score: 1
      Sampling audio on the Apple II was actually pretty easy -- it involved recording a "sample" on tape, then inputing that part of the tape as data, then playing it back. I think Creative Computing (or possible Compute!) did an article w/ listing that explained it pretty well.

      I assume that you could do the same thing on C64.

      --

      Dude, I think I can see my house from here.

    7. Re:He Slimed Me! by John+Harrison · · Score: 1
      Do you have a link? I subscribed to Compute's Gazette (the C=64 specific version) for years and never heard of such a thing. If it were easy to do, as you claim, then lots of games would have excellent samples, but that isn't the case. I still think that all sounds coming out of the C=64 speaker were produced algorithmically. I remember there being a big shock over the quality of the two synthesized voices in Impossible Mission.

      Now the Atari 400/800 series had a feature that could play an audio track from a data tape while loading data. The first time I heard that I was shocked, since the quality of the audio was so impressive. Once it was explained to me though it seemed kind of dumb.

      --
      Lasers Controlled Games!
    8. Re:He Slimed Me! by iocat · · Score: 1

      I know it took up a ton of space; one of the only places I ever saw it on the Apple II was on a crack of Adventure Mapper ("Cracked by Apple Bandit and Silicon Scorpion"). I have a friend who is a C64 expert and will ask him later today. Worst case one could probably email David Crane and just ask him. I'll post my friend's answer here tonight if you're still interested!

      --

      Dude, I think I can see my house from here.

    9. Re:He Slimed Me! by John+Harrison · · Score: 1

      That would be great. I googled for it a bit and couldn't find any documentation of how it was generated, but I did find a .au file, and I have to admit it sounds even better than I remember. It might be sampled. It would be interesting to know how that would work.

      --
      Lasers Controlled Games!
    10. Re:He Slimed Me! by iocat · · Score: 1

      I spoke to my friend and he told me that there were in fact several hardware add ons for the C64 that could do limited amounts of sound sampling. I forgot the name, but have pointed him to this thread, so he may add it in himself. He also listed off several other instances of samped speech on C64, all of which I forgot, sorry!

      --

      Dude, I think I can see my house from here.

    11. Re:He Slimed Me! by John+Harrison · · Score: 1

      So would the hardware add on be used for capture and playback or only for capture? Could you then playback a sampled sound without specialized hardware?

      --
      Lasers Controlled Games!
    12. Re:He Slimed Me! by iocat · · Score: 1

      I think it would capture and then could playback via software. One was called "VoiceMaster 64." A quick googling turned up a few German references.

      --

      Dude, I think I can see my house from here.

  5. Millionaire by Visigothe · · Score: 3, Informative

    I found the "Millionaire" segment to be rather amusing. They took data from the [then current] stock markets. If you look closely, you can see where the Dow was around that time in 1985 [well below 1000].. contrast to what it is now.

    Also, is that not the worst combo toupee/comb-over on the planet?

    --
    Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
  6. Pinball Construction Set by digitalgiblet · · Score: 3, Informative
    Man, I loved that game. My brother and I played the crap out of it on the C-64.

    Another game I loved was Wargame Construction Set. The great thing about it was that the graphics were so primitive any schmuck could make a "mod". You didn't need to have a friggin' clue about 3D modeling... You just picked a little sprite and adjusted properties.

    You could probably replicate the game in a few weeks in Java, but I doubt anyone today would accept the graphics... :-(

    1. Re:Pinball Construction Set by Carnildo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You could probably replicate the game in a few weeks in Java, but I doubt anyone today would accept the graphics... :-(

      Depends. What's the gameplay like? After all, Nethack is still popular, and I guarantee the graphics aren't as good.

      --
      "They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
    2. Re:Pinball Construction Set by digitalgiblet · · Score: 1
      "These little squares are tanks and those little squares are infantry..."

      You have a good point about nethack. The biggest problem I have now is that I haven't played the game in almost 20 years... My memory may be a bit faulty... Of course you wouldn't want to perfectly replicate the old game, just use it as inspiration. Networked play would be fun. Not sure how well turn based play would work with multiplayer, however.

      Must...fight...urge...to...take...on...another.. .project... ;-)

  7. Koronis Rift by sammaffei · · Score: 1

    Now, that was one cool Lucasfilm game.

    --

    Political correctness is the newest form of slavery.

  8. Zork Movie by Henry+V+.009 · · Score: 1

    I am probably the only person on the planet who is a million times more interested in a Zork movie trilogy than those silly and boring LOTR movies.

    1. Re:Zork Movie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, I agree with you. LOTR sucks.

  9. Glad I already had 'em! by Sean+Johnson · · Score: 1

    Now I can avoid the inevitable rush of slashdotters. However, the Internet Archives site seems to have enough to handle almost any load. I am a junkie on that site, and it never seems to slow down. I have prob half of all the Computer Chronicles episodes already. One of my favs is the one about the Intel 386. Just watching them oogle over this CPU, that is by now about 18 yrs or so old, is really funy. OOH it takes half a minute to spell check 100 words in a document with the 386. And it takes a couple minutes with the 286. DROOL! Just for comparison I did a spell check test on my Athlon XP 2000+. I told it to search and replace the word "the" with the word "mississippi" in the entire text book of Carl Sagan's "Contact". About 20,000 words or so. It took about 4 seconds. That is something that helps hit home how far computers have come in the last 20 years.

    --
    >>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
  10. What about TEMPEST??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    TEMPEST rocks! I'm really looking forward to this new remake of the game that's coming out soon for the Pocket PC: Vector Blaster

    1. Re:What about TEMPEST??? by digitalgiblet · · Score: 1

      Tempest was one of my all time favorite arcade games. I've tried it on MAME, etc. but it is difficult to play without the little dial to control it. Same is true for several other games Gyruss comes to mind. Their gameplay was pretty much designed around the dial.

    2. Re:What about TEMPEST??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah that's what so unique about this new Vector Blaster game (I was on the beta test program)... it uses the stylus as the input, so it really gives you that silky-smooth feel of the dial. It's pretty dang clever if you ask me, but my hand kept getting cramped after a few hours :-)

  11. old games by John+Harrison · · Score: 1

    I recently downloaded a Windows reimplementation of Telengard, a C=64 dungeon crawler. It uses the original gameplay and graphics. It is not nearly as fun as I remember it being.

    --
    Lasers Controlled Games!
    1. Re:old games by digitalgiblet · · Score: 1
      My God, but the nostalgia runs thick here...

      I haven't thought about Telengard in a very long time. It was mostly in basic (maybe all in basic, I don't remember), and I printed the entire thing out on scroll paper. It was like 50 feet long and I remember crawling back and forth on the floor tracing the code looking for ways to cheat...

      Let's just say that my characters never had trouble with bad stats or not enough money...

      Since we are on the Commodore nostalgia kick, who remembers Phantasy or Impossible Mission?

    2. Re:old games by John+Harrison · · Score: 1
      "Stay a while... Stay FOREVER!!!"

      Yeah, that was a tough one. Took forever to complete.

      --
      Lasers Controlled Games!