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Twenty-five Years at the Heart of Gaming
Andrew Leonard writes "Salon has a loooong interview with Eugene Jarvis, the creator of legendary arcade video games Defender and Robotron, up today. Jarvis talks about why he is pro-emulators, anti-Grand Theft Auto, still focused on arcade games, and deeply worried about terrorism. It's a good read, even if you have to watch a ten second ad to get access."
for some reason i always liked duke nukem 1 & 2 better then duke nukem 3d.
So intense.
Even the best players could only stave off an inevitable death for a little while. Towards the end, finding a machine that didn't have the up/down lever worn out was almost impossible.
If only there was a decent MAME controller for it withh all the buttons and lever in the rigth place....
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
always the way that the newer games get, and the faster the hardware becomes, the more we like the really old games. It's a sort of nostalgia, I guess. And I'm very prone to it myself, even if the game I'm looking for (in vain) is Blood and Magic.....
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
Everyone? Painting with a rather broad brush there, aren't you?
I grew up in the Pac-Man era. (I was a Tempest and Robotron junkie myself.) I love Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City! GTA:3 is like watching a really good 1970s mobster movie, except you get to play the part of the low-level thug, working your way up the ladder by doing ugly jobs for ugly people. GTA:VC is more like the 1980s drug-dealing mafia movie, and is equally entertaining. Performances from actors like Joey "Pants" Pantaliano and Ray Liota, along with the differences of handling characteristics of different cars, make both games extremely fun and entertaining for me.
I'm an X-Box owner, so I will have to wait a couple years for GTA:SA to get ported over, but the first two are plenty enough to keep me amused until then while my PS2-owning friends are playing the new one.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It doesn't matter if they like or dislike GTA and games of the present generation. Seriously there is no way in hell any one game can please EVERYONE. So stop trying.
I don't ever remember pacman and robotron giving me 8hrs of nonstop fun. At least GTA has. Stop labeling today's games like they are garbage. I can program a game like pacman using 1 joystick and no buttons. Those aren't even games, they are like light show demos.
I remember the days when I was young, dumb(er) and had way too much time on my hands.
When I was bored I used to go to a local bar and kill 2-3 hours playing Pac-Man... on a single quarter.
It was great, because I could hustle beers from other patrons by betting whether I could get 100,000 or 200,000 (or whatever) points, all because I had the Holy Grail of Pac-mania: The Ninth-Key Pattern.
I guess I can understand why my wife won't let me get one of those oldie-but-goodie machines for our place.
But I still have some of those memories.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
It's a good read, even if you have to watch a ten second ad to get access.
I use lynx, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, I do. There doesn't seem to be a way to get to the advert. Is there a way around? (Aside from waiting for someone to post TFA.)
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
He said that has they filmed some of the Golden Gate bridge for their new game the FBI called and wanted to know what they were doing! That's amazing!
:-)
I guess someone thought they looked suspicious and turned in their license plate number. But still... You'd think that if you wanted to scope out the bridge you could, ya know, just drive over it and take pictures out the back window with a digital camera or something. Or play like a tourist. Does the FBI call all those people, too?
I'm not so much outraged or anything as I am amazed that they can have enough resources to even bother with it. I mean, what if they weren't able to get ahold of them with a simple phone call? Would they have dispatched a team to go check up on these guys? What if it was a rental car or something? How far will they go based on one phoned in tip? There's a lot of bored and paranoid people in the world. Does the FBI respond to EVERYTHING that gets called in--no matter how small?
Ok, I know it has nothing to do with the interview (which is awesome). Oh well.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I'm confused, the link to the 3rd page of the article is
"Your cause should be just -- why amoral games like "Grand Theft Auto" are wrong"
But nowhere in the 3rd page, or in the entire interview do they talk about GTA infact the Eugene Jarvis talks about how we need to stop blaming games for our problems.
Apparently Salon doesnt take the time to check their content delivery system.
For every article they have you can just change the filename from index_rp.html to index.html and bypass the advertising or registration.
Raw Thrills' first volley is the upcoming counterterrorism two-player shooter "Target: Terror." "Target: Terror" asks players to save the Golden Gate Bridge, defend the Los Alamos Laboratory, and, somewhat controversially, prevent a hijacked airliner from crashing into the White House.
I used to be an avid arcade fan. 'Bout six years ago in my high-school prime, I'd always frequent the arcade. Stopped going for a couple reasons:
1) Pay per play was the shits...that was right around the time where they were coming out with the bloody "snowboarding" and "surfing" games that involved you standing on a board and moving it with your feet. Only cost $1.50 a play, and for a beginner to get 15 seconds of play on it not knowing how to get to the first checkpoint fast enough was enough to say bye-bye to those games. So many of them became 15 seconds of failure for too much freakin' money.
2) Games were no longer inventive. I'm sorry, but you can only make too many Street Fighters (I believe Capcom's cranked out 24 to date in the US alone) before it's no longer has flare. Speaking of which...
3) No more flare. There's no game now where you just have people surrounding the thing just begging for a glimpse of the wizard at play, wanting a glimpse at the levels which no human has ever touched before. When I was a kid, my gosh, there'd be 20 people crowded around the TMNT arcade machine just wanting a glimpse of what happened after you defeated Shreddar. There's none of that flare now.
The last game I remember that I loved playing and really got into was Area 51. I could get five minutes minimum of play for 33 cents (3 plays for a buck at my local arcade). I mean, the type of play was simple...but I really felt the desire to get further and further into it...that's what so many games are missing. Everybody thinks its about the big-fat graphics. It's not. You can get graphics now on a home console. It's about gameplay. Why did so many people throw gobs of quarters into Smash T.V. (a game that to this day refuses to let me get past the fifth arena)...it's because there's that inner desire to push deeper into the game, because the gameplay starts you off simple and then just becomes more and more and more challenging, so the point where your nerves themselves actually pulse with the game.
That's why I think his ideas might work. You want a game to be successful, the players want and need to get into it, and I'm sure there's plenty of Americans who would love to defend their country against terrorist badasses, just like before when everybody wanted to defend the world against alien badasses!
P.P.S- Immoral behavior? Guess what- there is no wrong and no right. There's only pleasure and pain.
And you wonder why people criticize GTA3? Your moral compass is broken.
Shoot my or?
Seriously, times have not changed that much. Back in the 80s, I knew a kid who took a sheath knife to school every day (he hid it in his sock.)
Working as a teacher in recent years, I've found kids to be more or less the same as they were then. A few troublemakers from terrible home situations, but mostly good kids who go through the motions of being students in order to keep the adults from hassling them so they can socialize over lunch. Drug use is close to the same rate as back then, and smoking is way, way down.
Don't let the hype of a handful of shooting sprees from the last few years mislead you. If you look at the cold, hard, unbiased numbers, even gun violence is down.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
inserting a quarter/pressing start was the best video game sound effect ever.
Nice strawman. In most cases we don't even know who the authors are because Atari and other companies had a policy of deliberately not releasing that information. That's why Activision came to be, disgruntled Atari employees who wanted recognition for the games they made. But, setting that aside for the moment, almost all of these games were "works for hire", and as a result the authors got paid to sit there and write the game and that is all. If there were megabucks made off the game, all that stayed with the company, with maybe a little bonus for the guys/gals as incentive or a raise. No "points", no royalties or residuals from revenue. Furthermore, as legal entites pretty much none of the companies who produced these games exist anymore. Atari alone has been bought a number of times, either alone or when its parent was acquired by someone else again. You think if the current company masters put out a "classics" ROM pack and sell it (not that they would) any of the original authors will see a dime? Why in hell would they pay anything to someone who had an association with things 6 companies ago?
Whatever you're smoking, pass it around!
Compare that with the BBC wiping early episodes of Dr. Who so that they could reuse the tape, and having to hope some people around the world had "copies" of it lying around.
I know for the sub 21 generation its boring to hear us old timers go on about the golden days of arcades but really it was something you had to experience. As a kid you'd never have enough money so you'd scrounge up quarters and change from everywhere in your house. Then you'd grab some friends and bike to the arcade. Awaiting you to turn you pennies and dimes into quarters was an old man wearing a visor and smoking a stinky cigar. I'll never forget trying to hold my breath in so I wouldn't have to deal with the stench. Then it came to the matter of how to spend your precious quarters. Deciding how much to spend and on what was not to be taken lightly. Remember not everyone was a guru. Contrary to what some of the people here say most of us could not play the same quarter for an hour straight. Games like Star Wars, Tron, Elevator Action, and Spy Hunter were like nothing else available at home. The best we had was Atari or Intellivision and certainly not those great joysticks and driving pedals. Pretty soon though home systems started catching up with what the arcades offered and they started charging $1.00 or more for many games. How many kids can afford to spend that much per game at an arcade? I stopped going to the arcade by the time I started High School and I can't really recall last time I was in an actual arcade.
Anyway thanks to MAME I can still play those old games once in a while. For the younger crowd they'll never understand why we rant on about them. Playing robotron via MAME at your Home PC with unlimited quarters at your disposal just doesn't come close to what it was really like. Maybe I'll put a few half smoked cigars near my PC and put a quarter slot where my floppy drive used to be...
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Role and circumstances mean everything... intent matters in the eyes of the law (it's even codified in most world religions, where a strong distinction is made between killing based on circumstances)
If you pull a trigger and somebody dies, one of several outcomes will occur: you can be decorated, exonerated, or go to the gas chamber... it's totally dependent on motive and circumstance.
If you're a Navy SEAL and you wax some terrorist, you get a medal, and rightfully so. I'm an individual, so I can't issue medals... but I'd shake your hand and buy you a beer for killing somebody like that (you're defending my currently-non-military hide and that of my family), because a terrorist who perpetrates the wholesale, deliberate slaughter of innocents deserves to die... period... and somebody's got to do that dirty work. If it's you, God bless you and here's a guinness on me.
If you're joe citizen and somebody breaks into your home with the intent to harm your family, and you kill him, you will generally be exonerated. Again, depends on motive and circumstance.
If you're a sociopathic ass who murders someone because they cut you off in traffic, you'll die in the electric chair. Goodbye... nobody will miss you.
In all three of these scenarios, you pulled a trigger and somebody died, but you were not sanctioned in two out of three because violence is not necessarily wrong... it's a tool to be used in extreme circumstances to protect the innocent (and sometimes punish the guilty).
I may have missed the entire point of your post... but it looked like you were trying to draw a moral equivalence where none really exists. Unless you're some kind of pacifist, there most certainly is justification for violence in some circumstances, and as someone who's assisted in the endeavor, I put terrorist hunting at the top of that list.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.