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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."
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.
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
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
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!
inserting a quarter/pressing start was the best video game sound effect ever.
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