Chris++

Misadventure Revised is probably my favorite hack, as it expands the Kingdom more than any other that I've played. (Never mind that the guy misspelled the title as Missadventure. It's the game that counts, right?) Of course, that's if you don't want to get DOSBox and Indenture, and play Game 5, with its hundreds of rooms. Awesome, I tell ya!

Pasted below is the Tron chapter of the Classic-Gaming Bookcast (without the images). I'm only including it because I thought you guys might enjoy reading it. I didn't realize that there were other huge fans of the film, at least beyond the association-with-old-games interest level. I hope you enjoy it...it was unexpectedly difficult to articulate why the movie means so much to me! --- In late 1982 or early '83, we rented the movie Tron for our Betamax VCR. Preposterously, I hadn't gotten around to seeing it on the big screen. I figured out how to copy it, using a borrowed second machine, and watched it over and over again. I bought the VHS tape five or six years later, and the double DVD on the film's twentieth anniversary in '02. Some of the dialogue might have been hokey, even when the movie was new, but I was mesmerized by the visualizations and plot details. I tended to live in my own world half the time anyway; upon seeing Tron, I transformed the real one from inside my head. I didn't quite mean to. It just made the repetitious things in a kid's life cooler. I left solid walls of light along the sidewalk, and the glinting tiles and painted-over bricks of my elementary school became circuited tunnels through which I ominously soared. I wasn't noticeably physical about any of this. I didn't have to be. I'd already filled my skull with video-game images over the prior year. Now the three-dimensional ramifications of living in that universe were absorbed into my mental metabolism. The screens that connected the everyday world to these new ones weren't monitors or television tubes, but windows. Locations from various games flew enticingly past me as I walked by things as formerly ordinary as jungle gyms and chain-link fences. It's not that I didn't enjoy being a kid. There were simply aspects that I found objectionable. Being expected to attend school every day felt like a prison sentence. And I reviled not having the adult abilities to do stuff. This didn't concern unrestricted toy shopping, theme-park trips or other external extravagances. I wanted to play real musical instruments and write real books. I could save odd-job money toward the former, and practice the latter on my mom's typewriter; but I wasn't skilled yet, and I was impatient to truly get started. Something that was possible, however, was to competently explore that limitless other place, finding and doing things previously consigned to my imagination. Tron alluringly blurred the line. I could even learn to create my own parts of that other place, if only I could get my hands on a computer. As I was already acclimating myself to a coexistence with other humans by adopting the crucial society-is-stupidly-funny mindset (I didn't know how to apply words like "absurdly amusing"), it was impactful to see just how easily alternate life could be created. My widening eyes watched Flynn and Alan actually communicating with the humanoid programs they'd "written," using secret messages such as "Request access to Clu program. Code 6 password to memory 0222." Outside the VCR, every spinning thing that I saw reminded me of the Master Control Program, and anything laid out in a grid fashion was an electronic, beautifully unambiguous expanse. When Flynn was sucked into the collective digital world and was able to interact with the walking, talking realizations of his own keyboard work, I was sucked in, myself. The main function of teachers seemed to be to detract my attention from the things with which I really loved to fill my brain. Their inapplicable blather might have prepared me to be a good drone, so it's fortunate that affordable home video games came along when they did. I believe that I initially played the Tron coin-op in the small game room at Uncle Cliff's, an Albuquerque amusement park. (The name has since been changed to Cliff's, but he's not fooling anyone. He's still my uncle!) When I play it now, it strikes me as a continually repeated quartet of largely derivative sub-games that rapidly rise in difficulty. It's blatantly designed to scarf up as much money as possible. In this sense, I suppose, it was technologically prophetic. My associations with the game are so positive that I occasionally play it anyway. I have a great time, notwithstanding any opinions I've formed since the '80s. This is perhaps the only arcade game from which I can't objectively detach my early affection, for the kid Chris was captivated. It was as close as I could get to literally playing a part in the movie, and I watched older players until I memorized their tactics and patterns. I became quite good myself, and still remember most of the maneuvers. In fact, if I'm out on one of my treasured nighttime walks and I get hit by a falling piano or something, I'll be in trouble when I try to recall my blood type. The poor paramedic will hear little more than, "High speed. Forward. Right. Left. Left. Left." He'll be all set if he ever gives up his work to drive a Light Cycle, though. I should know. http://www.orphanedgames.com

Lance rules, and has ruled for a very long time. I'm endlessly happy to see that Video 61 is still thriving. There's my 2K.

I used Scott Stilphen's map to beat Fathom back in '02, and I bring this up because, when I had my own channel and did a complete Easter-egg series, my comments on the game were either exactly or very close to: "I started out really enjoying Fathom, but by the time I beat it, I thought, 'Yay! I never have to play this game again!'" It's not as if I "don't like" it...the concept, graphics, smoothness, adventure-game layout, "game world" hugeness, etc. are all great. And I always applaud originality; it's a biggie for me. I admire Fulop for the creative risk-taking alone. But smoothness, precise graphical interaction, etc. are all typically superb on the 2600, so those aren't out of the ordinary. The thing is, those qualities make a lot of games feel good to play. Not this one. "Painstaking" is the word I would use. First off, it has a time limit (a personal bugbear) and calls for too much precision. The half-Jousty controls should have been made entirely Jousty. These elements boost the difficulty to the level of Unnecessarily High, along the lines of something like the eight-bit dog Manic Miner: Don't screw up a single thing, or you're done! If you accidentally leave the sky screen where you've revealed a trident piece, it's gone. You can make it come back, but by that point, you've used up all of the "good clouds" and now lose time for every "bad cloud" you touch. Perhaps a boundary to keep your bird from being bounced through the damn border would have made it more fun. (Say that three times fast.) Still, I wish this level of giddy originality and fantastical invention weren't lost to time. (These aren't show comments, Ferg -- I never see the point of writing in just to share negative opinions. The exception was, of course, Swordquest: FireWorld.)

Very cool. That Elite looks close to the Amiga version; I wish it had come out.

Cool. Thanks for the links!

Wow; my priorities certainly differ vastly from that guy's. I don't care about anything so tedious as marketing observations or the appearance of a controller. Such a superficiality doesn't concern me; I dig the Jaguar controller. I've never found it difficult to use, so its reputation (among some) has always puzzled me. My criteria: "Is the game-play fun for me? Does the game feel good to play?" Anything beyond that is an irrelevant sociological imposition, and has nothing to do with the game itself. I meant all of the above in a less grumpy manner than it came off. Do you conduct interviews with game programmers? Do you have a link to prior ones? I love reading stuff like that.

I've always thought that a sit-down model of Battle Zone would have been awesome. I guess it would be called a "turret cabinet" instead of a "cockpit cabinet"! The periscope wouldn't even be necessary. Being surrounded by the cabinet and speakers would have made it even cooler than the cockpit version of Red Baron. That and Star Wars are great games as well, but they're both wallpaper games (as I call games with forced scrolling, whether in the first person or not). I prefer to have control over the direction of my vehicle, rather than being subjected to a mere shooting gallery. Still, I won't pretend that the trench phase in the Star Wars game isn't awesome.

In 1997 or '98, I was visiting family in Buffalo. I saw a Jaguar on sale for a very low price -- $40, maybe -- at Kay-Bee Toys. The only reason I'd walked to the mall (a place in which I won't even set foot these days) was to look at records. One of their stores still had 33s. Well, also, I was antsy and wanted a walk! I saw the Kay-Bee and stopped in to see if they were selling any cheap 2600 games, as they had a few years prior. I saw the Jaguar and realized that I didn't know a thing about it. The most recent platforms I owned were an Atari 2600, a Commodore 64 and a C128. I was still gratefully fixated on those old pals, I programmed quite a bit, and I even wrote essays / articles about "old" games. I did the latter for my own amusement. I thought that nobody else on Earth would understand why I could find pleasure in playing '70s and '80s games, much less writing about them. I didn't know that any classic-game newsletters existed, and I hadn't been online yet, at least beyond CompuServe. I didn't think "modern" games would be much fun. These were the days of Myst and mere interactive movies (in essence), sold on that latest over-hyped fad, the multimedia CD-ROM. But seeing the Atari logo, and feeling glad that there still was an Atari, I was drawn to the table full of Jaguars and cartridges near the entrance. "Wow, that's cheap," I said to myself. "But I wouldn't be able to fit it into my suitcase." Then I saw the Tempest 2000 box. Like anyone else in his right mind who had played the arcade game in the early '80s, I had wanted a home version of Tempest for years. I examined the back of the box and saw that the graphics had grown advanced enough to make the potential vector-to-raster problems practically moot. I then noticed that the cartridge included a conversion of the original Tempest, which was being called Classic Tempest. At that point, I had to force myself to put down the cartridge box and walk away very quickly. (I'm pretty good about not spending cash unnecessarily.) However, as you can imagine, I couldn't stop thinking about it afterward. I got back to my grandmother's place, went down to the bedroom-like basement where I was staying, and tried to read. But of course, I kept thinking, I would be able to play Tempest at home...I would never run out of quarters...it's a very inexpensive console...the games are only ten bucks apiece...isn't it high time I treated myself to my first new system since the C128? Tempest at home...Tempest at home... Then I glanced over at my suitcase. I've always liked to bring just one, so it's usually huge. This one certainly was. Hmm...the console box could fit easily! There was no use in fighting it anymore. I walked back to the mall and bought the Jaguar, along with Tempest 2000 and Iron Soldier. Back in the basement, I opened everything up, read the manuals and basically drooled for three or four days. When I got back to Albuquerque, hooked up the console and started playing, I realized that I had made the right decision. I had no regrets about shelling out most of the spending cash I'd brought on vacation. Playing Jaguar games for the first time was a mind-blowing experience. Consider: I had never played anything more modern than Super Mario Bros. 3 on my bass player's NES. I had never even seen a first-person shoot-'em-up being played. And all in one day, I played Tempest 2000, Iron Soldier and the awesome, highly underrated Cybermorph. (You can mute Skylar's voice, people.) Around that time, I started hanging out again with a buddy from high school named Adam. I hadn't seen him in ten years. When we ran into each other, I learned that he, too, was into old games. It surprised me that anybody was. Over the next few months, in between alerting me to the presence of a few classic-game newsletters (including his own, to which I would eventually contribute quite a lot) and building me an Amiga 2500, he lent me the Jaguar version of Doom. I had never played the game before. The Jag version was my first. I plugged in the cartridge, turned on the console, started the game and...I've never recovered. Every modern game that I've bought since then (I've gotten as recent as the PS2! Movin' on up!) has directly resulted from my obsession with Doom, which led to a love for solo first-person exploration / killing-everything games. These days, I run the source port ZDoom on my PC, choosing from hundreds of maps made by fellow players, and designing some of my own. But every few months, I still play Cybermorph and Iron Soldier all the way through. The buildings in the latter look just as astonishingly cool when they fall to flaming pieces as they did back in the late '90s, when I had reached the grizzly old age of 25 and Atari had captivated me all over again. I will love the Jaguar forever.