Back to the Past
Yesterday, between the phone calls for the Student Film Festival, I spent some time in a time warp. I just picked up an Atari 2600 for my upcoming History of Videogames class at Laguna College of Art & Design.
The 2600 is not the first home console with interchangeable game cartridges but it is one of the first big winners of the console wars. One of the first systems to become the standard to meet or beat.
I picked up a number of games for the 2600 including the infamous E. T. movie tie in game. Movie tie in games have always been questionable from the beginning. With a built in audience often little effort is expended in the search for quality gameplay. E. T. was such a dog that warehouses of the unsold game cartridges of this title ended lifes buried in the dessert under a large slab on concrete. I am not kidding on this. It happened but not soon enough.
The game I am having the most fun with is Spider Fighter. There is a real Centipede feel to the game in the movement of the enemies and the shooting. This of course is all just an accident of design.
I already have a lot of these (most of these) games in ports for other systems but the controllers are completely different on those systems, better. So the game play is different. There is something about the clunky 2600 joystick with the one button firing control that makes the game more real then playing a port on Game Cube.
Speaking of ports, there are a number of arcade ports in the games that I bought for the 2600. Donkey Kong looks like a gingerbread man and Packman eats dashes not dots. They both play much as their arcade parent did, they just look different because of the memory limitations of the console.
Since I picked up the 2600 unit for student training I bought games for their importance in gaming history not for their quality. That means I picked up Football.
I have never understood the mentality behind sports games and I have not liked a sports game since Pong. But somebody bought and played these games in the past so they have an importance in the history of games even if they played no part in my own personal gaming history.
Normally I buy games I like, but now I find myself buying bad games in much the same way I buy bad animation: for the teaching value. Maybe if I show enough in the way of what not-to-do to my student in the classroom it will make the marketplace a little safer place in the future. Nobody sets out to design a bad game, it just works out that way far too many times.
The 2600 is not the first home console with interchangeable game cartridges but it is one of the first big winners of the console wars. One of the first systems to become the standard to meet or beat.
I picked up a number of games for the 2600 including the infamous E. T. movie tie in game. Movie tie in games have always been questionable from the beginning. With a built in audience often little effort is expended in the search for quality gameplay. E. T. was such a dog that warehouses of the unsold game cartridges of this title ended lifes buried in the dessert under a large slab on concrete. I am not kidding on this. It happened but not soon enough.
The game I am having the most fun with is Spider Fighter. There is a real Centipede feel to the game in the movement of the enemies and the shooting. This of course is all just an accident of design.
I already have a lot of these (most of these) games in ports for other systems but the controllers are completely different on those systems, better. So the game play is different. There is something about the clunky 2600 joystick with the one button firing control that makes the game more real then playing a port on Game Cube.
Speaking of ports, there are a number of arcade ports in the games that I bought for the 2600. Donkey Kong looks like a gingerbread man and Packman eats dashes not dots. They both play much as their arcade parent did, they just look different because of the memory limitations of the console.
Since I picked up the 2600 unit for student training I bought games for their importance in gaming history not for their quality. That means I picked up Football.
I have never understood the mentality behind sports games and I have not liked a sports game since Pong. But somebody bought and played these games in the past so they have an importance in the history of games even if they played no part in my own personal gaming history.
Normally I buy games I like, but now I find myself buying bad games in much the same way I buy bad animation: for the teaching value. Maybe if I show enough in the way of what not-to-do to my student in the classroom it will make the marketplace a little safer place in the future. Nobody sets out to design a bad game, it just works out that way far too many times.
posted by Larry Loc @ 8:11 AM
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