AKA Spook
Level 9 · text adventure · text parser · 1989
Platform · Amiga · Amstrad CPC · Atari 8-bit · Atari ST · C64 · DOS · ZX Spectrum
Download · DOS · Spectrum

There is only one reason I would ever deign to tell you about some boring old text adventure, and here it is: Scapeghost is awesome.

For one thing, the game is well-written—we hardly get to applaud computer games for good writing anymore!—and for another, it is authentically creepy.

A lot of the creep factor is indebted to the atmospheric artwork that accompanies each new location’s block of text. (One 1990 review calls the VGA art “photorealistic,” which, no, but all the versions really are very good.) You can’t interact with the pictures—that’s the sort of thing you’d find in Déjà Vu, a super-duper-early Macintosh point-and-click adventure game—but each backdrop goes a long way in establishing the setting’s grim moodiness.

You were Alan Chance. You were a good cop; now you’re a dead cop. You were trying to bust a dirty drug deal and now, in death, everyone assumes the worst about you. You wake up at your own funeral. You can practically taste the mist.

From the get-go, this adventure is slim on real mystery. If you already know to follow the one especially-suspicious dude, he basically confesses to your murder under his breath. God, why do murderers always talk to themselves? I ask you.

So you already know the identity of the two-timing detective who offed you. All that’s left is to vindicate your own death… FROM BEYOND THE GRAAAAAAVE.

In the beginning you can only pick up very small, light objects—a leaf, or maybe a flower petal, say—but if you pick up incrementally heavier little objects, you can eventually carry things like pebbles and scraps of paper. Soon you’ll be flipping switches and toppling fragile objects! You’re like a real ghost now!

There are other ghosts in the cemetery, too, and if you can assess what each ghost needs and somehow fulfill that need, you’ll be able to enlist each ghost’s help one by one. Here’s a hot tip: jot down the names of each ghost, or maybe the useful objects you notice lying around, whatever. That’s right, just scribble a list of words as you play. This is because, rather than telling the software you’d like to go north, east, north, north, you can use shorthand like “GO TO EDNA.” That’s wonderful. In playing text games and MUDs as a kid, I hated drawing those maps. I’m terrible at knowing where I am; once I do draw myself a map, I can’t even read it. I am definitely better at remembering landmarks—you could say I’m “object-oriented” maybe?—and this made navigating the game’s spaces a real treat instead of a chore.

The first chapter is drier, but it’s a terrific introduction and tutorial nonetheless. In small space, part one establishes what sort of things you might want to do, how to accomplish those things, and so on. It also establishes rules of the game-world: ghosts gain “permanence” and substance the more they do, but ghosts will be temporarily felled, for instance, by flashes of bright light.

The game is not timed—rather, it is turn-based—but as Alan Chance, you have a limited number of turns before sunrise. If you aren’t able to complete the first “night” in “time,” you can move right along to the next chapter anyway, if you like. That really takes a lot of the frustration out of the game.

In part two, “Haunted House,” things start to get much more interesting. The parser command “CONCENTRATE” (spoiler?) allows the late Detective Inspector to psychically replay the nefarious goings-on that ultimately conspired his death. Timing becomes much more important now; you’ll find yourself using your turns carefully so that you can avoid, say, the headlights of oncoming cars (spoilers).

In the final, most action-packed chapter—appropriately titled “Poltergeist”—you get to terrorize the bad guys and rescue a lady. Good luck!

If you have even an inkling as to how to tackle Scapeghost, the game’s pace moves at a clip. The writing is whip-smart and wry. And a little unexpectedly, the game is funny! Oh, it plays its creepy atmosphere straight, sure, and you generally won’t be chuckling, but sometimes Scapeghost gives in to its own silliness.

As a point-and-click adventure, even modern gamers would poop themselves. As a work of interactive fiction, Scapeghost is phenomenal (although frosh gamers might want to keep a walkthrough handy).

Scapeghost’s contemporary critics often complained about a “lack of creativity.” This is pretty baffling. I kinda want to go What the hell did people play in 1989, then, except that I can already guess: fantasy-adventure, cyberpunk sci-fi, dungeon-crawls. Sighing, I have to acknowledge the wafer-thin plane that divides “tired” and “classic” and call it a draw.

Odds and ends

• As you can imagine, it is very difficult to not repeatedly call Scapeghost “Spaceghost.” If you see any straggling errors, please let me know.
• I’m not sure what it’s like to be dead, but I bet it feels a lot like this. Spooky.
• The text parser does not recognize the word “at”. “To” is fine, apparently, but “at” is too much, too much.
• Level 9 was known for combining drawn or bitmapped graphics with text. The developers were thisclose to producing an officially-licensed Doctor Who game (source), but the project fell through.
• Level 9’s first five releases shipped on tapes packaged in ziplock baggies, as was the fashion then.
• Level 9’s first release, Colossal Adventure, was a reworking of Colossal Cave, or ADVENT, for home computers. (Adventure also inspired Ken and Roberta Williams to form Sierra On-Line.)
• Scapeghost was Level 9’s final—and reportedly “least successful”—game. It sold 15,000 copies at about twenty bucks a pop. Scapeghost was written by Pete Austin. Level 9 shuttered in June 1991.
• I filched screenshots from Scan0017 and Myabandonware.

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Derek and I have been spending an awful lot of time in Glitch, the free-to-play MMO that launched, finally, last month. (And when I saw “an awful lot of time,” I mean it. I’ve gained noticeable weight in the last three days. I’ve practically forgotten to keep eating, breathing, pooping, et cetera.)

Gameplay is ostensibly based on, of all things, the theory of ‘infinite play’ as outlined in this ultra-slim work of philosophy. The real point of Glitch, then, is “to continue the game for continuing-the-game’s sake.” There are gods and cities and objectives, sure, but there is no win: there is only forward.

In the earliest portions of Glitch, the dreaded ‘tutorial’ phase is scuttled in lieu of a long, unslodgy process of exploration. Your “Familiar”—he’s a google-eyed rock at the top of the screen, with occasional speech bubbles blooming from his sweet, mouthless little face—will give you small, achievable quest missions, which are less ‘go fetch’ and more ‘go discover!’ Your Familiar also helps you learn different “skills,” which open doors, in turn, to other skills. (When the Familiar is “studying,” his blank visage assumes a pair of reading glasses, adorably.)

Your autodidacticism is always and invariably rewarded with a triumphant trill, maybe even a badge or trophy, but then there’s that terrible carrot—there’s always more. And here is the truth about Glitch: the tutorial never ends. Because you’re always learning. That’s the game. And this could make you feel tired, but instead, it makes you feel awake.

But, but! Learning about what? Well. Your avatar has much to learn, say, about mining different rocks in search of certain elements. He might use those elements in all sorts of alchemical configurations, which he himself must discover (with or without the help of a user-edited Wiki, ahem). He might farm crops, clear-cut trees, cook, feed his piglets, buy a little house…! So Glitch combines the verdant charm of Harvest Moon with the hocus-pocus of Atelier Iris with the proceduralism of Cooking Mama. Worse yet, the game is every bit as infuriatingly addictive as some terrible Facebook time-suck, thanks to the constant momentum of unlocking-and-achieving. Other aspects—among them, Glitch’s coyly crass wordplay and emphasis on pasta sauces—are lifted directly from Kingdom of Loathing. And most horrendously of all, Glitch has a lot in common with Terraria, which is to say that it has well enough in common with Minecraft, which is to say that you’re royally boned if you’d ever planned to sleep again.

Glitch is no action game, though. Despite its tight controls and ‘platforming’ potential, it is a game about gardening. And I mean this in the pleasantest sense, because real-life gardening is a type of endless level-grinding that yields literal fruits, so that grinding can become its own reward. This is admittedly a simple synopsis of the game—it is so much more than gardening!—because there is also, yes yes I haven’t forgotten, the ‘social-ness’ of the game, which I am only beginning to explore.

And! There is even death! And when you die, passers-by can see a gravestone marking where you met your end, while you in the meantime are temporarily trapped in the bowels of Hell. To return topside, your avatar must crush a certain number of grapes underfoot. Really. And I know this all reads as a quirky aside, this whole bit about circumventing death itself, but it really isn’t. Here is my very favorite thing about Glitch’s idea of play: you won’t be punished. You don’t ‘drop’ all your hard-earned goods when you die. There is no lasting failure; quests are only left incomplete, waiting. Maybe certain creative acts demand an unseemly number of resources, but for the happy wanderer, the only thing separating him from his goal is Time. So there are no setbacks; again, there is only forward.

And then, of course, there is that inexorable endlessness, a quality that Glitch shares with other MMOs, but also with life.

Earlier this week, in our actual daily lives, Derek and I decided to look at an apartment together. Our decision hinged on a few shared priorities: affordability, of course, although we aren’t shy of spending the money, if that’s what it takes. Accessibility is another; is the apartment near a Blue Line train stop? A highway? Is it easy to get to a hardware store, a grocery? Would we each have enough space to work alone? (Because, while we have certain shared goals, we treasure time apart. We are good at different things, and very few of our hobbies intersect.) Is there an available practice space for a heavy metal band? (See also: Derek’s hobbies.) We looked at a beautiful building with a garden in back—the landlady, a middle-aged schoolteacher in a pop band of her own, was more roommate than landlady—but the building was so remote, located in a hard-to-get-to, run-down part of town. We passed on it. It broke my heart.

Then, in Groddle Forest, Derek and I took our meager savings and purchased two small apartments in-world. Derek found two vacancies nestled side-by-side, located in a residential area just off a major thoroughfare. We each have space enough for our separate gardens and chickens. I marveled aloud at Derek’s in-game apartment-hunting skills. And then I teased him: “Don’t break up with me,” I told him, “because then you’ll run into my avatar when she’s going into her apartment with her groceries. It could be awkward for you.” (That happened to me once, with an old boyfriend, in life.)

But also, not aloud, We will be OK, I thought.

Then the parallels between Glitch and our real routines became more insidiously palpable. “Can we really make egg muffin sandwiches?” I asked Derek.

“Well, we have English muffins,” Derek replied. “So check the fridge for turkey bacon. And see if there’s any cheese. And see how we’re doing on eggs. See what we need.”

“Oh, no,” I groaned, “it’s all a video game.”

And then I thought about how in Glitch I’m always rooting around for onions or bugging Derek for bubbles or butterfly milk while, in daily life, I’m always checking to see whether Green Grocer has shallots and mushrooms. Then, too, there is the sense of accomplishment I always feel, well before I actually ever get down to cookin’ something fancy. I stop and stare in wonder at what weird things I’ve managed to cram into a shopping bag. Because I don’t always find shallots; I am not always victorious.

So in its quest to eliminate concrete, legitimate, stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks failure, Glitch has struck on something remarkable. By taking punishments away—by letting the player explore, free of negative repercussions—Glitch becomes nicer than life. It becomes real play, the kind of play that helps grown-ups rediscover what it feels like to again approach all things in earnest. What could you achieve if there were nothing to lose?

“You see, I want this poem to be nicer than life,” Stephen Dunn wrote in a poem once. The poem goes on: “I want you to look at it / when anxiety zigzags your stomach / and the last tranquilizer is gone / and you need someone to tell you / I’ll be here when you want me / like the sound inside a shell.”

The poet then describes “what poetry can do” (“make you beautiful”), but he really didn’t have to explain it, did he? We already know what real, playful poetry can do. Poetry teaches without teaching; it preaches without preaching. It re-trains the brain—as cognitive behavioral therapy might—to acknowledge our own constraints without really respecting the limits, to marvel at possibility, to be guileless and fearless.

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When Jenn asked me if I’d assist in compiling this list, I was pretty excited! Ten years of games! I thought. Why, I have quite a few favorites in that lengthy time period I could mention.

Of course, narrowing it down is no easy feat. In terms of gameplay, video games haven’t exactly taken the huge technological leap the way they have in decades past, and graphically, the only real change is in visual detail. Nonetheless, this decade heralded the advent of downloading games and the return of in-console saving. Some games introduced these fresh innovative ideas; other games didn’t necessarily bring anything new to the table, but did what they did extremely well.

I’m not saying I played all the AAA titles and underground hits—I have eclectic gaming tastes, a low budget, and a proclivity for gaming mostly with other friends—but that has not stopped me from proselytizing the multiplayer goodness of Powerstone 2 or wild system-pushing 2600 homebrews like Adventure II to anyone unfortunate enough to get me started on the subject.

So here are some top picks from the gaming experiences of both Jenn and myself from the past 10 years, and hey, maybe you’ll find something interesting to check out! —Kevin B.

I don’t know! I’d like to tell you that making a list like this is not totally overwhelming. But that is a lie.

See, I’d really enjoyed the end-of-year/decade wrap-ups from Gamasutra and AV Club and Destructoid and everyone else I guess—they all made it seem so easy!—and so I said, “Kevin! Let’s do our own wrap-up! We’ll type it up really fast!”

And it hasn’t been fast, and we have day jobs, and I feel sort of terrible for asking Kevin to drop everything and throw this list together with me. It has been a painstakingly sloppy, brain-wracking collaboration. Have I really played every video game of note in the last ten years? Probably not! I don’t know anything! I admit it!

But still: we are so seldom afforded the opportunity to regale others with our generally ill-informed opinions, so, hey, we gleefully ran with it.

What follows are my, and contributor Kevin Bunch’s, top picks for the best video games… of the DECAAAADE! —Jenn F.

Zombie Game… of the DECADE

Jenn sez: I have complained endlessly about RE4. “It isn’t even a survival horror game!” I’ve moaned. “And there are all these tedious timed events and escort missions!” I’ve lamented. A casual listener might think I think RE4 is the worst zombie game ever.

And while ushering the President’s slack-jawed daughter to safety is still not my idea of a good time, RE4 perseveres: it is, as the old adage goes, greater than the sum of its parts. In particular, there’s a tinge of stranger-in-a-strange-land understated xenophobia about the game that I maybe uncomfortably like, in the same way Chainsaw Massacre and Wicker Man sort of work cinematically.

And the game is gruesome! It’s exciting! It’s all—in a very physical way—all pacing, all running and stopping and standing still, a lot of running and then waiting with your gun poised, kind of like FPS multiplayer at its very best, but more alienating and solitary and lonely, the way survival horror games really ought to feel.

Depressingly, the release of the original RE4 was timed to coincide with the pre-fated end of the Nintendo GameCube’s life-cycle—the launch was, seriously, scheduled for We Don’t Care O’Clock—and indeed, this game really flexed the formidable graphical could-do of the boringest, most underachieving game console ever.

But then RE4 was ported over to the Wii and, pretty impossibly, it proved for the first time that the Wii remote could be a perfectly viable light gun—and more importantly, that a rerelease can be even better than the original.

Jenn sez: With its near-weaponless gameplay and revolutionary, uncannily dead character facemapping, Siren—the most viscerally grating, tedious zombie game around—is basically too horrific to play.

Oh, sure, A House in California, recently named a nominee for the IGF’s coveted Nuovo Award, is all stark white flixels against a black backdrop, in the style of some early 1980s graphic adventure game. It is point-and-click interactive fiction, terribly sparse, with all possible parser commands weighting the bottom of the screen.

But the commands are strange—“Remember”? “Forget”? “Befriend”?—and sometimes, depending on what I accomplish in the game, the commands change. That is disturbing. But also, inexplicably satisfying, to see that I am somehow changing things with my actions?

I now totally get why House in California was included in this year’s Learn to Play gallery exhibit: the game uses a lot of “dream logic” and “guess-what-the-designer-wants-you-to-do,” and as you explore and progress, you find yourself making real sense of the game’s mediations. Like other good games that toy with their chosen genres, this game demands that the player learn its secret language.

In Part 1, Lois moves from place to place by “remembering” on certain objects: this segues play into a kind of flashback board, another place-and-time where Lois can remember how to do something in-game by recounting the circumstance in which she first learned to do it. To recall back to the game’s main action, Lois must “forget” what she’s thinking about. This turns game movement into a kind of procedural that mimics the way we ourselves think and do, and recollection’s role in thinking and doing. I am fighting to say something really intelligent and incisive, now, but maybe only a description of the game’s action is interesting enough.

In Part 2, Beulah, a writer (and a singer, and a cook), gets from place to place by writing or maybe reading about things—something about revisiting memory and making a different kind of thing out of it. You can see how this game ought to interest other game-makers.

In Part 3, playing as Connie, I broke and consulted a walkthrough because it was difficult to make any sense of all the butterflies. Maybe I could have figured out that watching things on the television—instead of remembering, see—would help me learn to do new things in Connie’s real world. But I was too used to playing the memory levels, and the introduction of the play mechanic’s newer idea, about learning passively through meditation and simulation, was utterly lost on me until later. Finally, in Part 4, you take all the pieces you’ve been tutored through—everything about learning and playing and reading—and the game gradually inverts and empties itself.

I’ve been complaining for a little while about certain independent games assigning ponderous values to mundane in-game actions, using hopping-over-a-curb as synecdoche for having-your-heart-broken and all that. I’ve also become annoyed with the use of 8- and 16-bit graphics to manufacture a sense of nostalgia. Maybe, in a way, A House in California is doing both, and then again it’s doing neither, or whatever it is doing, anyway, it does authentically.

The game feels fiercely autobiographical, too, but it doesn’t read, necessarily, as somebody else’s experience: playing the game made me ache with recognition.

My grandparents had a house in California—when I was a kid, I called it “The Big House”—and the backyard had a hill and a big stump with moss, and you could hear wind-chiming wafting from a great distance. My grandfather eventually moved away; he built a miniature version of the Big House on a patch of land in Kent, Washington, where we lived for a few years. I think a lot about someday having billions of dollars, knocking on my grandfather’s door, and asking the house’s occupants to please move out.

Or there was the one-storey house we had somewhere I think in Seattle, with these big fruit trees in the yard and all kinds of blossoms, maybe peaches or nectarines, squishing underfoot. Or there was me in my childhood bedroom in Texas, sitting at the computer click-click-clicking, and my adopto-mom standing in the doorway, pointing and hissing “I am so sorry we ever bought that thing.”

I was replaying Braid yesterday (thanks, Humble Bundle) and thinking about how hard it must be to write a nice art game. Text must be legible and so it must be used scrupulously or else completely fill the screen. And I wondered at how harsh the written parts of Braid really seem, all these prolix passages with actual, physical wayposts serving as textual wayposts. It doesn’t quite work.

Maybe Braid’s rhythm is all wrong, in spots. Ian Bogost, quoted capaciously in Stephen Totilo’s What If A Video Game Was Poetry, speculates that limited meter is what matters, not only in the writing itself, but in a game’s “constrained technical architecture, the way you program it, even the form of the assembly code on the screen—these long thin codes of data.”

Again, I worry that if I say too much else on the subject, I’ll ruin it. Probably that’s what Professor Bogost means by “meter,” in the end.

• dai5ychain – A House in California

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Then Mr. Nelson emailed me about his “odd art games,” many of which you can play right in your web browser by visiting Arctic Acre. (In his email, he also suggested that I visit Jason Nelson’s School of Games. You should probably go watch his video lecture series, too, because it is hilarious. There are currently 16 episodes, each only seconds long.)

Maybe ‘odd’ is almost the wrong word for his games: they’re straightforward 2D platformers, with moving and jumping and spatial circumnavigation and an end destination in sight, so that the way to play is immediately discernible even to your mom. But as you run-and-collect, the screens become cluttered with prose noise, taking on the likeness and verve of treated text. Everything feels very inaccessible and obfuscated despite the mechanics’ simplicity.

I got a little bit nervous when I googled Mr. Nelson and discovered he is a “lecturer on Cyberstudies, digital writing, and creative practice at Griffith University,” which itself is located in another country etc. (Everything I know about both digital writing and other countries, amounting to peanuts, I learned from 253.) And I am not a lecturer. Also, you probably already know more about Nelson’s games than I do. So I was pretty nervous about approaching his work at all.

Anyway, a bit about each: I started with the first one (?), called game, game, game and again game, or: belief systems are small clumsy rolling-type creatures. As I played, I typed into my note-taking software, “I am a spider or hairball or some kind of space-time tumbleweed,” and so when I went back to the first screen and noted its title I was relieved.

And as game, game, game’s story comes to the surface, sometimes the new scribbles onscreen will obscure (or totally change) your intended pathway to the end goal, and you are forced to reconsider and regroup. Just as in the game of life! And in some stages, choosing one avenue subsequently walls off another. Very philosophical and nice, OK.

Next I tried i made this. you play this. we are enemies, which I appreciated right off the bat because I am usually wondering as I am playing a game why the game designer hates me so much when we haven’t even met. I did enjoy the exhilarating physicality of hopping around Metafilter and Fark, but also I liked that the things to run-and-collect were hyperlinks and search terms. That is how we read! That is how we search the web! As in the first game, this one had a lot of portals in it, zapping your little rolling ball from location to location. The portals don’t actually make the games nonlinear, but that’s fine.

Evidence of Everything Exploding is the third game Jason Nelson links to at Arctic Acre, I think, and since I am predisposed toward a certain liturgical orderliness, I went to that one next. From the start this one is a lot more polished than Nelson’s other games, but it shares the same scrappiness that makes them credible. It is also more challenging and more playable, and so it is more fun.

It’s similar in makeup to the other two, except you swim around the mazes of text instead of hopping from platform to platform. And you blow stuff up! That’s cool. I’m pretty easy to please, though, because this is a game for people who play games and like the secret language of games. Of Mr. Nelson’s games, EoEE is definitely my favorite.

In each of these works, maybe the author is satirizing video games’ cutscene “reward system” when he includes his hair-tearingly meaningless videos. You don’t have to watch them, and I am pretty sure he is making fun of you for watching them, but I watched them.

Alarmingly These Are Not Lovesick Zombies woke up my family because I was playing it pretty late at night. It is bombastic and action-packed. I liked it least, in fact, even though I liked the branching “play as living or undead” option best in terms of mechanical ingenuity. Still, a playthrough is well worth Nelson’s “hidden secrets of the video game industry” game design whiteboard series, which appear during level intermissions.

But all of Jason Nelson’s maybe improvised? whiteboard demonstrations, which I entirely watched, are collected at Jason Nelson’s School of Games. Again, check those out. Seriously.

Some of Jason’s older work is available at Secret Technology dot com, below.

• Secret Technology – Jason Nelson digital art and poetry

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Not that this worry is anything new: Halo Wars was, in fact, developed by an outsider—Ensemble Studios—and is generally considered to be a top-notch RTS game. I Love Bees, the ARG by 4orty2wo Entertainment, is so highly regarded that it is arguably better, and certainly more inventive, than the game it was meant to promote. At the 2010 Classic Gaming Expo, however, another non-Bungie Halo game made its debut: Halo 2600.

Halo 2600 was an unexpected product from the people at AtariAge, who had previously promised a surprise homebrew release at what would be the first CGE convention since 2007. Developed by Ed Fries, former vice president of Microsoft’s game publishing wing, the game was borne out of an interest he had taken in programming for the Atari 2600 after reading Nick Monfort and Ian Bogost’s book, Racing the Beam.

“I wasn’t sure what to write, so I created a little Master Chief from Halo and made him run around the screen. Then I created an Elite for him to shoot at,” Fries explains in a post on AtariAge. “At this point it wasn’t my intention to make a full game. I was just screwing around.”

After getting tacit approval from Bungie and Microsoft to go ahead, Fries put together a game quite similar to the seminal Atari title Adventure, and on the first day of CGE, the game was announced, sold, and the ROM, dumped. And perhaps most impressively, the game is also one of the best homebrews to come along for the system!

The game consists of 64 linked screens that the Chief must venture through on his way to reach the final boss. He starts off completely unarmed so, as in the first Legend of Zelda adventure, your initial goal is to locate a weapon. From there, you must find keys that open barriers to progress further in the game. Each zone is based on an environment from Halo: for instance, there are grassy areas, a Covenant base, and an icy field. You could find a couple of equipment upgrades—a gun that fires faster bullets, perhaps, or a pair of speed boots that double your walking pace—as well as shield items that will allow the Chief to take an extra bullet before dying.

Little touches permeate the game to drive home the source material. When moving on ice, for example, the Chief will slide along in whichever direction he started walking in. Enemies include little 8-bit renditions of Grunts and Elites, and background objects, particularly in Covenant zones, really bring in the feel of the Halo universe. The final boss fight, against a gigantic Prophet so large that the camera “zooms out” to fit the fight sequence, is at once both epic and reminiscent of the battle against the Prophet of Regret in Halo 2. To top it all off, the familiar Halo theme and the ringworld themselves are both on the title screen.

The game is actually not that difficult, or at least not once you have the map layout figured out. Red Grunts and Elites are a pain, to be sure, due to their faster bullets, but once you obtain your speed boots those enemies are no longer a major concern. For those ambitious players who do eventually take down the Prophet, the game will start over on “Legendary” difficulty. Like the Legendary difficulty found in the games that served as the inspiration for Halo 2600, getting through the game requires a focus on survival, some gameplay tricks, and some luck. Walls are now deadly to the touch—Berzerk, anyone?—and the Chief moves at half his normal speed, making dodging normal bullets difficult and faster ones nearly impossible. Beating the game on that difficulty is an achievement.

Fries also left in an interesting glitch, called “Magic Land.” Getting outside the map causes the game engine to desperately flail about, trying to interpret memory never meant for the landscape, much like the hidden lands of Mountain King for 2600 or the game-broken screens of Metroid. Strange glitchy enemies exist out there, but with proper mapping, the player can get to the boss in a remarkably short amount of time, as evidenced by this playthrough:

Since the CGE run of game cartridges has long been exhausted, Albert Yarusso of AtariAge has been taking orders for the game cartridge on the website’s forum. And rabid collectors, take careful note: The CGE run has a different label from the newer run! The Halo 2600 game ROM is also available to play online via a Java Atari emulator, which is definitely a reasonable option for those gamers who have access neither to a physical console nor an emulator.

While homebrew ports of arcade games or titles that appeared on other consoles have a particular appeal to me personally –- I have always enjoyed seeing different takes on the same game for different consoles, like the excellent 2600 reinterpretation of the Intellivision’s Frogs and Flies, or Gunfight, a contemporary homebrew title loosely based on Atari’s Outlaw -– brand-new, original games, like Lead, so often are the more interesting experiences.

But Halo 2600, though based on an existing IP, is nevertheless its altogether own entity that yet manages to successfully draw on the source material in a new and interesting way.

• Shaw.ca – Halo 2600 by Ed Fries, emulated

• AtariAge – Halo 2600 Pre-Order

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3. Hello, Homebrew: Thrust

I watched Tommy Wiseau’s cinematic masterpiece The Room last month, and for weeks it was all I could think or talk about (and sorry for the protracted absence, but, The Room, people). The movie, though: it is incredible. My friend Robyn’s DVD player is all messed up, so we had to watch the movie with subtitles. Believe me, you should watch with subtitles. The disc even subtitles all the R&B songs that play during the lovemaking scenes! And there are myriad lovemaking scenes, so. Subtitles!

From its very introduction, the point-and-click adventure game establishes a number of familiar themes you’ll likely remember from the film: Johnny’s martyrdom; the implausible San Francisco vista; the music. As you play on, you’ll discover that the flower shoppe is meticulously recreated, as is Johnny’s apartment’s rooftop and spiral staircase and bowl-full-of-apples table centerpiece, and the dialogue. If you’ve never seen The Room, you might think the game dialogue’s utter lack of punctuation isn’t deliberate, but you’d be wrong. Perhaps the game reproduces the film almost to a fault—as a fairly straightforward adaptation, it does bill itself as a “tribute”—and yet there are other creative licenses taken. For instance, the interior of Denny’s apartment, heretofore unseen, rings sociopathically true. Other cinematic plotholes, like whatever happened to Chris the Thug, are kindly cemented in by Mr. Fulp (“Thanks Johnny, you’re our favorite citizen!”). And most impressively, within the adventure game’s limited narrative framework, the characters and their intentions make a lot more sense here than they do in the movie version. Which is weird.

The game is, by most standards, NSFW, as it includes cartoon nudity, as well as—true to its source material!—cartoon sex. In the end, The Room The Game is a labor of love by a guy who has seen the movie far too many times, and who absolutely gets it. The adaptation of The Room, absurdly, works better as a game than it ever did as a movie, if only for Mr. Fulp’s competence as a designer.

• Newgrounds – The Room Tribute via everyone (with screenshot via)

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1. Talkin’ bout Jason Nelson’s art games
2. Playing through the 2011 IGF Nuovo final-list: A House in California

As its predecessor had done for Breakout-style games, Bit.trip: Core takes the notion of classic, single-screen shooters and spins it off into a new, equally rhythmic direction. Whereas in the first game you were a paddle bouncing pellets to create musical notes, here you are an icon in the center of the screen capable of aiming and firing a beam in four directions, albeit only one at a time. Pellets will appear from all corners of the screen, and you must shoot them before they escape. It sounds deceptively simple, but the game is difficult. Ample reflexes, pattern recognition, and spatial skills –- which block will enter your range of fire first?—are important, but as with Bit.trip: Beat, to truly excel at the game you must lose yourself in it and the music. It’s a zen gaming experience.

In that regard it reminds me of one of my favorite Atari 2600 homebrews, Vault Assault, which is in itself a port of the arcade game Space Zap. Like Bit.trip: Core, there you control a cannon situated in the center of the screen, firing beams in four directions at incoming enemies. When Space Zap reaches its high-speed fever pitch, until you can discover the game’s rhythm and control the chaos, you will be overwhelmed. Lose that beat, and you will find it difficult to regain your bearing. Bit.trip: Core relies on the same concept, though the game graciously gives you a bomb that will wipe the screen of all pellets once per level (think Geometry Wars). Considering each level is in excess of 10 minutes, though, you may find yourself never using it for fear of a more difficult situation coming up. Much like Bit.trip: Beat, Core isn’t good in spite of the difficulty, but in part, because of it. Its difficulty curve isn’t unfair, bit rather it drives you to come back and squeak past that tough part, confronting the next mini-stage and its rhythmic changes.

That said, the music is not just for show. Hit enough pellets without missing a certain amount, and the screen will shift, featuring more instrumentation and more interesting effects. This continues until you hit the maximum level, where psychedelic lights and more dynamic music are your reward. Whiff too many times, however, and you’ll find yourself in the downright creepy “nether realm,” where the graphics enter a state of stark black and white, and the only sound is the beep of a pellet getting shot on your remote. As Jenn pointed out in her Bit.trip: Beat review, it is an unsettling state where feel yourself on the edge of death, clawing your way back to living color and safety.

As with the first Bit.trip game, there is a narrative that continues in the periphery. Told almost entirely through short cut scenes between levels and through the background and music of the stages, it subtly details your character’s journey in search of belonging and companionship. The game feels dark, even though there is nothing so overt as to state that. The world is a lonely and hard place by oneself.

Bit.trip: Core is a game that embodies the very essence of the medium. It draws the player in through visuals, sound, and gameplay, and is an ultimately rewarding experience to go through. It’s an easy recommendation from a seemingly crowded WiiWare game list.

Related posts:

1. Tripping to the blips of Bit.trip Beat
2. Throwback games are awesome.
3. Daily Linksplosion: Tuesday, May 26, 2009

I had written previously on the subject of gravity in Spacewar, one of the earliest computer games ever made. The concept of gravity’s effect on games has extended beyond that, but only a few noteworthy games have ever stood out. One in particular, a BBC Acorn game (later ported, famously, to the Commodore 64, among others) entitled Thrust, became something of a cult classic.

Thrust was something of an evolution from Atari’s arcade game, Gravitar. In that game, you were flying from planet to planet, destroying guns and grabbing fuel before taking off to the next one. Ever present was the gravity each planet would ensnare you in, forcing you to make your moves carefully, lest you fall too far and crash.

Thrust took this a step further—instead of flying from planet to planet, now you were warping onto a planet, battling turrets and the forces of physics as you made your way deep into planetary chasms to grab a fuel cell. Once you had latched onto it with your tractor beam, you had to carefully maneuver your way back out, all the while fighting with the weight and inertia of your cargo.

Fuel was also a concern, though not a large one. If you used your thrusters too much, you’d crash into a wall. Each planet also had a reactor, which if fired upon, would knock out the guns for an ever increasing amount of time. Shoot it too much, however, and it goes critical, forcing you to escape the planet in 10 seconds or get killed. Escaping with the reactor blowing up gave you a nice bonus to your score, but fail and you’d not only lose a life, but also any score you would get for simply grabbing the fuel cell and going.

The C64 version’s theme song, by Rob Hubbard, is a popular subject for remixes, and is generally looked upon as a high point in the SID chip’s musical life, no small feat. It’s so highly considered that a virtual concert program was written for the C64 solely featuring the game’s theme:

So, with all this complexity in mind, it was something of a surprise when in 2000, programmer Thomas Jentzsch released a version of the game for the Atari 2600. Even more surprising, he had managed to cram all of the gameplay of the computer versions, as well as a good approximation of the music. The game was as long as the computer ones, the levels were painstakingly recreated, and it quickly made the rounds among the growing Atari collector community as one of the best games ever made for the console.

In 2002, Atariage.com held a high score contest for Thrust. The prize was a special edition copy of a revision of Thrust, known colloquially as Thrust+. This new revision of the game boasted compatibility with the Atari driving controller, which allowed for precise 360 degree control. Since this also meant you could no longer thrust or use your tractor beam, the game was also made compatible with a new foot pedal controller, which the winners would also get. Rounding out the feature-set was functionality for the Omega Race booster grip controller, and a new pause function. There was some problems with getting the prizes out, however, as several players did not receive their packages for months.

A final revision came in 2003, when Atari music virtuoso Paul Slocum redid the music for the game, adding in the Commodore 64 version’s theme song and music tunes between levels. With that, the Thrust homebrew story had ended… at least for the Atari.

Then, in 2004, Ville Krumlinde put out a port of the game to the Vectrex. Due to the nature of the Vectrex console’s display, everything was done in very crisp vector line graphics. I can’t help but feel as though this added to the whole otherworldly feel of the game in a way no other version can. Tiny particles fly up when you take in fuel. The fuel pods have platforms that they rest upon. The music and sounds were also translated beautifully to the unique console. He also added a few new features; a hard mode, with homing bullets, new levels, and the ability to lock your thrusters while you fire in another direction; and a time attack mode.

I’ve sunk a lot of time into Thrust over the years, though I’ve never managed to make it all the way to the end. Reverse gravity, invisible planets, and then a combination of the two always conspire to end my adventures prematurely.

But it remains quite possibly one of my favorite games ever made on any platform. There’s nothing quite like squeezing through passages, or getting your ship under control after a bad burn sends your cargo into a pendulum swing. The physics make this game, and they make it worth your time.

• Ville Krumlinde’s homepage

• Atariage store entry for Thrust

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1. Hello, Homebrew: Halo 2600

3D Me JitterPic for iPhone makes it easy to take two photos, align them with each other, and automagically make an animated gif that can be instantly uploaded to Myspace (I’m not even kidding—that’s a built-in feature). The 3D effect is accomplished using “wiggle stereoscopy.” Hours of house party fun! A live demonstration of the finished product, above.

JitterPic is US$1.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Until a few days ago, the iPhone game Eliss was knuckle-crackingly, hair-tearingly, eye-drippingly tough. Multicolored orbs swarmed the screen too quickly, perhaps, and new game elements popped onto the touchscreen with hardly an introduction.

But Eliss’s creator, Steph Thirion, very actively sought out players’ opinions during this March’s GDC; even after, he went so far as to assemble a whole new crack team of beta testers. Seldom have I met a developer so sweetly wracked with concern after his game has launched—and, moreover, even after his game has already received generally favorable reviews.

Two days ago, Thirion released Eliss v1.1, an update that both eases the difficulty curve and lengthens the game. He’s also clarified the tutorial—although, for my own part, I really preferred the murkiness—and, on top of everything, he’s reduced the app’s price to a comparatively paltry US$2.99. That price point is honestly small potatoes, considering Eliss is every bit as full an experience as Every Extend Extra or Gunpey.

I think it’s really important to note all these changes. Destructoid posted its review of the old version of Eliss today, which is really too bad: a lot of major complaints have been addressed, if not resolved. In any case, if the difficulty curve frightened players off before, Eliss certainly warrants another look.

• Touch Arcade – ‘Eliss’ v1.1 Update Arrives, Easing Difficulty

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1. Eliss would be great if I were any good at it

After rearranging my Wii’s disk space to accommodate the comparatively large download—catch you on the flipside, Paper Mario—I settled in for some truly excellent, old-school synesthesia.

Bit.trip: Beat is a paddle game: think Arkanoid, Breakout, Pong or, ahem, Circus Atari. Here, though, the paddle control is gracefully approximated by very gently rocking the Wii remote forward and back. As with classic paddle games, the controls are ‘twitchy’ and require only very fine movements.

Your onscreen ‘paddle’ (which is to say, your avatar, or, you know, the line) moves vertically along the far left of the screen, and little pellets fly onto the screen from the right, hurtling toward the paddle. And the point is to hit them. Simple. Each pellet represents a kind of a musical note, too, so as you bat the pellets away, the game’s melody emerges. So far, easy enough.

But as you progress through the game, the choreography of the pellets becomes increasingly intricate. Soon those specks are weaving in and out of one another, changing shape and size, or cruelly altering their course midflight. In that way, Bit.trip: Beat is a classic gamer’s classic game: it’s all reflexes and pattern memorization.

When your paddle is in serious jeopardy, the game abruptly switches to a kind of “Danger! Danger!” Pong mode. The music disappears, and the graphics reduce themselves to their Pong-and-ball blipping fundamentals. And it’s genuinely unsettling. Compared to the rest of Bit.trip: Beat’s furor, the starkness of the black and white screens is downright creepy—like being trapped underwater or in the vacuum of outer space.

Perhaps Bit.trip: Beat isn’t all that innovative, but it sure borrows from the best. Those delicious, low-rez graphics are so totally cribbing from bit Generations. The controller’s rhythmic throbbing, the pulsing in your hand? That’s lifted right off of Rez. Like the music? It’s heavily inspired by the work of 8bitpeoples and other musicians.

And Bit.trip: Beat’s addictive “I can do better!” gameplay uncannily reminds me—right down to its shmup vibe and its emphasis on synesthetic musicality —of Lead for the 2600, of all things.

I’ve heard it argued that every game should have a ‘narrative’, and while this may not be true, by golly, Bit.trip: Beat has one. It reveals itself quietly, in the background, behind the mess of dots and dashes and musical morse code. And while that story isn’t especially crucial, it’s a nice touch. Things are happening. I am going somewhere.

I was a girl on a mission. As I played, each time I missed a pellet, I felt this strange surge of apology. That’s really remarkable, I think. I’ve missed plenty of notes and percussive beats in my time; I require a stellar music game to make me sorry for bumbling the song. That’s gratifying, in its own way. I began to compete against myself.

The real strengths of gameplay are, paradoxically, the feelings Bit.trip: Beat inspires in the player. There’s your inexplicable commitment to maintaining the flow and movement of the music. There’s nostalgia, which itself is powerful. There’s synesthesia, that musically- and sensorily- augmented shooter trance. And then there’s the feeling that keeps you playing, no matter how frustrated you become: the sensation that you really are constantly improving as you play. It’s why I still play Lumines. It’s why I stopped playing Geometry Wars.

Adam Milecki—who first got me hooked on Lead, in fact—phrased it really well. Of Eliss, he said: “Games this hard but this good make you better at games.” I think that applies here, too.

Bit.trip: Beat hit Nintendo’s WiiWare channel yesterday. It’s yours for 600 points (and, I believe, 312 blocks of flash space).

P.S. Check out the supremely rad Commander Video fan art, which I am irresponsibly using in lieu of screenshots.

Related posts:

1. The core basics of Bit.trip Core
2. Throwback games are awesome.
3. Daily Linksplosion: Tuesday, May 26, 2009

I’m really, really bad at Eliss, the multi-touch plate-spinning game for iPhone. I think my failure falls somewhere in my personal Venn intersection of shortsightedness, panic, and a total lack of coordination.

You’re nodding and thinking to yourself, “Stop worrying! No one can be that bad at Eliss.” You’re wrong. I am starting to realize there is something genuinely wrong with me.

There are 20 levels. I passed the first stage after a day of trying. I can’t pass the third stage.

I can see what needs to happen, and I want to make that happen, but I’m graceless and stupid, my brain motoring at half-speed. I’ve shown Eliss to others, demonstrating its artfulness and my stupidity. Friends invariably pluck my iPhone from my hands, to show me how it’s done, and then they don’t want to give me my phone back.

“Stop beating my phone game,” I snapped at Scott Sharkey, grabbing at my phone. I put my iPhone somewhere private he couldn’t get to it, like in my purse or in a drawer, I can’t remember. Scott smiled at me quizzically.

This is so frustrating because Eliss is obviously the raddest game for the iPhone yet. And I can’t play it! It’s right in front of me, and I can’t do it! I’d wanted to talk about it once I’d played it except I can’t. I can’t do it. And everyone else can!

Anyway, you’ll love it. It’s a $3.99 download.

• toucheliss.com

Related posts:

1. Retry this sector: Eliss v1.1
2. Daily Linksplosion: Thursday, March 19, 2009

The bitGenerations series of games were high concept/low-bit carts for Game Boy Advance, released only in Japan, in 2006 or so. Each bitGenerations game is essentially a tiny, playable art installation with a retro bent.

Including Orbital, I own three bitGenerations titles, which I play exclusively on my Game Boy Micro. This is to say, I don’t play anything else on my Micro; I only play these three bitGenerations games on it.

Stranger still, I’ve never played a bitGenerations game on my DS, my GBA SP, or even on my Game Boy Player. I think this is because at some point I read, somewhere (God knows where), that the bitGenerations games were specifically created to better market the Micro. I believe it. To me, GBAs are decidedly SNESy little 16-bit handhelds. My Micro, however, is disguised as a Famicom; therefore, only 8-bit games will suit it.

Of the three titles I own, Dotstream has the best music. It’s chippy and forceful. Dotstream is a racing game, except that each of the racers is just a pulsing line, sort of like a heartbeat.

There’s Soundvoyager, which Kohler gave me. I don’t remember his logic in gifting it to me, exactly, but it had something to do with how we are each deaf in one ear, which in turn makes the game nearly impossible to play.

Not least, there is Orbital, my favorite.

I bought it from Pink Godzilla during PAX 06. Initially, I was so frustrated by it. There are no instructions. You realize that your D-pad does nothing; one button pulls you toward astronomical bodies, and the other repels. So you can’t really control your course absolutely, you can’t completely direct what happens to you: you only float, and tug at your path, and the path is really governed by the context of the bodies that surround you. It is a perfect metaphor.

The simplicity of the game is a deception, of course. It is possible to become very good at it, at moving decisively toward a goal and gaily colliding into it. In fact, Orbital is addictive because, as with Lumines or Tetris, you can feel yourself getting better at it. There is the slow realization that, with a patient hand, you have control over your course and your destiny. It is zenlike.

Here is the goal of the game: you are a particle of space dust, just a little grey speck, and you want to grow. So you collide into smaller planetary bodies and consume them, adding them to your sum total. You become larger and more meaningful, until you are finally large enough to draw the sun into your orbit. That victory marks the end of a stage. So I guess it’s like Katamari Damacy, but with fewer cats and candies.

As you grow, you also add smaller planets to your orbit. In the game, the sounds begin as mere cosmic ambiance, but as you add planets to your orbit, layers of aural complexity reflect your progress. In that way, the sound and music in Orbital is the best of bitGenerations. You can hear yourself becoming faceted and beautiful.

I’ve compared. In Orbient—that’s today’s WiiWare downloadable—the sound effects and music are just like Orbital’s, mostly, if somewhat less chippy. The sound of actually moving is a little bit different—it sounds a little bit like if you were able to adjust a radio frequency inside of Galaga. Also, I count only 30 levels in the original Orbital; Siliconera reports that Orbient boasts 50 levels.

Orbient is, in many ways, an improvement. Moving your space particle around seems maybe a little easier, less frustrating and more focused. The Wii remote suits Orbient’s design perfectly, too, and movement is intuitive. Bringing your thumb down on the big face button draws you closer to planets; depressing the trigger button underneath the remote pushes you farther away. The buttons seem especially responsive to pressure, in a way the original Orbital controls perhaps weren’t. You can push yourself away from a planet, and you can push harder.

It was difficult for me, in a way, to acclimate to seeing such (comparatively) pretty graphics, and on a (comparatively) big screen. You’ll remember, when I began this whole reverie, that I said I’ve avoided playing Orbital on any screen larger than a nicotine patch. Remember, the Micro has a playscreen about the size of the face of a men’s wristwatch. Seeing Orbient on my bigscreen television—de-de-rezzed—absolutely struck me down.

But the updated graphics are not, to me, an improvement. Little pathways and trajectories illuminate onscreen, where their implication ought to have been enough. Instead of abstraction, this time things are carefully demarcated.

Worst of all… there is a tutorial. I cannot believe how much I wanted instructions in 2006, and how much I hate the tutorial now. I understand that, without a tutorial, Orbient could be too alien, too inaccessible. But to me—and I am comparing Orbient against Orbital and to my own revelatory zen-rock-garden experience with it, of course—Orbient is almost too clear-cut. It is—I am sorry I am such a snot!—fitted too carefully for a new, broader audience.

There! I said it! I’m terrible!

Dear Diary, I know this is absolutely the snottiest thing I’ve ever written. I also know that, if I were playing Orbient/Orbital for the first time, here on my living room sofa instead of on an airplane, I would become completely frustrated without instructions, hitting the directional pad in a fury. If I couldn’t understand the dynamics of the game in the first three minutes, I’d probably quit it.

I’d written this much, and stopped. I suspect my bias has to do with this: I played Orbital for the first time on a plane, trying to forget that I am scared of flying. It made me forget.

Maybe it has everything to do with which game you play first.

So at this point, I asked a friend to play Orbient, then Orbital afterward. Of Orbital, he said simply, “This one is way too hard.” I suspected so. To be honest, he didn’t really seem to like it. But awhile later, he said: “It’s tougher. But I think… it’s prettier.” In the original Orbital, your movement is more about duration of button-pressing; in Orbient, it has to do with pressure, too. But both games are beautiful and tactile. “I really like both, in different ways,” my friend concluded.

I am conflicted. Making Orbital available, as Orbient, is wonderful—I hope everyone will give it a little time and realize how engaging, even emotionally affecting, this game is. I love that, as Orbient, the game is less frustrating and, by all mainstream aesthetics, prettier, in a way.

I can’t shake the idea that the original Orbital is the more elegant game. If you can find a copy, you might love it, and if not, big deal! I can’t wait to see what your mom, sisters, and friends think of Orbient.

Orbient is available now for 600 Wii Points, which comes to about US$6. Which means, even if you like Orbital a little bit more, Orbient is by far the better buy.

• Siliconera – Nintendo’s Art Style Is Bit Generations For WiiWare?

• 4 color rebellion – Import Worthy – bit Generations: Dotstream/Orbital