Dow Plummets - Stock Brokers Shoot Tanks

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost another 420 points today. Oh if only someone made an arcade game about stock brokers jumping out of Wall Street buildings where it was your job to position a trampoline below them to bounce them from certain death into a waiting ambulance - how awesome would that be?!  Well not that awesome it turns out - but in my never-ending quest to play every arcade game ever made now seemed the perfect time to hit up "Wall Street".



Wall Street was produced by Century Electronics in 1982.  What?  Never heard of Century Electronics? Well not many have, although it's possible that some of our European readers may have played the Ocean port of one of their other arcade games - Hunchback. Their body of work goes quickly downhill after that though.

There are two different levels in Wall Street - creatively named "City" and "Maze". "City" is the only level that makes any sense - it's not much fun - but it makes sense. In the City level you maneuver a safety net / trampoline left and right to catch stressed-out guilt-ridden stock brokers that have leaped to their deaths. You position the trampoline under them and they bounce off at varying angles and heights depending on how they hit the trampoline. You can continue bouncing them around for points but if you can position it so that they hit near the right side of the trampoline you can bounce them over into the waiting ambulance for big points and one step closer to completing the level.



I guess it is a bit of a cross between the arcade games Kick (aka Kick Man) and Clowns. Or - a complete and utter ripoff of the old Nintendo Game & Watch "Fire" where you are saving people jumping from a burning building. From what I read online Fire came out the year before Wall Street.



If you're able to unwisely save enough of the slimy brokers before the Dow Jones Index reduced to zero you move on to level 2 - "Maze" (I hope the guy that came up with these names got a bonus that year).  Maze is where the game really falls apart. You are now the stock broker (I think) and apparently after being saved you a) discounted the promise you made to God on the way down of being a better person and b) determined to make your money back as quickly as possible.  So you are running around a maze to find bags of money - people's savings that you bilked them out of no doubt - that you must pick up and deposit in your safe. Unfortunately for you, the military has had quite enough and instead of a fiscal bailout have decided to simply kill you this time. And they're done screwing around so they send out a battalion of tanks to do the job, but luckily you had the foresight to bring your anti-tank RPG with you to work this morning so you're good to go. In true Tutankham fashion you can only shoot left and right, not up and down, but it's quite easy. This is a complete throwaway level.



If you're wiley enough to grab all the money in the maze and not get killed by the tanks well then it's back to level 1 for more "City". And actually the second round of City is a little better as multiple brokers start jumping off the buildings at the same time, so it gets more challenging and almost even a little fun. And rescue helicopters start making an appearance on the third time through the City level that you can try and land the brokers in, but I lost interest in the game before I was able to get that done.

And oh lord the music. Grating bleep bloop renditions of Oh Susanna, Dixie, and what I'm pretty sure is Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (..they go uppity up up, they go downditty down down - am I the only one who knows what song I'm talking about here?)  The music made me want to jump off a building myself.

So... I had to play it to rate it and check it off my list because it's what I do, but I certainly wouldn't advise you to make the same investment. My rating? A lowly 4.0.

New World Record on Nibbler

Over the weekend there were new world record high scores set on four different arcade video games:

Frenzy: Joel West with 4,933,702
Snake Pit: Mark Alpiger with 317,350
Tron:  David Cruz with 14,007,645
Nibbler: Rick Carter with 1,002,222,360

[*12/26/2011 Update: Tim McVey took up the challenge and recaptured his high score crown on Nibbler by crushing Rick's score with 1,041,767,060. Congrats Tim and thanks for setting the record straight about the bogus passing out story!]

Congrats to all those guys, but since I've never been overly interested in the first 3 games I'd like to chat a bit specifically about the fourth one - Nibbler.



Hats off to Rick Carter who took a little over 49 hours to amass that score. 49 hours! That breaks the old high score of 1,000,042,270 set by Tim McVey way back in 1984.

Nibbler was the first game to support a billion point score and to spotlight this Rock-ola offered a free Nibbler machine to the first player to turn the game over by scoring a billion. The early favorite to surpass the mark was U.S. National Video Game Team member Tom Asaki, who came close but failed in attempts at Walter Day's Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, IA (once when the joystick broke after he had scored 793 million points). Tim McVey (not Timothy McVeigh!) had six unsuccessful attempts before he finally broke the billion-point barrier with 1,000,042,270 points. To commemorate the achievement Ottumwa declared January 28, 1984 as Tim McVey Day.



Tim McVey held the official high-score record for the next 27 years until Rick Carter broke it last weekend. McVey tried to one-up himself in 2009 but only mustered a paltry 648 million. But now that he has officially been dethroned by Carter I'm guessing he will come back out of retirement for another shot.

And now to the game itself - Nibbler is another one of those arcade games that I discovered on MAME and enjoyed but still have never actually seen in person - not even at the ACAM. Pac-Man fever was still running rampant when Rock-Ola released it back in 1982 so it's not surprising that it is a simplistic maze-based eat the dots type of game controlled only by a 4-way joystick - but it far from a Pac-Man clone.

In the game you play as Nibbler the snake and must slither around a maze eating the food that is scattered about. You must eat all the food in the maze before time runs out but with each piece of food you eat, Nibbler gets longer and ultimately starts getting in his own way. If Nibbler runs into his own body or if the time runs out he loses a life. Once you've eaten all the food the level is completed and a new maze full of food begins. Don't ask me what kind of food it's supposed to be - apparently a radioactive fruit of some sort because it radiates with a multicolored glow. I saw someone call the food/dots "croutons" online once, but I have no idea where the hell they got that from - maybe the manual who knows.

Anyway, to make things more difficult the uranium-soaked fruit is evidently laced with methamphetamines because you cannot stop Nibbler and he just keeps going faster and faster the more he eats. He does pause very slightly every time he runs into a wall to let you gather your thoughts but he's tweaking hard so like any good meth head he is off and running in a split second, consequences be damned!



Obviously the gameplay is pretty redundant, but it is somewhat addictive and the mazes change up a little at each level to add a little variety. The second you look at the graphics you say - oh this must be from 1982. Or at least that's what I said when I first played it.  Is that wrong to not only think that but to actually say it out loud to myself while I'm sitting alone playing it?  The sound, though not great, is tolerable for a while. But it doesn't take long for the 8-bit rendition of La Cumparsita to wear on the nerves.  If they'd let the song play on I think I'd have liked it fine but it only loops the first couple of bars over and over and over like a broken record until I just want to tango into the kitchen and stuff my head in the oven. The microwave oven.

The game isn't nearly as easy as you might think. Since you can't stop you have to strategically think ahead to plot your course as Nibbler keeps getting longer and faster and it gets quite challenging very quickly, assuming you aren't Rick Carter, which I am not - my high score is a mere 52,170 (casts eyes down in shame).

Nibbler was ported to the Apple II in 1983 and the Amstrad CPC in 1984. So if you're not a MAMER you might want to check out those ports. In 2005, JMD developed a freeware themable clone of the game (the Amstrad CPC port of the game anyway) for the Sega Dreamcast - although I've never seen that one.

Overall I think it's a decent little game with a certain charm.  Reminiscent of the old Snake games that have been around forever but all Pac-Manned up.  To me it tastes like Anteater (although Anteater is the superior game) with some Tron light cycles thrown in, except there are no ants or MCP hooligans trying to kill you - just your own ever-growing body. I don't hit this game on the MAME cab very often but will brink it up every great once in a while for a quickie. I give it 6.9 bulimic boa constrictors out of 10.

Portable Arcade Cabinet for Enduro Racing

Wanted to share this video I found tonight on Game Set Watch in case you guys hadn't seen it yet.

Brazilian artist Rafael MSP made a very nice sit-down arcade-style driving cabinet built around the Atari 2600 game Enduro. Enduro!  I thought that was pretty wild. And as if that isn't impressive enough - he built it so that it would be portable. So now if he's ever in the mood for some Enduro on the go he just opens up the swanky custom Atari Enduro briefcase and pulls out the pieces like an old-school Iron Man unpacking his armor.

I thought it was pretty darn impressive and cool. Of course it makes me feel kind of bad about myself since he built all that to play Enduro racing and I don't even really want to get off my ass to go to the kitchen and get a Dr. Pepper.  And I'm thirsty.

Check it out:

Barcadia in Houston, Texas

Well, this post probably won't be of much interest to anyone living outside the Houston area but my gaming pursuits lately keep leaving me with thoughts of "meh - that's not really post-worthy" and as a result I go a month or so at a time without posting anything. Well I'm not goin out like that!  Post or die!

Mrs. MP and I were eating lunch at the 59 Diner last weekend before heading out on a little birthday road trip to Austin to play some vids and pins at Pinballz when it occurred to me that it was a perfect time to check out Barcadia, the still relatively new bar in midtown that serves up not only alkeehawlic beverages but some classic arcade games and giant-sized Jenga as well. I had my usual hesitation about checking out a downtown bar and the associated risk of potentially being surrounded by a douchey/hipster crowd, but trepidation be damned I was ready for some games and some afternoon beer - after all I was on vacation!

Parking was limited along the curb but there was a big dirt lot across the street with plenty of space, although strangely there was some loose barb wire on the ground in the lot. Not sure what that was about but we didn't run over it so OK.

First thing I noticed when I walked in was that the place was pretty small. It was fairly early in the afternoon so there weren't many people and only a couple of people were playing the games, but it didn't seem like it would take too many people to get unbearably crowded in there. Anyway, I moseyed on up to the bar and ordered a brewski to kick things off.



I saw a few guys commenting online that the bartenders were jerks but the guy that was there when I went was quite friendly. Everyone was pierced and tatted but cool. I think some people just like to bitch on sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor.

So now - the games!  The good news is that they had a pretty good collection of 15 old classics and 2 different multicade machines, the bad news is almost half of them had significant mechanical problems that interfered with their play  The games included:
  Asteroids Deluxe (I didn't play this one because people were on it but appeared to work fine)
  Defender (the Reverse button was broken - ever tried Defender without being able to turn around?  It's aggravating)
  Dig Dug (the up direction on the joystick worked about 10% of the time - also aggravating)
  Frogger (out of order)
  Galaga (graphics were messed up and everything was in red - weird)
  Ghosts n' Goblins (Worked great!  Still hard as hell but that's normal for G&G)
  Mario Brothers (I didn't play this one)
  Mortal Kombat (I didn't play this one)
  Ms. Pac-Man (I didn't play it but looked to work OK)
  Multicade (I assume this worked but multicades have lost some of their appeal for me since I have one at home)
  Paperboy (Am I the only person in the world that hates this game?  I think I am. I didn't play it)
  Phoenix (Worked fine and is still a fun classic. Spent most of my playtime on this one.)
  Popeye (Never cared much for Popeye so I didn't play this one)
  Star Wars (Worked part of the time but sometimes the tie fighters would distort and flatten out which made them a lot harder to shoot)
  Street Fighter II (didn't play SFII - although it is one of my all-time favorites)
  Track & Field (worked but one of the run buttons on the P1 side was broken so it was a little shaky)
  Williams Retrocade (meh another retrocade - would be fun to play with friends over beer though)
  Skee-Ball (not a vid but classic fun anyway - 1 of the 3 machines worked fine).



So I was a little disappointed that several of the machines were buggy, but they were all in pretty good shape cosmetically and if they would just put a little more work into them it would be a nice mix of old games with the multicades for flavor. Also, I heard that you had to pay for the games but when I went everything was on free play - they had outfitted the machines with buttons on the front that you pushed to insert credits. So I didn't feel cheated since the games were free anyway and the beer selection was pretty decent for a small joint.



The only problem with the whole 'drink beer while you play games' deal is the same exact issue I have with it at Joystix - there's just nowhere to put your beer while you play!  You have to leave it on a table or the bar which isn't exactly nearby.

So, in a nutshell, I thought it was a decent little joint and I definitely like the idea of a bar with retro arcade games, but they really need to work on their games to get them all working right for me to consider returning. Even then I don't really see myself making the drive downtown with Barcadia as the target destination, but if I was already downtown with friends I wouldn't mind stopping in sometime so I'm officially adding it to the Arcade Journal.

[Updated 4/12/2012]
A while back I heard through the arcade grapevine that the reason Barcadia's arcade games weren't working is that the owner stiffed the arcade repairman who was working on them and so word spread and so no one in the Houston area would work on his games. I don't know for sure if that is true, but now I heard through the ol' grapevine again that Barcadia has officially CLOSED. And word is that the owner skipped out on the landlord and didn't even tell his employees that he was shutting down. They just showed up for work and found the place cleaned out. Class act - this Barcadia. Headquartered in Dallas. Ah. 

The Lone Man Who Gave His Soul to Gaming - or - I Love Japanese Video Game Commercials

A recent post on Gnome's Retro Treasures featured Chu Chu Rocket - a neat little game for one of my favorite consoles - the Sega Dreamcast. More than the game itself, the post reminded me of the Japanese TV commercial I saw for it on YouTube whose song (the melody anyway) stuck in my head despite the fact that I didn't have any idea what the heck the guys were saying at the time:



My Japanese friend Hiroshi translated the commercial for me today - thanks Hiroshi!:
Chu chu rocket, save the mice
Chu chu rocket, cats are scary
Chu chu rocket, rocket is great
Zoobababaaaam!! 
xyz puzzle chu chu rocket 2,800 yen, cheap! Dreamcast. (He said he couldn't quite catch the xyz part. He also informed me that in Japan "chu chu" is considered to be the sound that mice make - like "squeak squeak" is in the US).

And that sent me back to YouTube to watch another few old Japanese video game commercials I recalled seeing. I've always enjoyed those commercials - so exuberant and over the top. I never saw any of them back in the day of course but only discovered them much later after the birth of the internet and when the internet begat YouTube.

Most of my favorites were, as one might guess, developed by Sega and I was going to embed a bunch of them here from the SG-1000, to the Mega Drive, to the Dreamcast but then I rediscovered one of my absolute favorite Japanese commercial advertising campaigns - Sega's Segata Sanshiro - and immediately deleted all the other embeds out of respect to the one true master.



Segata Sanshiro was a martial arts master who cherished his Sega Saturn so much that he made it his mission to travel the world - or at least Japan - and beat into submission all those who did not play the Sega Saturn often enough or with sufficient respect.  I like Dos Equis' "Most Interesting Man in the World" - but if I was starting a super hero team of advertising icons Segata would be my first draft pick. Sega did it first and did it better.

I had seen a couple of the Segata Sanshiro commercials before, but last night I stumbled across this one awesome video that chronicles Segata's birth, rise to power, and tragic end as he gives his life to protect the very board members of Sega who are ushering in the Dreamcast and thus ending the life cycle of his beloved Saturn. I defy you to watch his tragic death and not shed a tear. It is an opera-worthy climax. And in the usual random full-circle meaningless coincidence style that I love, Segata (whose real first name is Hiroshi) is killed by a missile that looks quite similar to the rocket in Chu Chu Rocket - well I guess they all do really... His last words as he clings to the missile in deep space - "You must play Sega Saturn... You must play Sega Saturn... You must play Sega Saturn!". And then the end - oops, guess that was a spoiler.

This stuff is pure gold. If I saw these commercials back in the day I probably would have bought a Saturn and gotten back into console gaming a decade before I bought my PS3.  I even put the mp3 of his theme song on my iphone (thanks SegaShiro!) - hell it kept reverberating inside my head anyway - Segata Sanshiro! Segata Sanshiro! Sega Saturn Shiroooooo!!  Rest in peace Segata Sanshiro.



and if you didn't get enough Segata Sanshiro from the official music video - here is a little clip of a cover of the theme song by Segarocks - a Japanese Sega tribute band.

Meteor - My Favorite Asteroids Clone

I was going through some older games on the MAME cab to see which arcade game from the 70's I felt like writing about and given that one of the all-time great arcade games was from the 70's AND starts with the letter A it didn't take long at all to come across Asteroids.

Well, I'm pretty sure everyone currently reading this is quite familiar with the arcade classic Asteroids so I won't bore you with my thoughts on that game other than to say that I am a fan and unlike some I've spoken to I prefer the sequel Asteroids Deluxe to the original.  But no - this post is to give a shout out to an Asteroids clone called Meteor.  There were a few clones and bootlegs of Asteroids when it became popular and they all play pretty much identically to the original, but it was the go-get-'em attitude of the sales staff at HOEI International that really turned me on to Meteor. I envision the brainstorming session to produce the flyer for Meteor went a little something like this:

Manager of Flyer Production: "OK Marvin. We've got this game Meteor that we ripped off from that new game Asteroids and I've never seen either one because that ain't my job.  What is my job is getting these flyers out the door to move these units. So what have you got so far?  What's the point of the game?"

Flyer Engineer:  "To destroy salling meteors"

MOFP:  "To destroy what?"

FE:  "Meteors. As they sall by.  And destroy salling UFO too."

MOFP:  "You mean SAILING meteors? I mean sailing is an odd fucking choice of words to describe a meteor, but it makes more sense than SALLING. Pretty sure salling isn't a real word. Let's just make it 'Destroy deadly meteors'."

FE:  "Yes sir, we'll make that change."

MOFP:  "OK what else? How do you destroy the meteors? Are you firing up at them like Space Invaders or what?"

FE:  "No sir. You fire in all directions."

MOFP:  "All directions? Are you sure about that? I've seen video games and you're usually at the bottom shooting up at things."

FE:  "Yes sir. In this game the space ship rotates 360 degrees so you fire in all directions."

MOFP:  "OK well confirm that with the guys downstairs.  Make sure it is OUR spaceship that rotates and not the enemy UFO and then make that point clear on the flyer because that is gonna to throw a lot of people off. And spice it up with some impact buzzwords like NEW! EXCITING! EMERGENCY! ESCAPE! and use lots of exclamation points - that kind of stuff. That it?"

FE:  "We also want to include a picture of the evil galactic emperor that sent the UFO and meteors to destroy us. As you can see from the sketch he is a reptilian being from..."

MOFP:  "WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Goddammit Marvin, you may be a hell of a programmer but you don't know shit about making a sale. You think guys want to see lizard aliens?  No! Listen. Change the lizard to a hot lookin' broad - and make sure her tits are showing and BAM we're done!  What other new games we got?  I'm on a roll!"

FE:  "Um - her... tits sir? You mean you want us to have her wearing a tight uniform that accentuates..."

MOFP:  "Who cares about the uniform?  A couple of leather straps and a choke collar and the uniform is good to go man.  Marvin. Let me be clear.  When you come back in here this afternoon with the mockup of the flyer in your hand, it better have a hot blonde... no... make that brunette... It better have a hot brunette on it with both her tits out or you can start looking for a new fucking job. Now get out of my office."

And the rest was history.

Arcade Games of the 70's: Clowns

No 'on-this-day' segue here - just thought I'd ramble a bit about a really old favorite of mine that I used to play on my Commodore 64 - or maybe even on my VIC-20, I can't remember - and I never actually realized it was a port of an arcade game until I accidentally rediscovered it one day on MAME a few years ago.  That game is Clowns. If you are one of those people with a fear of clowns (coulrophobia - gotta love Google) then the C64 game box is gonna scare the livin shit out of you because they managed to squeeze a half-dozen of the grinning maniacs on the front.



Clowns was released by Midway in January 1978 and was apparently a ripoff of Exidy's arcade game Circus which was released the previous year (and subsequently ported to the Atari VCS), but in the bitter Clowns versus Circus rivalry I'm down with the Clowns baby.

Clowns is a simple 2-D single-screen black and white game, but uses blue, green, and yellow horizontal overlays for color. It is sort of like Breakout with gravity and slightly better graphics - and I do mean slightly.



In the game there are 3 rows of balloons floating horizontally along the top of the screen and you control a see-saw at the bottom of the screen that can go left or right. There is one clown standing on the see-saw and soon a second clown comes barreling his crazy ass off an elevated platform and you have to position the see-saw correctly to catch him and launch the other clown into the air to collide with and pop the balloons. Each balloon nets you points with the balloons at the top level being worth more than the ones at the bottom. When the clown comes falling back to earth you move the see-saw under him and launch the other crazy bastard into the balloon-filled sky to bounce around and burst some more. These clowns really hate balloons. Once you burst all the balloons of a particular row/color you get bonus points and then a new row appears to replace it. The clowns hurtle through the air faster and faster and if you don't get the see-saw under the flying clown in time to catch him - well, that's a dead clown. And the circus only has so many before it's game over.



As you would expect from such an old game, the sound effects and the graphics are both very simple but surprisingly satisfying (except for the jarring noise to alert a player when he gets a bonus jump - not a fan of that). The game is pretty addictive so the replay value is good (if you're me anyway) and although the 1-player play is OK, like most old games it really shines when you have 2 players competing (turn-based play rather than simultaneous).

I finally got a chance to see a real Clowns machine in person when I made the pilgrimage to the American Classic Arcade Museum in New Hampshire last fall.  I managed to snap a picture of this young man as he sidled up the game to start clowning around.  Look at how joyful he is to find a real Clowns!



But that joy quickly turned to rage when he discovered the game was broken!  The poor sap wanted to play it so badly he even inserted a second token which the machine politely swallowed as it had the first without any sort of compensatory entertainment return whatsoever.  It even went so far as to taunt him with the screen in play, but the see-saw was frozen in place so the suicidal clowns just jumped blindly off the ramps to their doom.



The gentleman was escorted from the premises by arcade security and forced to cool down over a turkey dinner at Hart's Turkey Farm Restaurant down the street.  I never knew there were so many different meals made out of turkey. But I digest.




David Nelson holds the official record for Clowns with 61,390 points on June 1, 2004. So far my best effort has only netted 19,320.

Assuming you're playing it on MAME (and not the real thing) be sure to play it with a trackball, spinner, or mouse. If you try to play it with a joystick you are going to completely hate it. I booted up Clowns on the MAME cab before writing this and discovered to my dismay that the colors were gone. I guess the devs got rid of the workaround code that added the color. Now I have to wait for someone to add it back in as an artwork file.  You'd be surprised how much 3 little plastic strips of color adds to a black and white game. 
I give it 7.4 insane clown posses out of 10.

Oh, and in addition to my VIC-20/C64 version, Clowns was also ported to the Bally Astrocade in 1981 as the combo-pack Clowns and Brickyard. There were several other ports/clones in the Circus/Clowns "genre" as well.

















Circus by Exidy in 1977
T.T. Acrobat by Taito in 1978
Acrobat TV by Taito in 1978
See Saw Jump by Sega in 1978
See Saw Jump II by Sega in 1978
Circus Atari for Atari 2600 in 1978
Clowns & Balloons for Atari 400/800 and TRS-80 Color Computer in 1982
Stunt Clown (public domain) for Atari 400/800 in 1983
Monkeys and Balloons for Atari ST in 1988

There have even been a couple of modern-day remakes of the game based on the Atari 2600 Circus Atari that you can download for free - Circus Irata and Circus Linux.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Armor Attack and the Anti-Draft Sentiments of Tim Skelly

According to my handy dandy "This Day in Tech" feed it was on this day in 1840 that Samuel F.B. Morse received a U.S. patent for his dot-dash telegraphy signal system known as "Morse Code". So it seems a nice opportunity to chat a bit about one of my favorite old vector arcade games that actually contains genuine Morse code in its sound effects - Armor Attack!



Vector game specialists Cinematronics released Armor Attack in 1980 and also licensed it to both Rock-ola and Sega for release as well. The game takes place on a single screen which shows a top-down view of a bombed out urban landscpape in which you, and a friend if you happen to have one lying around, control a small jeep and must drive around the war-torn city avoiding the tanks and attack copters that are trying to kill you while trying to bring them down with return fire of your own. You can bring the copters down with a single shot if you are good enough to hit them before they shoot you while they circle around the playfield, but the tanks take two shots to polish off. Your first shot immobilizes the tank but it will still turn its turret and continue to shoot at you until you are able to administer the coup de grace.

Being an early vector game, the graphics were simple monochrome wireframe, but like a lot of early video games it used overlays to give the illusion of more sophisticated graphics. In fact the buildings behind which you take cover from attacking enemies are not even present at all electronically - they are represented ONLY by the graphic overlay, but the code was written so that they provided cover and obstacles just the same.



Armor Attack was controlled entirely by buttons - no fancy shmancy joysticks here!  I have always been strangely attracted to games that are controlled solely by buttons without any joysticks (e.g. Astro Blaster, Asteroids, Rip Off) so this one is right up my alley control-wise. You control the jeep pretty much the same way you control the spaceship in Asteroids except that when you stop pressing on the gas, inertia doesn't keep carrying you forward - you more or less stop on a dime.  And you can make some really nice tight turns too to avoid enemy fire. Here is the control panel.



I don't recall ever actually playing this game in the arcades but I saw the artwork one day on the MAME cab and checked it out and suddenly I had a new one for my favorites list. The graphics are simple and the gameplay is admittedly redundant with just a single-screen that in true old-school arcade fashion just keeps getting harder and faster until you die, but the game is strangely addictive and never really gets old to me. One-player mode is fun, but it also offers a two-player co-op mode where you team up with a partner to kick tank and copter ass together which adds a new dimension to the game. The sound effects are excellent too for 1980. High replay value - at least for me it is - I give it an 8.0.

So what about the Morse code you ask? Interesting story.  The U.S. government had reinstituted the draft registration during the game's development and Tim Skelly, the game's designer/programmer, was a longtime opponent of the draft. So to voice his anti-draft opinion Skelly encoded the message "don't register" into the repeating morse code beeps you hear in the game. Skelly discussed it in the following interview piece.

Armor Attack was done at a time when I felt I had worked out a few things about game design. I was just trying to do an artful update of one of the earliest video games, "Tank." Everything went smoothly. There were only two problems. One was that (again and again and again!) (Jim) Pierce wouldn't allow the mirror technique used in Warrior to be used here for a background. Pierce and (Papa Tom) Stroud (the owners of Cinematronics) were cheap, cheap, cheap! With every game they took away one more color from the cabinet art because each pass cost a few pennies more. Check it out. If I had done one more game the artwork would have been black on black!

Like Warrior, I just didn't have the drawing time to draw the (very important!) background outlines on the screen during the game. (They can be seen by themselves in the test mode for alignment.) So, the clever solution that management came up with was to use the same kind of overlay that was used on Star Castle. The problem was that the overlay wasn't covering/coloring anything but black! That's why the playfield for the game is either black or slightly-greenish-black. Ah, well. It worked well enough I guess.

A second event occurred about the time I had just started the game. We heard through the grapevine that Atari had completed a tank game and was testing it in the Bay area. Obviously we were concerned. One of the management guys went through the phone books for the bay area and called every arcade until he found the one with the test game. (He used a cheesy hillbilly accent. It was pretty funny.) We flew up immediately. When we got there we spotted the game, which turned out to be 'Battle Zone.' Since it was 3D and mine was top-down with entirely different game play, we went ahead with our plans, despite how good we thought the Atari game was. But that's not the funny bit. While everyone else was checking out 'Battle Zone' I wandered around the arcade like I usually did, looking for games I hadn't played. I found one and really got into it. It, too, was an Atari test piece, but none of the management guys thought much of it. Funny, I really thought 'Missile Command' would make it. ;>)

At the time I was finishing the game, the (US) government decreed that every male of draft age had to register, even though there was no draft in effect. This pissed me off (old draft resistor), especially since my buddy Scott Boden was someone who had to sign up. I wanted to use morse code sounds in Armor Attack, and I knew morse, (old boy scout) so that's real morse code in the game beeping out "dontregister." I was also assuaging my own conscience, since I had heard that Atari had sold Battle Zone to the Army.

Armor Attack was ported to the classic vector home game system Vectrex in 1982 - and when I finally buy me one of those beauties I will also be getting a copy of Armor Attack.

Tom Larkin holds the official high score record for one-player on Armor Attack with 2,009,000 points on September 25, 1982.

NES Music Video

Hello out there blogosphere. Been quite busy at work lately so although I have managed to squeeze in a LITTLE gaming here and there I haven't had time to do much posting about it. And by much I mean any whatsoever. But I have a nice quickie one today to get back in the swing of things.

Sebastian Bender, the guy who made the Game Boy music video that I posted about a while back has made another one over at his site Gnarl-o-Rama. His musical instrument of choice this time is an NES. He's blowing on cartridges. He's clicking zappers. He's rubbing the case ridges like a hillbilly on a washbboard. He's doing it all!

And you know how you always wondered if a copy of Super Mario 3 could be used as a kazoo? Yes. Yes it can.

So if you liked the first one then check out the new one below. Reminds me of the Rockit music video by Herbie Hancock sans synthesizer. I know - I'm old.

Uncharted the Movie, Still a Chance!

Yes, Sony and their open-door policy regarding my personal information and credit card numbers has been irritating me a bit of late.  But at least for the moment they went from goat to hero for this old gamer when I heard that they had, in essence, fired the idiot director David Russell from making the upcoming Uncharted movie - which apparently is no longer upcoming, at least for now.

From the article in yesterday's Variety: 

"A pair of tentpole-sized studio projects have lost their helmers, as David O. Russell exited "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune" over creative differences with Sony".



Word is that Sony is now searching for a new writer/director for the movie and the casting is starting from scratch.  I don't even care anymore whether or not it's Fillion playing Drake. I'm just glad they are restarting to try and hopefully stay a little closer to the storyline instead of Russel's opium-fueled vision of a globetrotting family of treasure protectors - or whatever the hell it was.  And of course, the big win here for mankind at large, is that there is just a little bit less of Marky Mark Wahlberg in the movies.  I think everyone can agree with me, even Mark himself because I have to believe he is filled with self-loathing, that less Marky is good for everybody.

So thank you Sony. I salute you.  Now seriously, stop giving away my credit card numbers.