Beyond Classic DOS Games

On May 3, a very odd thing happened to me. My computer, which is usually very stable, crashed when I closed Firefox. I wasn’t concerned at that time, but the next day I noticed that it had lost my History file. This wasn’t a big deal, but it meant that I had to type in the entire URL of websites that I go to frequently, which I’m used to having auto-complete for me (I only have to type “c” to get to this site). I’ve memorized most of the addresses that I visit regularly, so it was just a minor inconvenience.

Today I decided to do something that I don’t do every day: I checked my Bookmarks. I don’t bookmark websites that I visit frequently because I don’t need to. Websites that I visit frequently can be accessed by typing between 1 and 3 letters into the address bar until auto-complete brings up the one I want! No, I use Bookmarks to bookmark my infrequently visited sites. (This is the part where this post becomes relevant to gaming.) I host a website called Classic DOS Games (you’re visiting it right now), which is an archive of hundreds of classic games. To include them on the site, I have to be sure that they are original, unaltered archives. They can’t be cracked, hacked, hex-edited, or have added or missing files. There are very few internet sources that I trust to meet this standard. Every once in a while I find a hidden gem of a website that is devoted to a specific game or genre or company, which contains invaluable information and rare downloads. When I come across these gems, I bookmark them in case I ever need to find them again.

So, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, Firefox lost my bookmarks! I spent years finding these unknown treasures, and I could never find them again. I wouldn’t even remember which sites were missing! It took me five days to notice, but the consequences took less than 5 milliseconds to sink in. My first reaction was to exclaim, quite loudly, “I’m @&$^ed!”

It had never occurred to me to backup my bookmarks because I couldn’t imagine something like this happening. In fact, I still don’t understand how it could. NTFS is a very robust, recoverable file system. If the system turns off during a write operation, the file is never damaged. For one thing, the file isn’t replaced until the write operation is complete. Even if the file was damaged, NTFS stores two copies of the file allocation table at opposite “ends” of the hard drive (the innermost and outermost tracks). After an improper shutdown, the two copies are compared. If the primary copy is corrupted, it is restored from the backup. Any entries with mismatched CRCs can be repaired by knowing the correct CRC. The short version of what I’m saying is that Windows didn’t lose my bookmarks, Firefox did. Somewhere in the code, it must be non-fault tolerant to an improper shutdown while it’s saving the History and Bookmark files.

I was dismayed for a few seconds, but then I decided to do a Google search for “Firefox lost my bookmarks”. The first site that came up was http://splashofstyle.com/archives/2007/05/06/firefox-lost-my-bookmarks/. I can see from the long list of thank you notes under the article that I’m not the only person affected by this. The step-by-step instructions missed two steps, which I’ve inserted in bold.

1. In the My Computer directory/folder, choose the C: Drive.
2. Choose the Documents and Settings folder;
3. Then your user folder (what ever your user name is, there will be a folder for it)
4. Next, Application Data folder
4a. Choose Mozilla
5. Choose Firefox
6. Then choose the Profiles folder.
7. After selecting the profile you want to check, if the bookmarks.html file is empty (it probably will be), go to bookmarkbackups.

Splash of Style correctly predicts that you will likely have at least two profiles when you get here. One of them is your original profile (the one you lost), and the other one was created to replace it. The bookmarks.html file in the new one will be 7k, and will contain only the default bookmarks that you have when you first install Firefox. The bookmarks.html file in the other folder will be 1k and will not have any bookmarks in it! Go into a folder called bookmarkbackups, where Firefox stores backups of your bookmarks going back five days.

Ack! Five days! It took me five days to notice! I almost never use my bookmarks, and it was just dumb luck (or divine intervention) that I happened to go into them today. In the bookmarkbackups folder were five files: four empty files dated May 4, 5, 6, and 7, and one dated May 3 which had all of my bookmarks in it. If I had waited one more day, I would have lost them. Years of research would have been lost, and I likely would never have recovered all of my sources. That was close.

So, first of all, my sincerest thanks to debbieT of Splash of Style for saving my butt today. We all know that we should backup our valuable data, but it probably hasn’t occurred to most of us to backup a list of our important bookmarks. As I said, I don’t understand how Firefox could lose them! I would be even more screwed if I were to lose my emails, which is why I used to export my emails to a second hard drive, in addition to an off-site backup using secure online storage, on a regular basis. With Outlook Express this is incredibly easy.

In Outlook Express, select File>Export>Messages. Then just follow along and the rest is obvious. What could be easier than that? Importing is just as easy. The whole process can take less than a minute. O sweet simplicity, O well-designed interface! You are a rare treasure, a pearl of great price! Unfortunately, I switched to Thunderbird about a year ago because Outlook Express wasn’t handling certified emails very well. Where is the Export Messages function of Thunderbird? There isn’t one!

No, I’m not kidding! There isn’t one. Prove me wrong! I selected Mozilla Thunderbird Help and it took me to a website where I eventually found this explanation of how to locate the folder where my profile is stored on my hard drive so that it can be backed up manually. Apparently this critical function wasn’t considered important enough to become a feature of Thunderbird. (???) I used to be reminded to do it every time I clicked the File menu in Outlook Express. When I started using Thunderbird, I stopped thinking about it and put my last year’s worth of emails at risk.

So, the lesson today is that you should always backup your emails and your bookmarks. Some programs make this easy, and others force you to do it the hard way. Either way, just do it, and do it often.

As for Mozilla: you know I love you guys, but both of your flagship products need some work. Thunderbird has a simple function for importing messages, but not for exporting or backing them up. That’s unacceptable. Thank you very much for building backups into Firefox, but my bookmarks shouldn’t have been lost in the first place, and once they were, 5 days almost wasn’t enough to save them. Here’s a very simple suggestion: bookmarks-2008-05-03.html contains dozens of bookmarks, and bookmarks-2008-05-04.html contains none. It’s possible that I deleted all of my bookmarks, but probably not likely. If Firefox detects that all of the bookmarks in a profile have disappeared since the last time Firefox was used, or from one backup to the next, maybe it could alert the user? It’s very important that programs perform a self-check every time they run. Yes, it slows down the startup process, but it’s too important to skip. Firefox should check the integrity of the bookmark list at startup every time. I came within 24 hours of losing my lifetime collection of bookmarks.

In the early days of video games, the United States was king. In May 1972, an American company called Magnavox started selling the Magnavox Odyssey for $100. Even adjusted for inflation, that was a reasonable price for a video game console. Other consoles followed, including the Coleco Telstar, which first went on sale for $100 in 1976. I’m lucky enough to own one of those. Coleco is also an American company (COnnecticut LEather COmpany).

In the unofficial second generation of video game consoles, an American company called Fairchild released the Channel F in August 1976 for $169.95. For most people, the company that started it all was Atari. Based in Sunnyvale, California, they began a cultural revolution when the Atari VCS was released for $199 in October 1977. 30 million units were sold, and millions of gamers continue to own and play their Atari to this day.

Other successful consoles of the second generation include the Magnavox Odyssey2, and the Intellivision, released by American company Mattel, which is still one of my favorite systems. SNAFU for Intellivision is one my favorite games of all time. I even have the Intellivoice module, made famous by the southern drawl of the voice actor in B-52 Bomber. Towards the end, Coleco made another big splash with the release of the Colecovision. It used the same controller design as the Intellivision, but could produce twice as many simultaneous sprites. Sales were going well, until mismanagement at Atari led to an industry wide collapse known as the video game crash of 1983. Although Atari attempted to get back into the game following the crash with the Atari 7800 and Jaguar consoles, America permanently lost its dominance over the video game industry.

A Japanese company called Nintendo released a video game console in Japan called the Famicom, or Family Computer, on July 15, 1983. Wary of the American market’s recent collapse, they originally negotiated with Atari to sell the system as an Atari product in the American market. That didn’t work out, and Nintendo finally went it alone and released the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States on October 18, 1985, and Canada in February 1986, more than two years after the Japanese release. The Japanese invasion had begun.

Japanese company Sega had success with the Sega Master System in the third generation and Sega Genesis in the fourth generation. Tokyo-based NEC released the TurboGrafx 16, which I still think was a great system that suffered from some poor games. NEC’s flagship game series, Bonk’s Adventure, showed off what the system was capable of, and Fantasy Zone looked much better on the TurboGrafx 16 than on the NES and Master System, featuring beautiful pastel colors which were true to the arcade version. NEC dropped out of the market, but Japanese company Sony got into the American market in 1995.

Today, the three main systems are the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox 360, and the Sony PlayStation 3. Microsoft is an American company, having gotten into the console market in a big way with the Xbox in 2001, the first successful American console since the video game crash of 1983. Although a major player, the market is still dominated by Japanese consoles and games.

Which leads me to the subject of this article — great games you haven’t played. There’s a reason why you haven’t played them: they were never released in North America! Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll admit, I’ve gotten addicted to Scrabble. I had trouble getting into the game a few years ago because it’s a bit frustrating to have to memorize “words” that aren’t really words in the sense of actually being used by speakers of the English language. But then someone told me about Facebook, and soon after I discovered Scrabulous. Being able to play my friends made it worth suffering through that difficult initial stage of memorizing lists, such as words with a Q but no U.

So, a friend of mine recently invited me to play Scrabble on isc.ro. ISC is a Scrabble server. I took up internet chess in 1998, so I’ve been to a few servers in my time. Some of them were empty, or had bad customer service, but none of them have left half as bad a taste in my mouth as ISC.

First, the good. You connect to the server with a Telnet-based client called WordBiz. WordBiz is a clean, simple interface that does everything you could expect a Scrabble interface to do. WordBiz is a lot like Blitzin, the client for ICC (the Internet Chess Club), which includes the way Blitzin creates a hyperlink out of anything inside quotation marks. This allow you to link to a help file by typing “help channels” (inside quotation marks), or link to an external website. I’ve often wondered why they couldn’t have chosen some other character, like asterisks or something. You have to train yourself to use single quotes when you want to, you know, quote something, to avoid creating hyperlinks within mundane conversations. That’s a bit annoying, but ICC started it, so I can’t blame ISC for that.

And the members? Talk about friendly! A nicer group of people you will never meet. In fact, civility is strictly enforced. More on that later.

The first thing you’re likely to notice when you’re new to the server is that there are no Helpers or Admins online. There are certain times of the day when a Helper is there, but most of their answers are sarcastic and insulting. Don’t bother using the “ask” command, unless you want a stupid answer. Just ask in one of the chat channels. The fellow who runs the server, a man named Carol, supposedly is reluctant to add more Helpers and Admins because he doesn’t trust the membership. He apparently prefers that customer service be non-existent, and the lucky few who get to volunteer their time seem to have contempt for the other members. Perhaps their limited membership creates a culture of entitlement and elitism.

But let’s get back to the “ask” command. If you really want to be made fun of, there’s a command called “ask” which sends your question to the Admins and Helpers. Just type “ask <your question>”. This is similar to the “assist” command on a chess server I used to frequent. There’s one critical difference.

If the Helpers choose to ignore your question (as they did with mine), or if there are no Helpers online, your question will be stuck in the queue. You can’t ask a new question while you have a question pending, and there is no way to rescind or expire your question! If the staff ignores your question and you want to ask a new question, you’re screwed! You can’t clear the old question to ask a new one. No more questions for you, sucker!

The “assist” command on the chess server I was referring to was a bit more sensible. You could cancel your request, or it would expire automatically if you left the server. Assuming that there would be no reason for anyone to answer your question after you log off, I logged off. Then I logged back on, and my question was still pending! “Yes”, the other members confirm, “they will sometimes answer your question after you leave.” Why would do they that? What possible sense could there be for a question not to expire after you leave? So you can’t even clear your question from the queue by logging off and logging back on. Is there any point to that at all?

Anyway, everyone has a “Number of unfinished games” ratio. Mine is “very low”. A person with a higher ratio might be losing connection on purpose to be a bad sport. This is actually a useful piece of information. But sometimes you start a game and the other person isn’t at their computer. After it becomes obvious that they aren’t going to play, you can abort the game and it has no effect on your rating. But it does affect your unfinished games ratio. How does that make any sense? I mean, if no moves were made, then a game didn’t occur. If a game didn’t occur, how can it affect your unfinished games ratio? It just punishes you for aborting the game, when it’s really the other person’s fault for walking away from their computer while they had a pending game request. One of the members asked why ISC would do such a thing, and got a typically sarcastic response. It was pretty obvious that they were simply refusing to acknowledge that the member was right. Then the Helper logged off to avoid having to answer any further questions. Nice.

So, I decided to ask the members about their customer satisfaction. I used the Helper’s poor handling of the question as an example. One member said that the Helpers are just volunteers with no special powers, so there was no point asking them to fix something that they have no control over. Fair enough, but I’ve volunteered on chess servers before, and when a member had a concern that I couldn’t handle, I would escalate it to someone who could. I assume Helpers on ISC would do the same. “That’s an unwarranted assumption,” another member tells me. I replied that I was only assuming that if the membership had a concern, the site operators would be interested in hearing it and make some attempt to resolve it. “Go to a better server,” says another member. Read the rest of this entry »

I bought a Nintendo 64 the day it came out, and I’ve been a huge fan ever since. The N64 is my favorite console ever. It had amazing sound and video and, as always, Nintendo made some incredibly fun games for it. The jump from the Super Nintendo to the Nintendo 64 is probably the biggest upgrade of all time. Going from a 2D 10MHz system to a 3D 93.75 MHz system with CD-quality voices blew me away. When you’ve been used to Super Mario World, Super Mario 64 is unbelievable. Suddenly there were huge immersive 3D worlds to explore, and characters who actually spoke.

For a while, every new game was the best game ever. First it was Super Mario 64, then Wave Race 64, then Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (the first level, at least), then Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, then Star Fox 64. Fighting the Battle of Hoth, or shooting velociraptors that writhed about as they died were experiences that no one had dared to dream of in the previous console generation. The world of gaming had changed.

Then, perhaps the most anticipated game ever came along. It was about 10 years ago that I pre-ordered The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It had a massive 256 megabit cartridge, four times larger than Super Mario 64. It promised a new level of realism, with a realistic transition from day into night. There was the glorious sunset, casting shadows on everything. The ability to realistically cast light and shadows was something new. We take it for granted today, but PC graphics cards didn’t have dedicated hardware for lighting effects until the GeForce 256 came along.

The graphics are beautiful, with shimmering walls and beautifully designed dungeons to explore. You get to ride a horse at some point, which is just incredible! I couldn’t wait to ride Epona.

Zelda OoT featured the most realistic physics of any game created to that point. I’m still amazed by the attention to detail. When Link is running on ice and suddenly stops, he subtly, visibly adjusts his balance as he runs out of momentum. If you haven’t lived in a part of the world that has ice in the winter, it would never even occur to you that people need to do that. I’ve lived in such a place all my life, and I still wouldn’t have thought of it. Someone actually took the time to write code for that. There were rumors that the game might need a 384 or 512 megabit cartridge, so it’s hard to believe that someone approved the storage expenditure to include an effect that most people wouldn’t notice, and absolutely no one would have noticed its absence. The programmers must have been competing to get their ideas included within the 256 megabit budget they were given.

In the world of gaming, we expect small evolutions over time, not revolutions. The Intellivision doubled the number of simultaneous sprites that the Atari 2600 could display, and the Colecovision doubled that, but the games still look pretty much the same. The Super Nintendo looked a bit better than the Nintendo and added layers, but they both mostly played 2D games. Now compare The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, in all its 2D 16-bit glory, to what you see in Ocarina of Time, a 3D game for a 64-bit console. I never expected a leap forward like this. The N64 was miles ahead of the Super Nintendo, and the transition to a 3D world like this is nothing short of a revolution.

Basically, everything from here on is covered by a spoiler warning. Why a spoiler warning for a 10 year old game? Because if you haven’t played this game yet, you have to. It will blow… you… away. Read the rest of this entry »

I have always believed in the philosophy that a good product sells itself. I just assumed that if I made a great website, people would tell their friends, and they would tell their friends, and in no time everyone would be aware of the site. I worked harder on the site in 2007 than I had ever worked before, and then I evaluated the effects of my efforts. What I found was surprising: the number of visitors was no higher than it had been a year before!

I was disappointed by the numbers, but I figured that there must not be a large audience for websites about DOS games. Then I compared my traffic statistics with the top three DOS game sites and found that, on average, they were getting 10 times as many visitors! There is a huge demand for DOS games, but hardly anyone is going to Classic DOS Games to get them!

The mystery didn’t last long: I looked up “DOS games” on Google and the site made #11. That means we just missed being on the first page of results. The difference between page 1 and page 2 could be as much as 1000%. The rankings are based on content and sites linking in, so apparently we just don’t quite make the cut yet.

“Well”, I thought to myself, “there are over 200 games on the site, but the Big 3 have 400 to 500. The site is young, and we’ll catch up.” Then I remembered that one of the reasons why there are so few games is because those other sites include only the latest version of each game, whereas I take the time to locate and archive the entire version history of each game. It’s a ton of work! So I counted all of the versions and found that I had 575 versions of classic games! That’s more than any of the Big 3. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, Classic DOS Games now has more game downloads than any other legal DOS games website in the world! It took me less than three years to get to 575, whereas some of the other sites are 7 years old and are just getting to 500. Well, no wonder! I’ve been working like a dog on this site! Sometimes I feel like the hardest working guy in DOS games. I probably am!

So, you work hard for almost three years and accomplish things that no other website has accomplished. Liberate 19 games, do a bunch of interviews, make a DVD, and collect 575 downloads. That doesn’t include the modern games in the “member games” section, or the utilities. Or the licenses or screenshots or tutorials, or any of the other extras that set the site apart. You work hard, and you get no respect. Rodney Dangerfield: I hear ya, buddy!

Which led me to the question: how do I improve my Google rank by one place? Just one place! Well, there’s not much that I can do about it, so this is where you come in. If you like the site, post a link on your website. That will generate traffic from your visitors, and it will improve Classic DOS Games’ search ranking. It costs you nothing, and it might increase traffic to the site tenfold. Not too shabby!

So, that’s all I have to say about that. I think Classic DOS Games deserves to have the kind of traffic that the other big sites get, and I think it’s going to happen pretty soon, with your help.

Thank you to everyone who has supported the site thus far.

I discovered Monkey Kick Off on Miniclip.com, but I chose to play at Totebo.com to avoid the Miniclip intro and extra junk it places on the screen, but mostly because I wanted to support the author, Niclas Åberg, instead of Miniclip. He did a great job, and he deserves some credit. As a Miniclip employee, I don’t know how much it matters to him, but I wanted to promote Totebo anyway.

So, I went back to the Monkey Kick Off page on Miniclip and saw my rather pathetic high score and decided to improve it. That turned out to be very difficult. Monkey won’t throw the ball high enough!

I have previously said that if you wait for about 30 seconds, Monkey should throw the ball above his head, by which I meant the entire ball. On Miniclip, Monkey will often throw the ball high enough that the top is over his head, but you can wait a full minute for the entire ball to get over his head, and he will never throw it as high as he will at Totebo.com. The effect is that it limits the maximum power of Monkey’s kick, reducing scores by roughly 1000 points!

Whereas I was able to kick the ball 5806 meters on my first day of playing Monkey Kick Off, in two days I have been able to kick the ball no farther than 4781 at Miniclip. Let me put that another way. By patiently waiting (up to 30 seconds) for a good juggle from Monkey, I can kick the ball 5000 meters almost every time at Totebo. In fact, I hit “Retry” as soon as it becomes obvious that I’m not going to get 5000 meters. 5000 meters may not even be possible at Miniclip!

Now, I know, I can see that some people have kicked the ball that far. The current high score for the past month is 6001, which is probably the highest possible score on Totebo’s website. But how are people breaking 5000? I’ve been studying the game for weeks, and I can’t do it. Let’s analyze how the games differ.

There’s a Miniclip.com symbol on the screen, and you can submit your high score, which is much more reliable than the easily cracked encryption codes that you can send to your friends. Then there’s something in the top left corner.

I’ve magnified the number. What does 04 mean? Version 4? Clearly the game has been reprogrammed beyond the addition of the Miniclip advertisement and the ability to submit your high score. I guess the real question is why Miniclip wanted the scores to be lower. Can you think of a reason?

“Version 4″ still uses the same encryption, so I can change the domain name and use the code from one site on the other site. This means that I could pretend that I scored 5806 on Miniclip using the code I got at Totebo, which isn’t fair to my friends who are playing on Miniclip.

I decided to see if Miniclip had changed any of Totebo’s other games. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing my review of Totebo Flash games, I recently tried out Smashing. George Santayana famously wrote that, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This appears to be relevant here.

Smashing is a Breakout clone, and sadly, it’s one of the better ones. It’s sad that the game is one of the best of the genre because it isn’t very much fun. A history lesson is clearly in order.

In 1972, Pong became the first arcade machine to achieve significant commercial success, only a year after the first coin-operated arcade machines were invented. Pong required two players and was designed to be “so simple that any drunk in any bar could play.” It had the novelty of being new, but the lack of variation or complex gameplay eventually limited the replay value of the game. It also required two players.

In 1976, Breakout was released. It could be played by a single player, and the addition of a breakable wall added new dimensions of strategy and gameplay. A good strategy is to break a passage all the way through the wall on one side or the other, then send the ball up it and let it destroy the wall from the top. The only downside to this strategy is that the ball speeds up as it hits the blocks at the top, and it’s moving pretty fast when it finally comes back down. It was exciting, and it allowed players to compete with each other’s high scores, which was impossible in a game like Pong. The one fatal flaw of the game was that it could be incredibly difficult to hit the last block.

This flaw was passed along to future clones, such as Arkanoid in 1986. Arkanoid breathed new life into the genre by introducing new elements of gameplay, such as unbreakable blocks and blocks that required multiple hits to destroy, and various power-ups, such as multi-ball and laser beams. Most importantly, every level was different. Instead of repeating the same wall over and over forever, each level had the blocks arranged differently to change the strategy and keep the gameplay dynamic. It is also known as a ridiculously difficult game, mostly thanks to the unbreakable blocks. Breakable blocks are often shielded by unbreakable ones, and it can take forever to get the ball where it needs to be to clear out the screen. The game is so difficult that it just isn’t very much fun.

Then came Moraff’s Blast and Super Blast in 1991. A new “adventure” mode used a different layout in every level, and lots of helpful powerups, but the goal was no longer to clear the screen! Hitting every single block is simply too boring to complete an entire adventure like Arkanoid, so the goal in Blast was simply to hit one of the exit squares to get to the next level. Blast was a lot of fun, and is a gaming classic. Although to a much smaller extent, it still suffered from Breakout’s original Achilles heel: it could be incredibly difficult to hit that one exit square in a huge empty screen. The level design in all versions of both games was generally excellent, but there were a few levels that were just needlessly frustrating. There’s giving the player a challenge, and then there’s just wasting his time. Blast and Super Blast took multi-ball to a new level. Some levels were filled with power-ups that split the ball into 4 or 8 balls, and the screen could get filled with balls! Overall, both of these games were way more fun than every paddle game that had come before, and they remain classics of the genre.

Finally, in 1996, Psycon Software fixed the problem. Cybersphere was a revolution in the genre. Aside from featuring gorgeous graphics and great music, the big empty screen became a thing of the past. The blocks are brought closer to the paddle, making it easier to hit them, but maintaining the challenge because the ball bounces back much sooner. It also added angled corners, so that the ball could bounce off of them and back into the center. The angled corners and edges virtually eliminated the problem of hitting that one last block, and the genre was saved! Finally it was possible to have a game that had a variety of levels and power-ups for dynamic gameplay and excellent replay value, that had a high enough difficulty level to be challenging, but eliminated the tedious task of hitting a single block in a huge empty screen. New elements like invisible blocks and bonus screens also increased the challenge and fun factor of both games. Cybersphere and Cybersphere Plus are, to the best of my knowledge, the best Breakout clones of all time.

So, it’s 2007 or so, and Totebo decides to make a Breakout clone. It’s a good idea because it’s very easy to program (I had to make one in a high school computer class), and hours of gameplay can be created by simply designing new layouts. If done properly, this could potentially become my favorite Flash game ever. Hoping for hours of non-stop brick-smashing fun, I assumed that Totebo had learned from the mistakes of the past and made a game with all of the genre’s strengths and none of its weaknesses. I was quickly relieved of that delusion. Read the rest of this entry »

I liked Monkey Kick Off so much that I decided to try Zed yesterday. It’s an easy enough game that I can beat it without losing a single life, and yet it has a charm to it that I really enjoy. A game doesn’t have to be hard to be good. I like the fact that there’s a bit of exploration to it, which any good game should have. You should always throw in an Easter egg for players who enjoy the game enough to look for them. Let’s talk about the game.

So, this is Zed. Zed is an android who dreams of having a space suit made of gold. I don’t know why. It’s a good enough excuse for me to play a game. So, you’re a robot and you enter a gold mine that is full of monsters that look like dinosaurs. Good things include:

	200 points (103 in the game)
	500 points (105 in the game)
	800 points (30 in the game)
	Gold, mandatory, 3 per level
	Key to open a door (10)
	Energy, restores energy to 100% (6)
	Invisible, makes Zed invincible for a few seconds (2)
	Speed, makes Zed faster, jump farther (3: 2-1, 4-2, 10-1)
	Jump, makes Zed jump much higher (3: 5-3, 7-1, 8-1)

The effect of the Speed and Jump power-ups are permanent, but the abilities are lost when you lose a life.

There are six kinds of enemies. I don’t know what they’re really called, so I made up the names.

	Purple Walker, just walks back and forth (4 in the game)
	Red Walker, walks back and forth, breathing fire (3 in the game)
	Green Walker, walks back and forth, occasionally with a burst of speed (5 in the game)
	Purple Flyer, just flies back and forth in a horizontal line (2 in the game)
	Red Flyer, follows Zed and drops fireballs, can only move horizontally (2 in the game)
	Green Flyer, chases Zed horizontally and vertically, can fly through walls, has occasional bursts of speed (3 in the game)

The six monsters make their first appearance sequentially in the first six levels, in order of deadliness. Green Flyers are, by far, the most dangerous. Zed has no weapons, and the monsters can’t be killed or trapped. The only way to deal with them is to avoid them.

The game is a platformer, but not a sidescroller. That is, the screen doesn’t scroll; you move from screen to screen.

There’s really no way that I can write a whole post about this game without significant spoilers, so consider everything from here on covered by a spoiler warning. This is a complete walkthrough of the game. Codes for each level can be found in the screenshots. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a fine example of why DOS games are still popular. I just discovered a Flash game called Monkey Kick Off, made by a company called Totebo. Having mastered Monkey Lander several years ago, the name caught my interest a few hours ago. It’s a simple flash game in which a monkey tries to kick a ball as far as possible. I’ve always said that DOS games are great because they just take a simple concept and make it fun. Well, it doesn’t get any simpler than this. The only thing you do in this game is press a key or mouse button when you want the monkey to kick the ball. Simple, certainly, but is it fun?

It’s addictively fun. It’s fun because you want to see how far you can kick the ball. It’s a matter of trajectory. For years, artillery engineers have had to learn how to calculate trajectory. For as long as there have been projectiles, there has been knowledge of an ideal angle to maximize distance and calculate weapons range. If you fire at a very straight angle, the projectile will waste less energy on upward motion (which it must fight against gravity to achieve) and spend more time going forward, but when it runs out of momentum it will have less distance to fall. A projectile that is shot almost straight up will spend longer falling, but it won’t get as far before it runs out of momentum. The ideal angle is somewhere in between. It has to be straight enough to get distance before it runs out of momentum, but high enough to get a good arc instead of just running straight into the ground.

In high school computer classes, most students will have to write a projectile game at some point. The user enters the speed and the angle and you see how far the projectile goes. Those are games where you type in the numbers, so there’s no skill or reflexes involved. Then there are dozens of golf games where they add reflexes to the mix by angle and power bars to determine your swing, and you have to press a button at the right moment to get the maximum distance. Monkey Kick Off is even a bit more advanced than that.

In this game, the monkey juggles the ball (with his feet), and you must determine when he kicks the ball. If you kick the ball at the top of its arc, it will be angled upwards. If you wait for it to come most of the way down before hitting it, it will be straighter. The monkey also juggles the ball to different heights. The higher the ball is at the beginning of your kick, the more powerful your kick is likely to be. By patiently waiting for the ball to be juggled high enough for a really good kick, and timing it right to get the ideal angle and power, you can really launch the ball. Physics in action!

Unlike artillery simulations, the ball will bounce, and your score is how far the ball travels before it comes to a complete stop. In a simple artillery simulation, the first “bounce” is the only consideration. With a bouncing ball, there are more options. With a high angle, the ball will have more height, so it will bounce more times, although it won’t get as far on each bounce. A lower angle will get less bounces, but it will get more distance out of them. There is still an ideal angle, but there’s more than one way to get the ball the same distance.

Once you kick the ball, it sails through the air and whistles through the trees, which are full of monkeys. The environment is broken into zones that repeat over and over for 1000 monkey meters, at which point you enter a new zone. 0 to 1000 meters is a forest, the 1000+ zone is a desert, the 2000+ zone appears to be a castle or fortress with an obvious lunar inspiration, the 3000+ zone is full of palm trees, the 4000+ zone is the monkey village, the 5000+ zone is full of banana trees, and everything beyond 6000 meters has a spaceship, presumably to take you back to your home planet for being so good at this game (actually it’s the ship from Monkey Lander). Read the rest of this entry »

On November 15, 1971, Intel released the 4004 processor, the first commercial microprocessor. Operating at 740 KHz (0.74 MHz), it was a 4-bit processor, and it could access up to 4 KB of memory. Although the 4004 was never used in a PC or video game console, it can still be thought of as paving the way for all home video games.

The 8-bit version, designed at the same time as the 4004 and released a year later, called the 8008 processor, was succeeded by the 16-bit 8080, which was 10 times faster. Finally the 16-bit 8086 was released, which was backwards compatible with the 8080. Although the 8086 was never used in a PC, the lobotomized version called the 8088, released in 1979, was chosen for the IBM PC in 1981, and the x86 architecture remains the most dominant CPU architecture to this day. So wait, what does the 4004 have to do with the IBM PC that wasn’t released until 10 years later? Actually, not that much!

Certainly the success of the 4004 led Intel to develop further processors until they got to the 8086, but the implications for gaming occurred much sooner. The high price of Intel and Motorola CPUs led a company called MOS to develop an inexpensive CPU called the 6502 in 1975. It was used in hobbyist computers, the Apple I (1976) and Apple II (1977), Commodore PET (1977) and a little video game system called the Atari VCS (1977). It was later used in the Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System (1983/1985), a modified version was used in the Commodore 64 (1982), and a next-generation version was used in the Super Famicom/Super NES (1990/1991). Remember Super Mario RPG? Those graphics were made possible by an extra chip in the cartridge called the Nintendo SA-1 (1995), which is a 10 MHz next-generation version of the 6502 processor.

The popularity of the 6502 (and continued expense of Intel processors) also led Zilog to create the 8080-compatible Z80 processor in 1976. It was used in the Tandy TRS-80 in 1977, and was was later used in the Osborne 1 portable computer (1981), Kaypro computers (1982), ColecoVision (1982) and Commodore 128 (1985). It also led to an explosion in the popularity of the CP/M operating system, which had originally been designed for the 8080/8085 processors. The power of the Z80 processor and the ease of use of CP/M put 8080-compatible software on home computers around the world.

The remarkable success of home computers from Apple, Atari, Commodore, Kaypro, and Tandy led IBM to join the market, selecting the inexpensive 8088 for their IBM “Personal Computer”, causing things to go full circle. The 8088 led to DOS, which led to Windows, and competition from Linux and Mac OS X for Intel processors. Whatever operating system you’re running, you almost certainly are using an x86 CPU.

It would be simplistic to say that the popularity of home computers is directly attributable to the 4004 processor, through a royal line of succession from 4004 to 8008 to 8080 to 8086, and all the generations of the 8086 that followed. In fact, if Intel hadn’t had competition from cheaper alternatives, there might never have been an 8088 for the IBM PC to use! But the 4004 led to the 6502, and the 8080 led to the Z80, and the tremendous popularity of video game systems and computers derived from Intel’s competitors eventually caused the market to come full circle back to Intel when IBM chose the 8088 for their PC. The 4004 led both directly and indirectly to the entire video game industry and personal computer industry.

Most of the first video game systems never used an Intel processor, and most modern video game systems still don’t (Wii uses a PowerPC processor and PS3 uses a Cell processor), but whether you do your gaming on a video game console or a PC, you’re playing your games on a system that might never have existed without the Intel 4004. So, happy 36th birthday, 4004! Game on!