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Portable consoles have come a long way since their introduction in the late 1980s — compare the Nintendo GameBoy, released in 1989, with Sony's 2005 PlayStation Portable. The advancement is staggering, though it took a bit of time to get there. Generally screen sizes were small, blurry and monochrome (unless you could tolerate a battery life of around only two hours to power a color screen) until around 2001, when Nintendo's GBA was released.
PocketGamer.co.uk looks at the notable portables throughout this period of gaming evolution comparing screen size, screen resolution, initial price, horsepower and physical size. Unfortunately some of the more unique systems, such as NEC's TurboExpress and SNK's NeoGeo Pocket, are not included in this comparison, but you still get an idea of how the technology has advanced and evolved through the years.
Gaming site Armchair Arcade is starting a month-long examination of the Amiga CD-32. It should be interesting to see what kind of info they dig up about this forgotten CD platform. Be sure to check it out!
Gashapon - Japanese capsule toys sold through vending machines. They are collectable, inexpensive and are usually pretty well detailed. Being a fan of shmups, I was excited to see Think Geek carrying a series of gashapon for shmup games, including my favorite R-Type. Before you could say "SHOOT THE CORE", a number of them are now in the process of finding their way to my door.
Order yours at Think Geek before they sell out! And remember, you can't choose which ones you get, so order many to increase your chances at getting a specific one!
Back when I was first learning procedural programming with C, I remember "gotos are evil! Never use them!" being drilled into my head over and over. I would shrug it off, telling myself that I can easily keep track of where I'm going and what the logic is doing. I really wasn't writing anything complex at the time, and the goto statement in C came in handy for several sticky situations. As my programming grew more and more complex and the need for long debug sessions grew, I started to understand my instructor's reservations about the goto. Stepping through pages and pages of code line-by-line to find the crippling bug was made more and more difficult as each goto blasted the code pointer to far-off places, jumping around like a game of hopscotch, with no easy way to find my way back.
Ben Fry, who has spent many years at MIT combining computer science, statistics, graphic design and data visualization, has traced the operation of several classic Atari games in an exhibit titled Distellamap, including Adventure, pictured to the right. Each game's code has been presented as Atari 2600 assembly code, with arcs drawn between the two points of a goto statement. Pac-Man and Q-Bert are apparently more complex than the other three games analyzed.
Like any other game console, Atari 2600 cartridges contained executable code also commingled with data. This lists the code as columns of assembly language. Most of it is math or conditional statements (if x is true, go to y), so each time there's "go to" a curve is drawn from that point to its destination.
Looking at all the logic traces from just these simple games should easily demonstrate why gotos and other such logic jumps are a pain in the neck to debug and should be avoided wherever possible!
One of the more interesting aspects of video games that sets it apart from other hobbies is the frequent need for importing titles that did not see a domestic release. As the vast majority of video game hardware and software companies originate in Japan, there is a not-so-insignificant expense attached to localizing a game for sale in North America, or any other regional market. Sadly this results in many great and interesting titles being lost in the shuffle, doomed to never be appreciated outside of their home territory.
Since at least the NES era, there has been a small number of avid gamers who would pony up the extra expense and time to import quality titles from afar. That number has grown substantially in the past decade, mostly due to the barriers of communication around the world being lowered substantially by the Internet. It is now possible for any gamer to know what games they are missing and pick them up through any of several online import shops. It is easy to learn how to mod most current, mainstream consoles to play games not available in your home region, and is usually as simple as soldering a few wires to a chip.
While nearly every hardware vendor frowns on this practice on their home consoles, hand-held systems have generally been region-free, allowing playback of any official software regardless of what region it is marketed for. Nintendo's GameBoy is no exception. Chris Covell has pointed out 10 obscure, but excellent, GB and GBC games that should be looked in to:
Here is a fabulously cute and gloriously-designed action game by the masters of NES graphics and sound, Sunsoft. Trip world plays just like a scaled-down mini-version of their earlier production, Gimmick!, with a cute main character, large, slightly linear maps to explore (but with secret passages and divergent paths), and fluffy enemies that let you stand on their heads without being injured... until you decide to boot them out of existence.
Trip World's difficulty is quite low, but with graphics and music (Sunsoft's trademark) as good as these, you don't want to pass it up! I had a blast going through the varied levels and spotting all the unique and adorable creatures along the way.
This game suffered the fate of many of Sunsoft's fantastic games in the 1990s like Hebereke and Gimmick!, namely being withheld from release in North America, and being released in low numbers in Japan. I suppose Sunsoft took a long hard look at the series of mistakes that brought down former powerhouses Konami and Capcom and decided that proliferation was the road to ruin in the videogame world.
In recent years, retro game t-shirts have become quite the fad. I admit, it was a good feeling to think of myself as possibly "hip" as I looked around the game shirt offerings at my nearby Hot Topic...then I realized that most of the kids who were going to buy these shirts had never played the games depicted on the cotton. But the concept has been a hit with the 25+ crowd who remembers a day before CD-based video games and laughed at Sony's "Play Station".
Several print-on-demand and specialty t-shirt vendors have popped up online, such as ThinkGeek, JINX, and Threadless, the latter which has printed a shirt designed by talented pixel-pusher etherbrian.
Pick up yours at Threadless before they're sold out. Shirts there go quick!
Who says GameCube controllers are ugly?
Check out the rest of the photo set and gain a new appreciation for its hardware design.
Until the late 1990s, most forms of Japanese media were usually heavily edited (or mercilessly butchered, depending on your point of view) during the localization process in an attempt to make them more accessible and culturally understandable by a North American audience. DIC's translation of the Sailor Moon anime, or MixxZine's (which became TokyoPop, by the way) "liberties" with the manga, come readily to mind. Thankfully there were a few companies, such as Viz, who did not deviate too much from the source material when adapting the story to a different culture. Video games were not spared during this time, either. Sometimes the modifications were limited to just sprite changes, but occasionally the localization team decided to "go the extra mile" and dramatically alter the game in an attempt to make it more identifiable to a mainstream audience, such as Kato-chan & Ken-chan's transformation into JJ & Jeff.
One of the more dramatic NES conversions is Totally Rad, a.k.a. Magic John.
As I glanced through Magic John's cutscenes, I quickly noticed that the original game had in fact been played completely straight. The bodacious 'tude and happenin' sensibility of Totally Rad had been solely an invention of its localization team at Jaleco, who not only played fast and loose with their translation but also entirely redrew two of the characters. While the story of the original is merely dorky and forgettable, the American release crosses the line into a glorious retroverse that renders it an oddly prescient ironic masterpiece.
Once I realized how much had been changed, I knew that I would eventually need to make an in-depth study of the localization to document the changes. Thus was born The Rad Project.
But enough blather. It's time to be righteous.
Echoing many of my own perspectives on the current state of video games, this post by RyanDG at Arcade-Renaissance.com summarizes the hopes and dreams placed onto Contra 4 by many Contra fans: a return to the run-and-gun testosterone fests of the first two titles in the series. And the picture of Arnold makes it just that much more awesome.
I once told myself I would never get to the point where I would be one of those bitter gamers who look at today's games as being "inferior" to the pre-32-bit gaming era, but after being only mildly amused with the direction that the "new" next generation has taken, the more I find myself talking about the "good old days".
But let's look at things logically for a moment. I grew up on some of the classics of both console and arcade gaming, and despite being "outclassed" by games that have recently hit store shelves, I still willingly go back to the originals to get in my gaming fix.
Dovetailing on the earlier mainstream press article covering retro game collectors, Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle suggests finding the forgotten consoles and games of yesterday as a alternative for the newest expensive (or unobtainable) consoles this Chrsitmas.
But just because you don't have $250 for a Nintendo Wii, $400 for an Xbox 360 or a suitcase full of cash for a PlayStation 3 on eBay, doesn't mean your loved ones can't be blowing stuff up and decapitating zombies into the New Year. While many of the newer video game platforms are ridiculously expensive and in short supply right now, you can find incredible bargains on the nostalgia gaming market.
His suggestions range from the earlier Nintendo offerings, to old Ataris (in 2600 or Flashback form), to the fan-favorite Dreamcast.
It's interesting to see a general trend in the industry away from "it's got good graphics, therefore, it's the best", to "why spend a fortune on this, when you can get just as much fun, or more, at a fraction of the cost?"
