The very first graphical MMORPG I played was Everquest, way back when the premise — a game with thousands of people playing together — was something most people had no idea existed in video games. Everquest wasn’t really the first to do what it did, so why does every MMO since still feel like Everquest?
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Before I begin the review, I feel I need to mention a mistake I made in my last blog entry. In Pitfall II, you don’t have to get all the gold bricks to beat the game. However, getting the bricks is good for getting more points and possibly achieving a perfect score. If you just want to win the game, all you need to do is find Rhonda(Harry’s niece), Quick-Claw the cowardly mountain lion, and the diamond ring.
Now on to the review of Jill of the Jungle.
Released in 1992 by Epic Megagames, Jill of the Jungle was a sensation in the growing shareware market. The way companies used to market their games was to release the first part or ‘episode’ of a series for free distribution, as sort of a demo or teaser, and charge a fairly cheap price for the full package which generally consisted of three episodes. It was a hit due to the amazing(in that day) graphics and soundblaster midi music, some cool puzzles, and possibly fan service.
Spending just a little time in the thick of things can really relate you to the pulse of public sentiment. Recently I was surprised to find how many people consider the Nintendo Wii an abomination. They blame “casual gamers” for their influence, and Nintendo for attending to them. They cite low attachment ratios (the number of games sold per console) for proof that the Wii is not a success, and insist these numbers are explained by smart hardware that is hampered by a subpar game library.
According to Nintendo’s second-quarter 2008 earnings, the Wii maintains a higher attachment ratio than the DS and the Gameboy Advance, and is led only by the Gamecube. Considering the Wii’s hardware sales have already overcome the Gamecube’s, it probably wouldn’t be fair to call the Wii unsuccessful by business standards.
The Wii’s game library may never see a sharp turn toward great numbers of games for Nintendo loyalists. Instead, we may continue to see them only on occasion, as we have with Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
Personally, I’ve tried the Wii but only briefly. I don’t own one for the above reason: there hasn’t been a watershed game, or collection of games, convincing me to purchase the console (but there are plenty I’d like to try). Although the choice of titles so far might not appeal to me, I do recognize the power of the platform and the way it has shifted the perception of interactive games. More weighty than the issue of the Wii’s success for Nintendo are the implications for future hardware, and the impact on a population newly aware of modern video games.
In 1982, Activision programmer David Crane made a masterpiece known as Pitfall, a simple sidescrolling adventure game with the object of collecting all the treasure within a time limit(twenty minutes). The enemies were mostly static, except for a menacing white scorpion which lurked in the underground caves and followed ‘Harry’s every move whether he was above or below ground(Psychic scorpions, anybody?). The game was very popular and raised the bar for video games of the future. Two most notable games which readily used and expanded upon elements from Pitfall are Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog. A sequel to Pitfall would introduce several other features, some of them good, some bad, and at least one that would leave you bald from sheer aggravation.
With the market for video games growing, Atari decided to capitalize on a growing demographic of gamers: young children. Unfortunately, these games did not always give the buyers their money’s worth. In this article, two childrens’ games, Strawberry Shortcake and Big Bird’s Egg Catch, will be compared for design and replayability.
First a brief history of the Atari 2600 and early games:
In the late 1970’s, home video game systems were beginning to flood the market, and one company, Atari, capitalized on it by taking games to the next level: removable cartridges. This enabled the buyer to purchase a console and games separately, instead of buying several bulky consoles which often had at the most five or six preloaded games. The old machines, notably Video Pinball and the great, great granddaddy Pong, made way for a sleeker, more compact system, and cartridges which held around three to maybe six or seven kilobytes of information. The resolution improved as well, as the simple squares of the paddles, walls, and balls were replaced by sprites made by multiple pixels, forming space ships, bugs, ghosts, frogs, robots, men, and other types of characters. This incarnation was dubbed the Atari 2600, an innovation when video games were still in their infancy.
Now for the review.
Today’s video games rely so heavily on graphics, sound, and fan-service, that they lose sight of what matters most in gaming: the gameplay. Over twenty years ago, technology was still new, and there was very little space and memory to work with. Thousands of games from that era could all fit on the dinosaur floppy disk, and still have room left over. These constraints meant that one would have to balance graphics, sound, and gameplay with the five to six kilobytes of space they could store on a chip which was protected by a box known as a cartridge. Those cartridges were similar to the jump-drives often used today, and were bulky compared to the six or seven kilobytes they could store. Despite those limitations, many great and addictive games came from that era.
John Carmack, graphics-programming pioneer and programming lead of id Software, does things with video cards that other people only theorize. He understands the zeitgeist of gaming, and that is a movement toward console games. It’s a little confusing, then, why he would announce a browser-based game for the competitive gaming community, a community that appears to be stuck in its infancy.
Last year, when Carmack announced Quake Zero (later renamed Quake Live) he explained that the choice for a browser-based delivery of the game was natural because competitive players forsake graphical quality in favor of faster input response. The game itself, which will run on a revitalized Quake 3 Arena engine, certainly has no aspirations to be the biggest, the best, or the prettiest anything.
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