There is something about flash games that catches my eye. Maybe it’s the ease of which it can produce a silly or entertaining game, or sometimes it’s the quality and effort put forth by what often is a single man project, with maybe a few free music resources here and there. Either way, I’ve found that as the quality of Flash has improved over the years, so has the amount of endless entertainment for me at Newgrounds.
It was several years ago when I came across the website of a bitter, former player of Asheron’s Call 2. He was condemning a patch which he swore ruined its solid PvP system and any further reason to play. Betrayed by the game that he’d invested so much effort in, but still devoted to the genre and potential of MMORPGS, he had no choice but to migrate to any number of other games, one of which was a promising title on the horizon called World of Warcraft.
Searching Google now, I can’t find that old site, but there are still vestigial diaries about Asheron’s Call 2, written by scorned ex-players who clearly felt cheated out of something. And shouldn’t they?
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.
We, the Players is about learning from the people who do more with games than play them. In our first interview of hopefully many more, we talk with esteemed modder and map-maker WadaHolic about Doom, his history of mods, and his take on console gaming.
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.
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