Friday my brother Ben came over and we played old Video Games using an emulator and a USB controller. We had a blast.
We spent quite a lot of time marveling at how different games are designed nowadays. In QuackShot and World of Illusion, two Disney games, there is level after level of rote memorization. If you don’t know which direction to jump before you start falling, you die, and start the level again. The goal is to make you play the game one hundred million times.
Today, a game is designed so that something is always changing, and something is always new, and that makes you want to play it one hundred million times, because there is an unexpected element around every corner. In old games, you are expected to know each corner, because if you don’t, you’ll die immediately after you turn it.
But honestly one of the coolest things was just going back in time and remembering the titles for all these games we used to play. Populous. Shadowrun. Centurion: Something about Rome. We got them all, and each time, it went like this:
- Seth: Oh, SuperMegaCoolGame! We’ve gotta get that!
- Ben: I remember that! Here it is!
- Seth: Oh yeah, I forgot that in order to finish the first level you had to dunk your head in acid. Yeah, this was great!
- Ben: Man, I don’t understand what’s going on.
- Seth: No one does. And the graphics all suck compared to my memories.
That last part, where I realized that the graphics were awful, happened in every single game. I remember thinking that this stuff was magical. And indeed, some of it was. Shining Force looks great next to BattleMaster, but they both look childish now. It seems odd that I’ve retroactively upgraded each games’ look and feel in my brain. Even now, two days later, I am picturing the memory-enhanced version of BattleMaster and not the real thing. And in terms of nostalgia, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. In a few more years, I can come back to them again and be surprised all over again.
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Oh look, the map from Quackshot. Did we ever finish that game, or did we finally give up on memorizing our way through that terrible last level?
No, we actually stopped on what I had always assumed was the last level (Pete’s secret island) but was in fact the second-to-last level. After you defeat Pete you go to the place where the treasure is buried and go through that, and then you’re all done.
These things are much easier when you can save at any point, like you can using the emulator. So we’d make a jump, land on safe ground, and save the RAM state. If you fell, you just hit another button and the emulator jumped back to wherever you saved. Very handy.
Cheatzor!
It makes Shadowrun a whole lot easier, too.