Rick Dangerous (Microprose/Core Design, June 1989)

Among the many reasons I love the 8- and 16-bit European game industry: British Telecom owned a game publisher for four years — and a pretty good one, too.

Said publisher was purchased by Microprose in 1988, delaying the release of Rick Dangerous by about half a year while everything was being figured out post-sale. This gave the developers at Core Design time to port this game to six different computer systems, every major one of the day — PC, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. It’s a testament to Core’s skill that every one of them control so well and “feel” the same despite the radically different hardware involved. (This was Core’s first game chronologically; Rick co-designer Simon Phipps went on to spend five years designing Harry Potter games for EA.)

It’s hard to say why I like Rick so much. It’s a very formulaic platformer, and one that relies a lot more on memorizing stage layouts than having serious action-game skill. Rick dies all the time from unseen traps or unnoticed blowdart turrets, and the only way to see the ending is by trial and error, memorizing each stage until you can pull off every jump and crawl and ladder-grab perfectly. Zzap!64 and Amiga Power both slammed the game for this in their reviews, and I can’t blame them.

But there’s something else Rick has, something difficult to lay one’s finger upon. I’d pin it down to “console-style response,” I think. It controls great on every platform, with none of the odd little unfair delays that were sort of part and parcel of computer games back then. It’s not that other 8-bit titles didn’t have responsive controls and quick gameplay, but something about Rick makes it feel far more console-y than a lot of other European computer releases of the time. Try it for yourself — any platform will do — and see if you agree with me.

And if you’re going to try it out, why not use Rick Dangerous 128+, a brand-new version released last Christmas for the Amstrad? The French coders behind it claim it’s the best 8-bit version of Rick ever released, and I’ll have to agree — it’s got all the extra content from the Amiga and ST versions (about a third of the game was cut to fit into the 8-bitters), it’s quick and colorful, and the enemies make the cutest shriek of horror when you fill them full of lead. You’ll want to use the WinAPE emulator to play it.

Out Run (Sega, September 1986)

What red-blooded ’80s boy, no matter which side of the ocean he lived near, didn’t have a poster of the Ferrari Testarossa in his bedroom? One that always depicted the supercar of all supercars framed around a matte-black background, maybe with a few white clouds of smoke around the sides for effect? Anyone who didn’t was a dweeb, a dork, a Sega Master System owner, and no doubt they’re the ones busing your table at the Steakountry Buffet this evening. Make sure to give them a decent tip, because c’mon, man, they had a hard life, they’re driving beige Camrys, they don’t know no better.

Since few of us have actually sat inside a Testarossa, it’s not well-known that the Italian speedster can operate at its top spec speed of 294 km/h on literally any type of road surface — tarmac, sand, grass, the Pacific Ocean. Yes, the Ferrari Testarossa is fully submersible. Italy, you know, it’s a very high-water-table country. Flash floods kind of creep up on you. It’s a safety feature.

Yu Suzuki, being a man of refined automobile tastes, naturally knew that. That’s why, if you carefully shift gears in a high-low-high pattern on the edge of the road, you can run over any sort of terrain you like in Out Run for up to seven seconds without any speed penalty while the game tries to figure out where you’re going. It’s a feature (I wouldn’t dare call it a bug, for doing so would suggest that the Testarossa is not the divine vehicle for the soul which it is) that became household knowlege in Japan after Gamest and other mags brought it up in their strategy guides in 1987.

Unfortunately, the timing behind this move can be pretty tricky, and most gamers flailed away at the arcade cabinet’s gearshift like a hummingbird trying to search for just the right technique. This led to a lot of broken gearshifts and signs in Japanese arcades threatening to kick punters out of the establishment for gia-gacha (gear-rattling) play. MAME, and automatic rapid-fire, make it a lot easier these days.

The same trick can also be pulled off in Turbo Out Run, but in no other Out Run game after that — an homage to the original Testarossa model getting phased out of production in 1991, no doubt. Right? Right?

Final Fantasy Legend II (Square, 1990)

MAGI… The symbol of great power. The legacy of the ancient gods who made this world. Many fought for the mighty power. Some won and some failed. Now…another legend of bravery is about to begin…and end before the washing machine’s done running…

SaGa 2 (aka Final Fantasy Legend 2) is a far more complex and involved than than its predecessor, which (as we all know) can be completed in just under two minutes. You’ve got to travel across multiple worlds, unlock the secret behind the mysterious MAGI, and figure out where your father went — that’s a lot to put on one man’s shoulders. We’re gonna need a lot more time for this. Like, half an hour.

Most of this two-part video is the TASser working the game’s assorted random-number seeds (whose memory locations are monitored on the upper-right) in order to trigger the bugs he needs to skip vast tracts of the story. In part one above, the climax of all these arrangements takes place at 8:22, when the following situation takes place:

- There is a total of 16 participants in a battle between your party and the enemy
- An ally or enemy dies of poison damage
- Your final action in a turn is something that doesn’t require a target (such as using a shield to defend yourself)

This, for some reason, triggers a bug that causes the most significant bit of assorted inconvenient memory locations to be set to 0. This alters your party’s race, HP, stats, and inventory, and any empty slot in your item list is suddenly transformed into a Katana, which deals ridiculous damage if the wielder’s high in agility — which you are now, thanks to that bug. Consuming the bugged-out meat that the bugged-out battle gives you also transforms your hero into a BlackCat, a monster far, far more powerful than what you’re supposed to be able to access this early in the game.

Part 2 chiefly depicts our hero switching between monsters depending on whether he needs to teleport around the world or set off some other bug. At 8:57, the TASser exploits a famous SaGa 2 bug that was fixed for FFL2 — the game erroneously treats “Counter” (an ability skill that some monsters have) as an item that can be unequipped. “Counter” just happens to sell for 272,823 GP in the shops, enabling your party to obtain all the weaponry they need for the final battle without much fuss.

In 9:48 you can see the fairly famous trashcan bug in action, one that wasn’t fixed for FFL2 despite being pretty obvious. In Saga 2, double-clicking the trash can when you have 29 MAGI suddenly ups your MAGI total to 255, letting you skip about 85% of the game and open any dang door you like in the celestial world. Finally, at 11:29, we see the party rent a mount for the dragon races in Race Town, only to teleport right on out after the race starts, granting them a blazing bugged-out ride that can clip through walls.

Straight to the final boss we go, and from there, onward to an ending filled with fabricated memories and people we swear we’ve never seen before in our lives. Whew.

Vasectomy (Automata, 1982)

“A useful operation. Unfortunately you, the surgeon, have got myopic vision, and are blind drunk anyway. You are finding great difficulty in getting the target of your operation into focus. After ‘RUN’ and ‘NEWLINE’ it shifts around the operating table alarmingly. You might be able to control your palsied fingers with their snipping scissors, by using your ’5′, ’6′, ’7′ & ’8′ cursor controls, and you must snip at exactly the right moment, when your scissors are closed, and also at exactly the right place, which is from behind between the organ & the lower appendages. The result of your efforts will be printed out. Inkey ‘NEWLINE’ to commence operating on another victim.”

Vasectomy is just one of the amazing experiences to be found on Can of Worms, a cassette tape of BASIC games “for the over 18′s” meant for the unexpanded Sinclair ZX81 computer. It holds the honor of being the first commercial software ever released by Automata UK, a developer that achieved some success releasing ZX Spectrum games like the weirdly pioneering Deus Ex Machina, which I’m sure I’ll cover sooner or later.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you can play the other games on this pioneering (?) tape online to your heart’s content. Check out some of the other 1K winners here — Acne, where you must squeeze at the poor sod’s exploding forehead with all your might, and the ripped-from-today’s-headlines Reagan, where you must prevent our dear leader’s hair from turning gray and robbing him of his youthful appearance.

Sadly, fellow early Automata releases The Bible and Love and Death appear to be lost to time, even though all three were advertised together in the first issue of Sinclair User (right).

Rad Mobile (Sega, February 1991)

I’ve got fond memories of this. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that it’s my favorite “sprite-scaling” arcade racer of all time; certainly it’s the pinnacle of the sub-genre, which got its start with Out Run back in 1986. It’s packed with awesome little details, from the hilarious voice work to the way your avatar adjusts his gloves right after the start of the game — and no, you can’t control the car while he’s doing this.

The first game on Sega’s System 32 platform (and therefore the first 32-bit arcade game ever), Rad Mobile is neat partly because of its sheer length. A successful trip through Out Run takes about six to eight minutes; crossing the USA in Rad Mobile takes up to eighteen. It’s a test of concentration, especially in the later stages where the roads narrow and get packed full with cars driving at high speed and switching lanes without signaling — a very realistic simulation of East Coast traffic, even today.

Sega released a port called Gale Racer for the Saturn in Japan, but it’s not very good — I mean, the cars are 3D models, for Chrissakes.

Also worth noting: This game actually beat out Sonic the Hedgehog, the Genesis game, to market by about five months, making this (believe it or not) the character’s video-game debut. Wikipedia has no citation for this, but my copy of Famitsu DC’s Sega Arcade History — itself a collector’s item these days, going for 5000 yen or so in the aftermarket shops — confirms the dates.

More Marble Madness madness

As if to answer yesterday’s prayers, I managed to track down a video of someone (Japanese, of course) finishing Marble Madness, the arcade original, at very high speed while recording his hands working the trackball. The three minutes and change it comprises are jaw-dropping.

“Recorded 12/30/2008 at Shinjuku MIKADO. ‘Marble Madness is a sport,’ as they say, so I threw up a video I had handy. An utterly stupid mistake on the last stage keeps me from finishing with 99 seconds, but otherwise it’s a relatively decent run. If I can get a flawless run on video, I’d like to update this.”

I knew about the Silly Maze shortcut, but not the one right at the very end. Sheesh!

Marble Madness [EA, 1986]

Marble Madness, Mark Cerny’s first game-industry credit, is a game near and dear to my heart. People still link to the archived Video-fenky page where I described in detail how to beat the secret stage in the Commodore 64 version. The world it portrays is remarkably well-defined, especially for its time — clean, calculated, wonderful, and merciless. I’d like to think its visual style still influences modern stuff like Mirror’s Edge to this day, but ah, wishful thinking will only get me so far in our modern, shiny, Hollywood-ized game industry, won’t it?

The Amiga version, coded by Larry Reed (who may or may not be the Larry Reed who codes for Crystal Dynamics nowadays), is worth special note. It was the Amiga’s “killer app” for much of the system’s early life in the US, the one title that stood out as massively superior to any other home gaming experience. Even though the Amiga debuted at $1295 (compared to $300-ish for a full C64 hardware set at the time) and Commodore attempted to position it as a professional/business computer, they still used media of the Marble Madness port in much of their advertising. As a kid growing up in the northeastern US, I remember playing only two Amiga games: this one, and Turrican, both of which blew my NES-addled mind.

I never really followed the Amiga the way I should’ve, and I’m in the midst of teaching myself the ins and outs of its game library, a process that I’m sure will happily occupy my free time for eons to come. Along the way, I came across the above YouTube video, demonstrating a pretty astonishing annotated speedrun of the Amiga Marble Madness. The non-TAS-enhanced player winds up with a final score totaling over 200,000 points, which is about 2.5 times what an average player manages in a complete runthrough. Seeing the player wrangle his trackball in person must be a thing of technical beauty, like a master seamstress at the loom or a mile-long line of Toyota assembly robots churning out Camrys. I wish I was there.

The review on the right is from an autumn 1986 issue of Amazing Computing magazine. Click the cut to view another look, this one from the March/April 1987 edition of Amiga World — one of my favorite reviews ever for the sheer looneyness lurking between the lines.

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Pilotwings (Nintendo, 12/21/90)

A Japanese TASser has uploaded a new runthrough of Pilotwings completed in 22 minutes and 27 seconds. He also uploaded a few videos of him screwing around which are, to be honest, a lot more fun to watch. Here’s one of them.

Back in 1991, when my 13-year-old self camped out at a friend’s house to play his shiny new SNES, we’d do a lot of the exact same things you see in this clip — right down to figuring out how spectacularly we could crash the light plane upon landing. Ah, nostalgia! (I also like the demonstrations of him missing each license by a single point. I didn’t realize that was possible.)

“Can’t Wait for the Pole Vault Cartridge”

Chicago Tribune December 11, 1987 Friday, SPORTS FINAL EDITION

Copyright 1987 Chicago Tribune Company

Now you can pretend you’re Carl Lewis, and you won’t even have to get a funny haircut.

Bandai America Inc. of Allendale, N.J., has come out with “Stadium Events,” the second in a series of game cartridges in which people can participate.

The game cartridges are used in conjunction with the company’s Family Fun Fitness control mat, which hooks into a Nintendo Entertainment System, which, in turn, connects with your TV set. It’s much easier than it sounds.

Here’s how it works: The control mat is covered with large circles. You run in place on two of them. As you run, a computer-produced figure runs on the TV screen. As the little video guy approaches the hurdles on the screen, for example, you jump. The little man jumps, too. Jump late, or hit the wrong dot, and your little video man takes a dive and skins his little video legs.

“Stadium Events” features the 100-meter dash, hurdles, long jump and triple jump. You can compete alone or against a computer opponent or another person running on the control mat.

The Nintendo system is about $80. Bandai’s basic set-the control mat and a game cartridge-is $70 to $80. “Stadium Events” is about $30. It’s a small price to pay for fun, exercise and the chance to really bug the neighbors.

 
Evidently neighbor-bugging is an activity in high demand these days.
 
(Thanx to Mr. Cifaldi)
 

Terrifying NES User-Made Levels

I would not want to be friends with anyone who made levels like these.