Snapshot: How Far We’ve Come

 

Expanded VIC 20 Coverage!

 

(Yeah, this story deserves a big headline. I wasn't sure how to do it with Blogger.)

It was always inevitable that, if I felt my personal income could do it, I would look back at the golden age of videogames and nostalgia would take me over and I would pull the trigger on Ebay to get some of those games back. It finally happened a few weeks ago.

I have reacquired a Commodore Vic 20 computer and cassette drive, along with a few classic games to start, with more coming in. Earlier this year, the idea to get either a Vic20 or Commodore 64 took root when I picked up a few games on Ebay out of nostalgia, but also because the prices were lower than I thought they would be.

Then my mind began to consider "Is there room for it on my desk?", "Can I trust Ebay sellers on this?" and other such important aspects of adding a new member into your videogame family. As time passed and the rationalizations fell away, I knew that in the summer I would probably be able to get one of those computers. 

I found what looked to be a reputable seller on Ebay who had the VIC 20 and a cassette drive, selling them as is. Seeing that the seller's other items were all vintage electronics and not just computers, I took the dive and bought it for about the same price Dad had paid in the summer of 1983. The cassette was another fifty dollars on top of that, well worth it as the best VIC 20 games are on cassette.

Look for Commodore VIC 20 game reviews and other articles soon. The VIC 20 is a very special computer to me, but it has an important place in computer history that few people are aware of. 

Beaten: Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising (GBA)

 Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising is an important game to me for a lot of reasons. In the early 2000s, I had pretty much abandoned consoles for PC gaming, thanks to MMORPGs hitting the scene. I was all in on Nintendo 64 and Playstation in the late 90s. When I got Ultima Online in January of 1998, it was the same week Resident Evil 2 finally hit. I barely played it as UO was such a new and refreshing game.

I didn't miss The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time of course, but console gaming lost its luster once I was online experiencing new and amazing things. I had also been disappointed by the Game Boy Pocket and had soured on handhelds. Even when I saw a co-worker with a Game Boy Advance, I said it looked like a cheap Game Gear and passed. 

The turning point was a magazine I had purchased which showed off two things of great interest. The first of course was Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. Having not heard of its predecessor, or that it was a portable turn-based strategy game like Military Madness on the Turbografx 16, I was surprised that what I thought was an obscure genre was showing up and looking so good on the Game Boy Advance SP, the second thing of great interest in that magazine.

The Game Boy Advance SP had a better screen and an awesome clamshell design that made it more portable, more playable and just plain cooler. Combined with the possibility of a portable turn-based strategy game that allows you to save your progress, it was a no-brainer purchase. 

Advance Wars 2 was exactly what I had hoped it would be-Military Madness-level complexity-challenging enough to be tough but not deep enough you need a spreadsheet. My first playthrough ended at the final battle, so overwhelming to me that I never finished it. It is a hard game to just pick up years later, jump into the final battle, and do any better.

No, to resolve this unfinished business with Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, I had to start over from the beginning. After finally beating Advance Wars a few years ago, I was primed for the sequel. I will state right here that Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising is a much more advanced Advance Wars than Advance Wars was. 

In the first game in the series, the learning curve is pretty evenly paced throughout the campaign, bringing the player up to speed on each aspect of the gameplay as the story progresses alongside. In the sequel, the first few maps are the curve and then it gets really....advanced.

The battles get more difficult quickly, and I know because there is a difficulty rating shown next to each battle on the map screen based on a number of stars.  I seem to recall Advance Wars had battle difficulties of 2, 3, or 4 stars, with some of the last levels reaching 5 stars. Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising breaks past the five star ceiling pretty quickly. None of this is a complaint, it's a compliment as a sequel should do exactly that.

Players control infantry, vehicles, ships, subs, aircraft, and so forth, and capture cities, factories, airports, and naval bases to help fund the war and generate new units. Each turn is about movement, attack, retreat, and generating new units with the funds you have. It's all presented in a cutesy-fun 16-bit sprite look which is a weird juxtaposition with the horrors of war you have to unleash to win.

The game has you pick a CO, or commanding officer, in each round to lead the troops. These characters have different strengths and weaknesses, and each has a special attack that they can use once charged up by combat experience.  The back-and-forth between these characters, and the enemy CO's, help tell the loose story.

When they say advanced they mean it. The battles each have goals, usually to take out the enemy by eliminating them or capturing their base. Some missions have time limits as well. In one seemingly hopeless battle, the player has to hold out with only a few resources for a certain number of turns before rescue arrives. My strategy to defend it quickly fell apart so I just kept generating infantry troops to flood the battlefield and stall the enemy. Sorry, little cannon fodder guys.

The enemy deploys some fixed super-guns in some levels that the player must take out or avoid to win the battle. These have a greater range than mobile artillery so they player's movement is often restricted. There are battles that are all air power or predominantly naval power, but most of the action is on the ground. In another cool level, a volcano erupts regularly, spraying liquid hot magma onto certain spaces. I never figured out the pattern.

When I finally made it to the final battle, I remembered why I gave up. It, too, is time-limited. Of course, the final enemy CO is way overpowered and has all the resources he needs to wipe out your troops fairly quickly. It took about four tries to beat it, and I did so in an unexpected and heroic way.

To win, the player has to take out the control base for a doomsday rocket that will launch after a certain number of turns (thirty, I think it was). I developed a strategy to draw the enemy south to meet my main force near my base. Their super guns covered the area north of it, so there was no going that way. For this battle, the player gets to command three COs working in tandem.

So I put the CO that was good with air power on the east side of the screen, the guy who could do the best at ground battles in the middle, and the guy with the snowstorm special attack on the left, knowing he could do some damage to all units once powered up.

The enemy certainly took the bait in the middle, but also noticed the danger of the air power guy on the right as he built up some bombers for an assault on the guns protecting the doomsday rocket. But, I had also created a bomber on the left as well, with the guy not known for air power, to try the same assault.

The enemy went after air power guy's stuff hard and wiped out his first wave. In the middle, as expected, the main battle was all over the place but I was grinding down everything the enemy was throwing at me there. So to my surprise, the snow guy's bomber was able to penetrate their defenses and take out one of the big guns protecting the doomsday weapon. While that got the enemy's attention, they only took one shot at the bomber with an anti-aircraft gun before deciding to aim elsewhere.

So with only 5 out of the 10 bombers left and all of them low on fuel and ammo, I went for the doomsday weapon. It took two shots and I just had enough ammo for exactly that. I won.

The crews of those five bombers were I assume given a ticker-tape parade later. Finishing Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising was a pure joy, and it certainly reminded me of how much I enjoy those types of games from time to time. Next up is Advance Wars: Dual Strike on the Nintendo DS. I might not wait too long before starting that one, though.

Beaten: Control (One)

 After being surprised by and subsequently finishing Alan Wake 2 roughly a year and a half ago, I made a note to go back and play the studio's previous shared-universe game, Control. References to the game were scattered in Alan Wake 2, with one of the agents being a Federal Bureau of Control agent sent to investigate all the wackiness in that small town.

It turns out that their shared universe is full of reality bending objects and extradimensional messiness, so the Federal Bureau of Control was created to collect it all and house it in a building that is also some weird reality-bending place. The main character you play is there to find her missing brother, but quickly takes the lead of the agency as the building itself is under siege from extradimensional creatures called The Hiss.

There is a lot of backstory here but it is not presented in a linear fashion; instead, pieces of it fall into place as you fight your way through the building. It's an interesting and sophisticated storytelling technique, but the result for me was to not really care and just work my way through the game and take it in as I go. There's lots of lore to discover, and I didn't devour it ravenously, but took little bites as I went.

The action is third-person shooting with lots of great aspects. Your gun, of course, is itself some extradimensional shape-shifting device that transforms from the usual pistol to variations of shotguns, rifles, and so forth. It was truly cool and unique, but the other power you have, telekinesis, is handled exceptionally well. Grabbing objects and hurtling them at great speed toward enemies was absolutely joyful and never got old.

So the action is good, with the Hiss levelling up alongside you and presenting new enemies and challenges as you go. The building itself is vast, requiring you to capture and cleanse certain points that then become fast travel locations as well as restart points. New challenges pop up too, since you were put in charge after all, giving you side quests, but I ignored them for the most part.

Control is a pretty good game and in another life I would have had time to give it more of my attention and seen more of its world. However, the constant respawn of enemies in areas you had already cleared discouraged me from exploration beyond the main story. I can recommend Control to any Alan Wake fan, but only if they just can't get enough of that world. 

The King of Wacky Packages

 It was a humbling lesson, to eight-year-old me over half a century ago, that no matter how much passion you feel for something, no matter what level of expertise you bring to it - there's always someone else out there who is better at it than you and has more resources to pursue it. It took some nifty packaging parody stickers to teach me that in 1975, as Topps, the famed baseball card company, released Wacky Package stickers to the world.

I saw them first on a short family trip to southern Ohio to visit a relative. We had stopped at a gas station that had them on sale and I convinced Dad to buy me a pack, which was a classic road trip move most kids probably had then. It had a few stickers and a stick of standard Topps petrified gum in it, and I was mesmerized:

The following week, back home, they turned up at the Summit Street carry-out and there went a cut of my lunch money. We kids called it "Harold's" after the owner/operator, and he was glad to see us there buying candy after school when we could. The Wacky Packages were funny as hell to me in third grade, sort of an introduction to satire if you will, and I wanted to collect them all. I wanted to see them all, possess them all, and become the King of Wacky Packages, a title made up in my own weird childhood head.

Summit Street Carry-Out AKA Harold’s, now just a home.

Anyone who has collected anything like that knows that - when there is a series of anything to collect - that the last two or three will be the hardest to get. One never knows how much care went into shuffling them up at the printer/packager, but to get a complete set may mean weeks and weeks of purchasing the item, hoping to get a pack with that one rare one. 

That's where I was in third grade, down to one or two, when the rich kid in class showed up and laid out his two full sets and extras. While he had an extra one of the last one I needed for a complete set, he would not trade anything I had for it. All of the extras I had, he had in more numbers anyway. Plus, he felt special being the only one with a full set, and if I accomplished that, it would diminish his achievement.

The lesson I learned that day was that all my passion for it, all my careful moves to get a full set, were not enough to make me the King of Wacky Packages in third grade. My own sense of accomplishment was diminished knowing that whoever has the most money wins most things in life. Still, the stickers were funny and I kept picking them up.

Later, I grew up and did not let other people's accomplishments shadow my own, learning to enjoy what I enjoyed in life without comparing it to others'. I collect things I want to enjoy them as I want, not to compare them to what others have.

Here is most of what is left of my 1970s Wacky Packages. I had peeled the stickers and put them in a blank book, and later transferred them to a photo album, before finally framing them in 2013:

In the 1980s, as a teenager, I collected the new series as well. I did not want to grow up and lose my sense of humor. This time, I had enough financial resources to complete a set. I had peeled them and put them in a similar book to the one I used in the 1970s, but that booklet was lost sometime after I moved out of my parent's home. My best guess is that I left it in the basement and Mom threw it out later during a junk purge. A damaged checklist was recovered from the basement later:

In the 1990s, as an adult, I collected them again, as the Wacky Packages showed up at my comic book store. I completed that set and still have those in an album today. There was also a cool poster one could assemble by using the back of the checklist card:

A few years ago, I saw that there were two art books for sale showing the 1970s Wacky Packages, and picked them up too. What was cool about those art books were introductions from the original artists and some never-released designs made into actual Wacky Packages!

At some point in the 2010s, someone I knew bought me a modern pack of Wacky Packages. You can tell the era by the one sticker for “Super Mario Fart”.

Finally, sometime after the pandemic in the early 2020s, my adventures took me to a fancy stationary store where, by the cash register, there were little 3D-printed Wacky Packages of various products for sale. I didn’t buy one but smiled as the parody of products and packaging continues, even if not in sticker form.

I'll never go gung ho for Wacky Packages save for what I currently have. Vintage video games are expensive enough, and what I have saved of my Wacky Packages - especially those two books - are enough to get a chuckle out of me as they are.

Now, Trog-Lo-Dytes Action Packs are another matter entirely. That's a story for next year, though.

Beaten: Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga (360)

 While I was smart enough to not have children in pre-apocalypse America, a lot of my friends and co-workers did, and they raised them on videogames so they could keep playing too. Starting around 2010, I heard from those friends how great the Lego games were, even for them as adults. While the Lego games covered a lot of pop culture (Star Wars, Marvel Comics, Harry Potter, etc), they never seemed like something I would enjoy.

The recommendations continued over the years, focused on how the games had humor and were easy to play co-op alongside your offspring. I pushed those endorsements aside as I had other games to play. My recent decision to throw a "palate cleanser" easy game into my mix, however, brought me to play Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga on the Xbox 360, via Gamepass on the Xbox One. I choose "The Complete Saga" over "The Skywalker Saga" because those last three movies were tragically bad.

So I had six movies, each broken down into six chapters, to play through and see if those old recommendations were valid or just another case of parents endorsing things to their childless friends because misery loves company. It turned out about as I expected. It was fun but only in small doses, and challenge existed mostly through environmental puzzles that needed solving to progress.

The story diverges from the movies here and there, the dialogue-less characters give puzzling expressions at times, and there’s a huge focus on collection quests and unlocking stuff.

Which makes sense. Keep the kids busy with those time-consuming tasks and you don’t have to get them the next big game yet. 

I probably won’t play any more Lego games but I’m glad I got through this one so that I have a better understanding of what my dad-friends were going through. I hope they made good memories of playing side by side with their sons and daughters with those Lego games.

Beaten: The Castlevania Adventure (Game Boy)

 Finishing up yet another classic Game Boy platformer with my modern Analogue Pocket and its save anywhere ability, I did something I’ve only done once before: I beat a Castlevania game! 

This series is special to me and I have lots of Castlevania games unfinished in my collection, but I’ve only beaten Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest before. The rest, I play, I’m in awe, but then I hit a wall that breaks down my resolve to continue.

These games are top level Konami platformers, which were kind of like From Software’s Souls games of the 2010s, just in the NES/ SNES era and mostly 2D hellscapes of painful sidescrolling. Only the most dedicated players would beat them.

I picked up The Castlevania Adventure for my Game Boy on August 9, 1991, which was over a year after it had come out. Hey, I was on a tight budget and supporting a Turbografx 16, an Atari VCS, and a Commodore 64 at the time, so the Game Boy library grew slowly.

I think I made it past the first boss once back then, but quickly used up my remaining lives in the next level and put it away. Over the years I pulled it out and played it many more times, but I never made it much farther than that.

Playing through, I realized that I’ve been getting psyched out by the difficulty of these and discouraged by the repetition, when, in essence they are not insanely hard. Each encounter I had after each save point I made was reasonably difficult to figure out, meaning that the attacks, dodges, and jumps I had to make would only take a few tries to get right.

Even the final boss, Dracula himself, had an easily discernible attack pattern for both of his phases. Once the player knows it, it isn’t too hard finish him off and start the end credits rolling.

I’ve just about finished all of the old Game Boy platformers that are in my meager library at this point. The two remaining - Ren & Stimpy’s Space Cadet Adventures and The Amazing Spider-Man - were pretty bad.

I really need to toughen up and go after the first Castlevania game next. Then like ten of its sequels. They are great games, but I’ve always taken them in small doses and never felt guilty about abandoning them when things got tough. 

For now, though, I’m good with just beating The Castlevania Adventure on the Game Boy. 

Beaten: Atomfall (Series)

 Back in the day it was a risky thing to buy a brand new game without having waited for the magazine reviews. You could get home with it and find out quickly that it was not the game you were hoping for based on the box art and description on the back. These days, there are downloadable demos, quick internet reviews, plus the fact that many new games end up in one of the subscription services that exist.

I admit to not taking full advantage of XBox's Game Pass Platinum Ultimate Game Pass thing, but rather just using it to try out one or two new games a year. It was in this manner that I came across Atomfall, a new first-person adventure set in 1960s England in a countryside area sealed off after a science experiment goes wrong. I tried it out for a few hours to see if it was worth diving into, and it was.

It's got first person gunplay and melee combat, lots of exploration across 5 large areas, with smaller areas opening up within them. The areas are gorgeous, with ruined buildings, flowing rivers, and trees and bushes all over. Learning each area, and the various routes to navigate through them and between them, was a blast. The world is very well designed in this manner.

Combat is fun first-person stuff but there are limited weapons available, as one would expect in an area of the country that has been shut off for apparently years before the gamer joins. There are some slight upgrades available, I think, but I never explored that.

Enemies are limited to several factions, one being the usual post-apocalyptic outcasts, another being fascist British soldiers that are oppressively locking down a tiny town with like 15 people. The fascists have tall robots which are fun to fight, too. Finally there are nature freaks deep in the woods that are trying to make things worse as well.

Critters include ferals, bees, and very angry plants, so there is medium variety. You can clear an area out for awhile but return visits later usually result in respawned foes. Random patrols also come through to keep things interesting, so the frequent backtracking one does can be full of surprises.

The player gets a couple of cool gadgets in the form of a metal detector and a signal redirector. The detector beeps when the player is close to something, but then requires a few seconds of finesse to nail down the exact spot before the loot can be had.

The signal redirector allows power to be rerouted at junctions and a few other functions. These puzzles are pretty easy but rewarding nonetheless. The player doesn’t get the metal detector or signal redirector right away, so lots of Metroidvania backtracking is needed, but I found it enjoyable as the map design is devious at times, with tunnels and other routes between areas. 

The game’s story concludes with not a boss fight (although there are tough enemies to fight if one chooses) but with several choices based on what faction or scientist or other asshole the player decides to listen to. I enjoyed the ending I choose but could easily load up a save before the final area and make a different choice to see the other endings.

I enjoyed Atomfall quite a bit. It was big enough and deep enough to pull me in but didn’t bloat itself up with content. It concluded in a timely and satisfying manner and gave me the first person adventure fix I was looking for.

Another Great Use for the Analogue Pocket with Save States

I’ve been gushing about the Analogue Pocket portable for over a year now, lauding its crisp screen and its ability to create “save states” anywhere in a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance game while playing. These saves are created on a regular everyday micro SD card thingy plugged into the device.

This ability has allowed me to play through old 2D platformer games without having to repeat difficult sections or battles. Traditionally those games have no save points at all, just continues, making repetition the difficult part of playing those games to completion.

For games that do have saves built into them, the Analogue Pocket’s save states can be a good secondary save option. A game may only save at the end of each level by design, for example, but with save states one can create convenient mid-level saves. 

Finally, I’m starting to see the save batteries fail in Game Boy games older than thirty years. My saves on the Final Fantasy Legend trilogy, for example, are all gone. Thanks to the save states of the Analogue Pocket, those games are still playable by using the micro SD card to create saves instead, should I desire to play those games again.

A new use occurred to me the other day: use the save states to save high scores on arcade games that do not have a battery backup. Games without the battery only save the high scores for each session of gameplay, and the scores are erased as soon as the game is turned off. With the save state on the Analogue Pocket, one can save their high scores for much longer. 

I’m testing it with Xevious for the Game Boy Advance. That mid-eighties arcade classic holds a special place in my heart as it was in the student rec room at Mansfield OSU when I was taking classes there, but I digress:

That’s not a very high score yet, but I just started playing it again.

The ability to play old games with new hardware has been a middle aged joy for me. Finding clever ways to enhance those games using features like save states just adds to their value.

Beaten: Powerslave Exhumed (Saturn/One)

 I've been getting my fix of late 1990s first person shooters over the past few years, beating Marathon:Durandal and Quake for example, but when I saw that Powerslave Exhumed was available I had to get it, as the original Powerslave was one of my "unfinished business" games, which are games that I played in the past but never beat. 

I had purchased the Sega Saturn version of Powerslave in late 1996 as it beat the Playstation version to market for some reason. My purchase of the Sega Saturn at release in May of 1995 had proven to be a mistake once Sony released the Playstation later that year. By late 1996 Sony had clearly already vanquished the Saturn by having games like Wipeout, Resident Evil, and Tomb Raider out, so I felt that I needed to boost my Saturn library, and Powerslave sounded cool.

I cannot remember where I was stuck, but it might have been on the first boss, Set. So I downloaded Powerslave Exhumed, a modern port for consoles and PC created by Night Dive Studios that retains the graphics and gameplay of the original. Since the original was so good, that is a plus.

It's a first person shooter, sure, but also a first person platformer at times, getting both gameplay aspects right. The other awesome aspect of this game is it's "Metroidvania" style of progression, created well before that was a word, meaning that the player opens up areas as they go and those areas will require repeated visits once the player acquires new items. Some areas, for examples, have multiple exits with one of them on a high ledge, meaning the player needs to acquire a certain artifact to make the jump.

Powerslave was an Iron Maiden album before it was a game, with a cool ancient Egyptian theme, and the game Powerslave recreates that theme in each level. The levels are large and varied in theme, each with the standard 1990s keys and doors that must be acquired and used during each visit to that level. So the backtracking one does is not that easy, as each key needs to be reacquired and each door reopened, every time one goes through the level.

It's not frustrating, though, as the level design is absolutely awesome, making levels fun to revisit. The weapons keep coming throughout one's playthrough, and once acquired, they remain in one's inventory forever. Starting with a sword (great for underwater fish fights), the player gets a pistol, a large machine gun, a grenade, and then some interesting magical weapons like a snake staff, a fireball ring, and a lightning bolt spell before it's all done. 

Ammo drops from fallen enemies are generic, meaning that whatever weapon one is holding will get the ammo refilled. So if the player is low on machine gun ammo but was using the pistol to kill enemies and some ammo drops, the player must switch to the machine gun before picking up the ammo.

There are a few boss fights, and they are memorable and challenging, but there’s no health meters on these guys, so just keep shooting and moving. While Set gave me some trouble again (I almost gave up there again), I got the final boss on my first try.

The wave of first person shooters following Doom were often creative in their attempts to stand out in the crowd, but the under appreciated Powerslave had more going on in it than I realized back in late 1996. I’m glad the folks at Night Dive Studios released Powerslave Exhumed so I could wrap up that bit of unfinished business.