Category: Gaming

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Gaming Short Essays Writings

Big Traks and Little Phones

The first computer I spent time on was a IBM PCjr, acquired around fourth grade, 1984 or so.

Before that, I really had no idea what a computer was, or what one did, save perhaps my Big Trak, a tank-like toy with a microprocessor that could be “programmed” via buttons on its back to crawl forward or backward or spin or fire its “laser.”

The aggressive PEW PEW PEW noise of a Big Trak is ironed directly onto my synapses even more keenly than “YOU MUST GATHER YOUR PARTY BEFORE VENTURING FORTH,” and that is saying a lot.

The PCjr was an absolute beast in computing terms, the 1984 equivalent of giving a 9-year-old boy a Ford Mustang and carte blanche. 16-color monitor, infrared keyboard, a clunky 5 1/4 disk drive, two mostly useless cartridge slots (I only ever had the BASIC cartridge), and 128k of RAM to power its trusty 8088 processor running at a lightning 4.77 mhz. I fed that monster many floppy disks as a young and ambitious high priest in charge of sacrificing 360k at a time to an increasingly demanding deity. I gamed, I learned DOS, I learned BASIC, and I also learned how to troubleshoot.

Years later the junior was replaced by a clone 8088 with 512k RAM and two disk drives, but its 4-color CGA monitor (the PCjr’s monitor was incompatible with anything else) was a sore point. Eventually I got a 16-color EGA upgrade, and later, an Adlib sound card, and a hard drive, which held an astounding 30 MB. The clone died at some point and was replaced with yet another 8088 clone, an XT “Turbo,” which via a red button could press its clock speed to a terrifying 8 mhz.

I still had the XT Turbo when I went to college, but in an misguided effort to reinvent myself as a long-haired, guitar-playing Luddite, I left it in a closet. I’d become convinced that all my years of computer gaming had left me socially stunted and I needed to keep off of screens.

This phase lasted several years and didn’t work well. I missed the 286s, the 386s, and even the 486s, and I had managed to become computer-phobic right as the internet took off. Eventually, however, a roommate gave me an email account on one of the university’s servers, and I used it in conjunction with the 24-hour terminal labs on campus to explore this newfangled web. I slowly became tech-savvy again.

By 1995 or so, it became clear that biking a mile to the nearest lab was impractical if I wanted to read something on the net, write a paper, roleplay, etc. The XT Turbo, which would have qualified as a Porsche in 1984, was now a Model T (I also skipped years of game console development after the Super Nintendo, requiring extensive supplemental recovery, but that’s another post).

So I saved up every cent I had from part-time work and bought a Pentium. 120 mhz (overclocked to 133), 28.8 baud modem, VGA monitor, CD-ROM (read only), and perhaps most strikingly, Windows 95.

I was on the information superhighway.

My grades plummeted immediately.

You can literally see on my undergraduate transcript exactly when I got this devil’s machinery. My rapid recovery in my four last semesters depended on strict internet rationing, partially aided by the purchase of a 56k baud modem that reduced the time spent twiddling my thumbs.

The Pentium went with me to Boston in 1999 upon graduation. It became clear, however, that I was outgunned. My first job in Beantown gave me a 333 mhz Celeron that they had lying around, and after I bought a car that summer, I bought a Pentium II in the fall. 400 mhz, and of course I added the stereotypical “necessary” Voodoo 3. By 2002, I had a Pentium IV running at a ridiculous 1 Ghz.

In 2003, I got my first laptop, a hand-me-down Pentium III, and after a stint as a laptop tech, I decided to start building from components. I built a massive full tower (I still have the case, which figures into this story later) that held a long succession of processors, with a reliable Q6600 being the longest-lived. I also acquired a X31 Thinkpad around 2007, a model I’d fallen for hard when doing warranty repair on them, and I wrote my dissertation on it. It was destroyed accidentally around 2010 (long story) and I could never quite find a good replacement for it until very recently, depending on several Dell workhorses from UHD, when I ditched my work machines and bought the modern version of the X-series, a Thinkpad Nano.

The advancement of what I consider a minimum has, umm, increased. Right now I’m writing this post on a water-cooled i7-11700k with 32 gigs of DDR4 and a RTX 3060 Ti driving two 4k monitors, which makes the 1984 PCjr look like something scrawled in the margins of a cave painting in France, and it’s a fairly mid-grade setup. In addition to the Nano, which I take to the office, I have a recent iPad that I use almost entirely for streaming and gaming, a PS5, and a heavily modified Steam Deck.

This is adequate.

I gave my full tower to my 8-year-old son, who now has unwitting custody of the trusty 1660 Ti upon which I rode through most of the pandemic. He also has access to a Switch, an 8-bit NES that I restored, and a battered internet-free iPad.

My younger son is too rough on tablets, but has an ancient, heavily armored iPhone, also locked down, the use of which is rationed carefully. But his creaky phone is far more powerful than the 1984 PCjr. With a peripheral exoskeleton, it could run rings around my first laptop.

My goal with him and his brother (something I’ve discussed here before) is not to replicate the same cool experiences I had, but to make sure they are comfortable around tech, they can solve most problems related to it by themselves, and their internet usage is never overwhelming nor addictive.

The tools for moderating such activity are far better now than they were for me; my only saving grace was that I didn’t get a modem until I was about 20. I am thankful that I had good early tech exposure, as it helps keep me happy and employed, but it’s quite possible to have too much of a good thing.

It has not escaped my notice that they are almost as enamored with the NES as they are with the Switch. The NES is not much more complicated than a toaster (it gets hot enough to make toast, to be sure) but it remains a mean gaming machine. They are also just as excited about mundane Lego sets as they are anything on a PC. The Big Trak is still cool, perhaps only a little less than the Arduino robot my older son and I built (easier to program, too). In some ways they have it better, as they have access to both the old and the new, and they can see the advantages and disadvantages of each. My job is to act as a mediator of taste.

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Game Design Gaming PC Reviews Writings

The Long Dark, Appreciated

Little has transpired lately that cheers me, so here, I have decided to praise something that I like.

I’ve been using Steam to buy PC games for over a decade. The best one in my alarmingly large collection is, by any measure, The Long Dark. It has been in Early Access since at least 2015, but it doesn’t matter. It is pretty much everything I might want in a PC game, but at the same time, it is maddeningly incomplete, illogical, and nonsensical. But this is a case where the flaws create the sublime.

The narrative version of the game, “Story Mode,” is fine, if still incomplete after seven years of development. Irrelevant, though. The core fan base of the game is in “Sandbox,” where you, as a recent plane crash survivor on a remote Canadian island after a ill-defined apocalypse, are tasked to survive as long as possible.

That’s it.

It’s very cold. There are no living humans save yourself. Much of the wildlife is hostile. The weather is fickle and deadly. Supplies are rare and randomly placed in every new game, and “safe” areas are widely spaced from each other, forcing dangerous treks. It’s a game of careful planning and preparation, and in the end, you’re going to make a mistake and die, as TLD is permadeath. You can stop playing to save your progress, but dying is permanent, and you must start over.

It is a gorgeous game. The weather is dynamic, moody, and a character unto itself. A typical game consists of long stretches of pleasant monotony, carefully building up a reasonable shelter, broken by abrupt moments of sheer terror during meticulously planned expeditions to distant corners of the island for rare supplies.

But the game is also highly unrealistic, and by design.

Crafting items is essential to survival, but many of the most painfully obvious items that a reasonable individual in such a circumstance might think to construct are not featured.

For example, I can build a fire, repair clothing, sharpen a tool, forge an arrowhead (if I’ve got a forge), even fashion a rabbit trap and build a self bow, among other useful survival tasks.

But I can’t make a spear, the most basic and easy to make Paleolithic weapon, even if items like knives, arrowheads, cured gut, and hardwood saplings are in the game.

I can’t fashion a sled to carry more gear or an animal I’ve just killed so I can harvest it in a safer location. They did eventually implement quartering, but it’s not that useful.

Even with a hatchet, I can’t manually cut down a tree – I’m limited to hacking branches that have already fallen to the ground.

I can’t fashion a stronger or larger backpack other than the one I have at the beginning. It’s possible to make a satchel out of a moose to supplement my carrying capacity, but I can only carry one.

I can’t build anything larger than a small snow shelter, despite, again, having multiple hatchets, knives, and various appropriate tools, or modify an existing structure in any way.

Several firearms exist in the game – a .303 carbine and a .357 revolver – but the stock character, despite apparent 20/20 vision, can barely hit a deer at 20 yards when he/she is standing still and the ungulate in question is standing still.

Finally, perhaps, raw meat spoils far too quickly, even if left outdoors to freeze , and there is no way to preserve/pickle anything long-term.

Oh, and don’t even get me on the lack of booze and candles.

Now, you’d think a reasonable individual like myself would laugh all the way to never playing the game again, after taking all of this nonsense into consideration.

But all of these examples are examples of good game design. Games are never supposed to be realistic. They’re supposed to be fun and challenging. Walking right up to reality and becoming indistinguishable from it is not the goal.

Spears would unbalance the game. Solo wolves and bears and even the odd moose would be too easy to fend off, and conserving and handloading ammunition for the guns would be less important.

A sled would make the “expedition for supplies” play cycle too easy, which encourages careful inventory management.

Forcing the player to harvest an animal where it falls introduces considerable strategy when hunting.

Allowing the player to deforest an area or improve shelters in an area also unbalances the carefully crafted maps that balance shelter, resources, and danger.

A realistically accurate rifle would make hunting trivial.

Yes, constructing a bear-proof log cabin, with an endless supply of firewood and months of cured meat, plus some pit traps that would allow me to hunt without wasting bullets… that would be ideal. But it would remove the sense of improvising every moment, of immediate danger and death around every corner.

These limitations can also be explained. The character is a unlucky bush pilot, not a mountain man/carpenter/hunter/craftsman. So the technology and abilities is closer to what an average Joe might be able to do while in a perpetual state of total panic.

In other words, nothing heroic.

The first time I encountered a bear in the game, I slowly backed away, despite being heavily armed and theoretically prepared. I only had one life. Having one life and holding on to that one life requires a different kind of thinking, decision-making, and risk calculation. The strange restrictions that I listed before, then, actually increase my sense of realism. Letting the player get too powerful and capable would turn it into every other poorly-balanced RPG in existence. The limits are what make it great.

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Game Design Gaming Writings

One-Screen Bad Endings from 1980s and 1990s PC gaming

PC games in the 80s and even early 90s didn’t have much in the way of disk space or graphical whiz-bang.  An interesting side effect of this limitation was the failure states for many games were rather stark and inventive. They were more than a simple GAME OVER in the arcade, but far less elaborate than the now common fully-orchestrated 15-minute branched-ending cinematic.

I’ve collected ten examples that I think are illustrative of ‘one-screen bad endings’ of that era.

1. Ancient Art of War (1984)

Let’s start simple. The granddaddy of all real-time strategy games is AAW. As it is entirely scenario-based with no campaign, and slow-paced to boot, the arrival of the triumphant warrior ‘victory’ screen as opposed to the below ‘defeat’ screen was always an interesting payoff.

2. Amazon (1984), the Telarium entry.

The Telarium games, easily recognizable by their distinctive box art design, were essentially text adventures with CGA graphics. And they were brutal and cruel, with Amazon, a tale written by Michael Crichton, being the harshest of them. Amazon could, and would, cheerfully kill the player after any use of the parser, and loved giving you just one more chance to type a command even though nothing would work, letting you gaze on then-wondrous CGA art and contemplate your impending death… before kicking you summarily to DOS.

3. Oregon Trail (1985)

There are as many versions of this game as lineups for the Rolling Stones, so I’m not positive this screenshot is from the 1985 PC version. But you can die of dysentery in all of them. Myself, it’s usually cholera.

4. Life & Death (1988)

Given the game is chiefly about not botching two operations (an appendectomy and an aortic trunk replacement), you’re going to see this screen a lot before you finally master the good old McBurney’s incision.

Note the lack of text. None is needed.

5. Manhunter: New York (1988) and Manhunter: San Francisco (1989), the Sierra entries.

All the classic Sierra adventures, from King’s Quest and Space Quest on down, produced endless variations of amusing death sequences, making failure as fun as success. The Quest for Glory series probably has the funniest, but the first Manhunter game is the gold standard for mocking the player’s apparent ineptitude. Death in the game is always accompanied by a customized and horrible pun which is delivered by a depiction of the game’s three designers in apocalyptic cosplay. The sequel doubles down on this method.

6. Midwinter (1989)

This stylized screen is the one that inspired the writing of this article. General Masters is clearly working out his frustrations over his wasted conquest of the Hair Club for Men and his further inability to conceal his lack of a chin. REBELLIOUS DOGS! Clearly you require the use of an appositive to identify me!

7. Sword of the Samurai (1989)

SOTS’s art design was impeccable, allowing single, static screens to communicate major events in its “samurai simulator” in elegant ways. I’m working on a journal article right now about this beautiful game. The following screen is not a game ending – the game allows you to continue after death if you have a male heir. But there is another screen in much this style, calmly depicting your enforced seppuku and the execution of your entire family if you do something inadvisable, like attempt to assassinate your daimyo and fail. You come at the king, you best not miss…

8. Balance of Power (1990)

The masterpiece of the bad-ending genre follows, both subverting and enforcing the concept:

9. Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991)

Not every Civilization player has seen the “worst” ending of the first game. Again, static image, but music and text. A little bit of Shelley, I think.

10. Fallout (1997)

This is a late but classic example, which I include as video for the voiceover. But it is still a static image.

Note that there is a slightly different voiceover for different methods of death. And the the cold fact that everyone in your vault is now dead due to your failure is also, well, stressed just a tad.

Special “Kick to DOS” Category: Command HQ (1990) and Pool of Radiance (1988)

Command HQ, a minor Microprose classic, would kick you to DOS if you used nukes too much with the admonition of “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.” As the original Balance of Power had the snarky ending years before 1990, this was probably a tribute.

This piece would not be complete without a Gold Box entry – the first in the series, Pool of Radiance. Press a key, and you’re in DOS.