Best Games - SubSpace
In 1997 you would be lucky to get two computers to talk with one another long enough to play a short game of quake. It wasn’t impossible. Networked multiplayer games existed. Lots of people played them. I played them. But they weren’t exactly easy to get running. They weren’t exactly responsive. They weren’t exactly stable. The idea of running a single game that could accommodate over two hundred players on a single server, over a dial up modems, well that was sorcery. Higher speed connections to the internet were available, but they were either extremely expensive or only in specific locales. Wherever you happened to be, that is where high speed internet probably wasn’t. It was all a little too big an ask just to play a multiplayer game. If you wanted to do that you would pack up your pc and move it to where you could hook up a LAN. With a bunch of other people. Maybe even a party. A LAN party. Now, if I want to play a game with any number of other people I can turn on one of the many devices within arms reach that will let me do that. Including this IPad I am typing on right now. What if there were some sorcery that let you do that in 1997? What if there was at least one game where you could join in and play with an absolutely staggering amount of people. SubSpace is all at once close to a decade ahead of its time while also being a throwback to the very early days of video games. SubSpace is multiplayer Asteroids. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that SubSpace is massively multiplayer Spacewar!. Spacewar! is a head to head space combat game from the early 60’s. You control a spaceship in pitched combat against another spaceship. There is gravity, inertia, explosions, a star you can slingshot your ship around. It’s actually pretty impressive. And it is likely the first ever video game. SubSpace is that, but if two hundred other people were also playing and there are missions and team and sometimes you would join up with a bunch of random people from anywhere in the world to play some spaceship soccer. It felt like it shouldn’t work, but it did. It was amazing. Unfortunately, being amazing doesn’t always mean commercial success. Subspace didn’t sell well enough to keep the servers running for very long. And like far too many online games, that would have been the end of it. With no server, the game had nothing to call in to, no place in the world to call home. But SubSpace was amazing, and a lot of people knew that. These people did what people who love something amazing do. They made it their own. Today on Steam you can play SubSpace Continuum. It is a aground up recreation of SubSpace. I don’t know if there are people playing it now, but I think it might be worth your while to try. Get a group of two hundred or so people together. Go fly tiny 2D spaceships around 2D mazes and shoot at each other. It’s fun. It’s one of the Best Games.
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About a half an hour ago I solved an issue I have been having with my 2D (but actually 3D) game project. It feels great. When I started this, I had an extremely specific aesthetic and feeling that I wanted to capture. A late 80’s to early 90’s arcade machine. The first part of the journey was creating a CRT effect. That came together fairly quickly. The next part was making properly looping animations and a system for making them either 3D or 2D rendered sprites. In the end I managed to make them 3D meshes that get rendered in a spritelike manner. After that was control. I wanted analog control that still felt snappy like D-Pad or joystick inputs. I think I have that mostly taken care of, along with a simple, but solid general input component that handles button presses and gamepad or keyboard inputs. I have interaction with colliders and trigger volumes working. Animation trees are mostly ready to go. The only thing that never worked quite like I wanted was the camera. Godot 4 is pretty well known for having camera jitter when trying to create pixel perfect movement and panning. I experienced a lot of it. Eventually I was able to get the player and object movement to be pretty crisp. There wouldn’t be very much pixel twitching when you ran the little character around. Background tiles would stay stuck to the simulated phosphors and CRT bloom. Until the camera moved. If it moved slowly, everything looked okay, but as soon as it started moving with any sort of speed things got very twitchy. I did the first thing anyone would do, I looked it up on the internet. I watched tutorials. I snooped around in code off of GitHub. I did the research. There are a lot of people doing pixel art games and a lot of those people are working on pixel perfect cameras. Not one that I found were solving the same problems as me, and a lot of them required so many weird workarounds and caveats that it would be a chore to develop the actual game. I want aesthetic constraints, not arbitrary technical ones. Anyway, at the end of all of that, I combined some techniques and figured out a solution that actually allows me more artistic freedom, and it looks damn near perfect. I could try to explain, but you can just watch this and judge for yourself. I have been playing some Atari 50. It’s part game, part documentary, part interactive museum highlighting some slices over the 50 year history of Atari.
It is packed with high resolution scans of game manuals and marketing materials. Most of them are what you would expect. Flyers filled with details about cabinets for arcade owners to peruse when making purchasing decisions, complete with the requisite amount of hype. I find all of this historical miscellany fascinating. This is the sort of stuff that typically gets tossed, since it doesn’t offer much value to the company. Not much money to be made with a flyer for an arcade machine that isn’t being produced or sold anymore. It’s even more difficult for people to see any value in artifacts created for temporary commercial purposes within their own lifetimes. The first Coca Cola logo ever produced is historically interesting, some slight change to that logo produced in the last five months is not. Maybe it should be. Maybe we should celebrate these small artifacts. Small works. One of the things I have been extremely taken with when playing through Atari 50 is the T-Shirts. T-Shirts come up a lot. Pictures of people wearing weird T-Shirts, stories of people making T-Shirts, and the company using T-Shirts as marketing material. Compared to most corporate T-Shirts today, the design of a lot of these T-Shirts absolutely rips. I’ll admit here and now that I haven’t done a ton of research on this, but I think there might be a reason these particular T-Shirts are great. Most of these T-Shirts are from the late 70s and early 80s. There was a certain confluence of technologies and design during that time that would lead to some really fantastic T-Shirts. First, screen printing technology, which had been around for literally hundreds of years at the time, had fairly recently been commodified to the point that a person could buy or build a screen printing setup for a few hundred dollars. That meant that it became pretty easy for people to print images and words onto T-Shirts, at least if what you want is fairly basic. Around the same time, graphic design and camera technology was going through a similar commodification. We weren’t quite to the point where all of this work could be done on a computer, setting up artwork was still mostly a manual process, but improved photographic film, emulsion, and lithograph materials helped designers work cheaper and quicker than ever before. This led to an absolute boom of high quality design being applied to products that never would have enjoyed such high quality artwork even a decade earlier. Toys and moderately priced consumer products started getting the premium artwork treatment. Artwork that could be resized and reused for anything and everything. Artwork that could be applied cheaply to something like a T-Shirt. Of course, the graphic T-Shirt options somewhere in the vicinity of 1979 were nothing like they are today. You can get a cheap shirt with basically anything you want on it now. You can even have a place print something you drew with your finger in a jack box game and they will send you that shirt in a few days. Maybe even less. But that also means that most shirts are considered cheap, almost disposable, items. Companies that make shirts don’t always bring their A game. In the late 70s they had a bunch of good artwork and it was very easy to make T-Shirts. Maybe not as easy as it is today, but if you are silk screening the shirts and not inkjet printing them, it was pretty close. If you are a company like Atari and you want to make some shirts to sell, and maybe promote your company and products, you will use the artwork that you have ready for screen printing. The best artwork your company can make. Simply put, nothing else is ready. Almost all of the T-Shirts I am seeing in Atari 50 follow that model. They are screen prints of some bit of art that the company had already photographed and set up for making screens or plates. In other words, their best art. I’m sure they had a few duds, but I haven’t seen them. While the flyers and other advertising materials were probably held in a flat file somewhere until they were scanned for this project, I doubt the T-Shirts exist now. T-shirts aren’t really known for their durability, but also, people don’t tend to consider artifacts like that important. At least not historically important. That’s unfortunate, since they represent a lot of skilled artist’s work. That, and they were a damn sight better than just another corporate logo in the center of someone’s chest. Best Games - Retro Game Challenge (GameCenter CX: Arino no Chosenjo)
For the last twenty years the show GameCenter CX has played on Fuji TV One in Japan. It’s a comedy show where Shinya Arino attempts to play, and beat, old video games. Arino is an affable man, usually quick with a joke, who suffers the task of playing these games at the behest of the CX company, a company that gleefully promotes and demotes him based on his performance in the games, but one that he also appears to run. His assistants will show up to alternately help or torment him, whichever is funnier in the moment. Between games, Arino and his crew tour around Japan interviewing legendary figures in the video game industry, and, more often than not, playing games with them. The entire show is built on good natured enjoyment, and an honest love of video games. When indieszero set out to make a game based on GameCenter CX, the only way to do the show justice would be to build into it that same love. So that is exactly what they did. Since GameCenter CX isn’t really a known commodity outside of Japan, the English title of the game was changed to Retro Game Remix, but the content of the game is largely the same. In Retro Game Challenge, you play as a young kid in the 80s, playing with your neighbor on what looks to be a Nintendo Famicom. A low poly version of Arino will issue you challenges, much like he deals with during the show, and you must complete them by playing a series of fictional video games. It would do a disservice to the games included, to call them minigames. The games are often more fully featured than a lot of early Famicom games. They are often ridiculously authentic. If a player weren’t familiar with the real games that these fictional facsimiles are referencing, they could fairly easily be confused for real games from the mid to late 80s. The games are good too. They look good. They sound good. They play good. They are good. They aren’t just good enough for a minigame collection. They are legitimately enjoyable sans the game master Arino framing device, and arbitrary challenges. Indieszero made games within a game, but they made them so well, many of them could have stood on their own, wrapped in a plastic cartridge and jammed into a Nintendo console. The love for gaming doesn’t end with the high quality of the fictional games. Each game comes with a period perfect manual that you can flip through for background and tips on how to best play each game. The manuals are beautifully designed and pitch perfect. There is a deep love that went into the fake packaging of these fake games. They feel real, because they are real. The last threads of the nostalgia tapestry making up Retro Game Challenge, is the magazines. Every once in a while a magazine will be added to your shelf, and you can take it down and read it. The magazines are filled with poorly, but authentically, written reviews, hints, and articles about the games you are, and will be, playing. The magazines provide a sense of place. A connection to the time that these fictional games occupy. Retro Game Challenge loves games just as much as the show it’s based on, and that love makes it one of the best games. |
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