Category Archives: Console Video Games

Anything relating to videogames, from old to new, goes here.

Computers/Tech/Games, Console Video Games, Main

Goodbye, EA, and Goodbye Modern Gaming.

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While I was out of town last week I received an e-mail from Electronic Arts (EA). The e-mail informed me that my old “EA” account would now be known as an “Origin” account. My initial reaction was, “why do I even have an EA account?” Then I remembered.

The reason I have an EA account is because, after buying a used copy of the last Need for Speed game for the PlayStation 3, I was forced to create an EA account to play the game online. Then, after doing that, the game informed me that I was going to have to also pay an additional $10 to play the game online, since I had purchased the game used. That was the day I swore I would never buy another Electronic Arts game, and whined posted about it on my blog.

Oh, and Origin is not optional, if you want to play new EA games. It has been confirmed that Battlefield 3 will require Origin to be installed. Even if you walk into the store and buy a copy of Battlefield 3, you will need to install EA’s Origin and sign up for an account before you can play BF3.

There comes a time when it makes sense to say, “it’s not you; it’s me.” I think that time comes when everything around you seems to no longer make any sense. For me, and gaming, it appears that time is now. Pretty much everything about modern video games either confounds me, confuses me, or simply makes me mad. I’ve complained about it here before dozens of times. I don’t like the DRM. I don’t like the online requirements. I don’t like the forced firmware upgrades. I don’t like micro-payments. To be honest, I just don’t like any of it anymore.

Between older video game consoles and computers, there are tens of thousands — maybe even a hundred thousand — games to choose from. There are so, so many games I’ve never played; thousands of solid, classic games I’ve never even tried. I’ve never played any of the Zelda games. Hell, I don’t know that I’ve played an RPG since the 1980s. I don’t think I’ve ever beaten any of the old LucasArts Point-and-Click adventures. I’ve never played a single Sega Master System game. I don’t think I beat a single text adventure written in the 1980s. Or 1990s.


Oh, Sir Graham — how I missed ye.

I feel like there are so many classic retro games that there’s just no reason to keep reading modern gaming news and getting mad at every single thing that modern companies do. When you’re mad at Microsoft, and Sony, and Electronic Arts, and Ubisoft, and Amazon … well, like I said, at some point you’ve got to step back, take a deep breath, and realize that it’s not them; it’s me. The things I complain about, the things I’ve been complaining about, don’t seem to bother other gamers — at least, not enough to write off modern gaming. But I am.

The Nintendo Wii seems to be the least Draconian of the bunch, so if there’s any system I’ll keep supporting for a bit longer.

My next major gaming project will be to build an “emulation box,” one that runs all the classic emulators, including M.A.M.E. I had a modded Xbox loaded up with emulators for a while, but I think I’ll go with a PC setup this time. Upstairs, next to my C64 setup, I think I’m going to set up a retro PC box as well. That should keep me entertained for the time being.

If it’s me, then fine — I blinked. If this is the future of gaming, then it looks like a good time for me to bow out of the gaming rat race, do a u-turn, and check out all the cheese I missed throughout the years.

Console Video Games, Interactive Fiction

Review: Cryptozookeeper

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Disclaimer:

I passed on the opportunity to have dinner with Robb Sherwin back in 2007 when the two of us were (separately) attending the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. “He’s funny, you’re funny, come have dinner with us,” said a mutual friend of ours. Unfortunately I already had plans to visit the Pinball Hall of Fame with other friends of mine that evening, so I had to decline the offer. Their pack of nerds went one way, my pack of nerds went another, and fate was postponed for a couple of years.

Since then, Sherwin and I became mutual fans of each another’s work. He purchased my book Commodork and gave it glowing review. I, in turn, fell in love with Sherwin’s writing style, both in his text adventures and on his multiple websites. In June of 2010 while visiting Denver, I was able to swing by Sherwin’s place and check out his collection of arcade games; earlier this summer while visiting the Oklahoma Video Game Expo, he was able to check out mine. Along with our mutual love of classic arcade games, we also share common interests in old computers, video games, and of course, text adventures.

Summary: Robb Sherwin and I know one other. If you’re looking for a completely neutral and unbiased review of Cryptozookeeper, this may not be the one for you. (That being said, I’ll still be writing it.)

And now, on with the review.

Cryptozookeeper:

Like most gamers, I drifted away from the world of text adventures around the time graphics, sound and joysticks were invented. I played my share of text-based games in the early 1980s, but quickly moved on to “the graphical stuff” and didn’t revisit the genre until my interest was re-piqued by Get Lamp.

There’s a reason the genre tends to identify with the more modern term “Interactive Fiction” versus the classic label of “Text Adventure”: Cryptozookeeper is roughly 600 megabytes in size, mostly due to the game’s graphics and 70-song soundtrack. To put that in perspective, the entire text of the Bible is 1.2 megabytes. (For the Devil sends the Beast with wrath, because he knows his downloads are short.) The game’s interface consists of four windows: a picture of who you’re talking to, a picture of where you’re at, a status update window, and the game’s text. Each of these windows are constantly changing depending on who you’re focused on and where you are, giving you a visual glimpse into the twisted world around you. This is not your father’s text adventure, in more ways than one.

In Cryptozookeeper players become William Ezekiel Vest, a man stuck in swarthy Christmas City, a town that’s part-nightmare, part-dark comedy. Things here are a little sick, a little twisted, and a little goofy in this place where the X-Files meets Nightmare on Elm Street: Part 3. In the game’s first location, players must solve a puzzle involving a dog named Puzzle. Assuming you outwit Igor Cytserz’s killer mutt, you’ll be gifted a vial of alien marrow from which DNA can be extracted. This package sets in motion a series of events in which Vest meets, interacts, and travels with multiple NPCs, traversing the city to find and collect DNA samples, all while solving classic IF puzzles along the way.

Midway through the game, Crypto morphs into a Monster Rancher-style game in which cryptids (creatures unknown to modern science) are created by mixing and matching your previously discovered DNA samples. Players have the freedom to create whatever kind and how ever many cryptids they want. Players will then spend time pitting these cryptids against other cryptids in order to level them up in order to finally face … well, I don’t know because I’m still leveling them up. But I’ll bet it’ll be a humdinger of a battle when I get there. While the battling cryptids contain varying attributes, the battles are mostly luck-based and randomly decided (I just had my Bigfoot unceremoniously defeated by an Aardvark). Fortunately your cryptids never truly “die” — instead they end up back at the pen, where they recuperate after a bit of resting.

The dialogue system used within Crypto is interesting in that the game-related topics each NPC knows about appear in color. (“I see you brought some DNA with you.”) The Tads.org article on NPC conversations refers to this style as “hyperlinked replies”. The advantage of hyperlinked replies is, you’ll never walk away from an NPC without gaining all the knowledge you are supposed to receive. (Typing “Topics PERSON” will list any you missed.) The disadvantage of this style is, conversations quickly become a laundry list of topics to be checked off until none remain. To be honest I’ve played all the major IF conversational styles (“free form”, “menu driven”, and “hyperlinked”) and they all have advantages and disadvantages. While free form conversations feel the most interactive, they leave the most to chance (and can lead players down a slippery “guess the noun” slope).The other two don’t allow for as much freedom; then again, they don’t allow for as much floundering around, either. As an author, I can appreciate forced dialogue systems for no other fact than I would hate to waste exposition (or worse, a great joke) on dark nooks and crannies that players may never encounter. Worse yet, put a game-advancing tidbit in there and watch your players’ progress grind to a halt.

Like all of Robb Sherwin’s games, the world of and characters within Christmas City is a conglomeration of pop culture references and technobabble. Sherwin entertains as earnestly as he offends. There are jokes about baseball and stigmata and trolls who edit Wikipedia entries. Not every joke sticks and I doubt everyone will get all the references (I know I missed some), but the ones I did get made me laugh. As with his previous games, Sherwin’s strong suit continues to be his writing.

If there’s any downside to Cryptozookeeper it’s that parts of it are insanely hard. I struggled with some of the puzzles for days, which, in all honesty, could be more of a reflection on my relative inexperience and re-introduction to text-based games than on the game. Some of the puzzles took me days to solve, and at least one side-plot involving an exorcism (I can’t tell if solving it was integral to “beating” the game yet or not) I can honestly say I have would never, ever solved on my own. This particular puzzle boils down to coming up with a single word, which I ultimately came up with after pleading with the author via e-mail. Cryptozookeeper may be enjoyed by beginning gamers, but it probably won’t be defeated by one.

From the text to the puzzles, Cryptozookeeper is a challenging game. It’s a game that engages players on multiple cylinders. I’m guessing the subject matter, language, and puzzles may not strike a nerve with all IF gamers, but for the ones it does, Cryptozookeeper is a guaranteed good time.

Link: Cryptozookeeper

Console Video Games, Interactive Fiction

Racing the Beam

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My parents brought home our first home Pong console in the fall of 1977, shortly after I turned four-years-old. The following year we upgraded to a Magnavox Odyssey 2, and in 1979 we purchased an Atari 2600. I have literally been playing video games my entire life; I’m a grown up gamer that grew up gaming. I’ve watched the video game technology grow and expand infinitely, back from its humble monochrome roots in the late 1970s to the hi-definition graphics, digital surround sound audio, and online multi-player gaming experiences we take for granted today.

When you’ve been around as long as I have, it’s impossible not to compare and contrast the new with the old. As a technical kind of guy this often plays itself out in numbers. Comparing the processing power and storage capacity of today’s modern marvels to the systems of yesteryear results in some mind-blowing revelations. I once downloaded a zip file that contained the ROMs of every Atari 2600 game known at that time. The file was 3 megabytes in size. A complete archive of every official US Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is slightly larger at just over 100 megabytes. Realizing that I have enough memory to store complete copies of the Atari 2600, NES, SNES and Sega Genesis game libraries on my phone reminds us of how far we’ve come in the couple of decades. In the year 2000, I had a Nokia cell phone that was capable of playing a port of Snake (an arcade game from 1976). Ten years later, I bought an iPhone that plays Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (THPS2).

Cramming a skateboarding game originally designed to play on the Sony PlayStation into an iPhone requires a level of technical wizardry that is impressive, but not surprising. If you really want to understand what technical wizardry is — if you really want to learn about a world where every byte (nay, bit!) counted, you’ll need to go back almost 30 years to the Atari 2600 platform. While it is indeed impressive that in 2010 Activision was able to render a three-dimensional world in which you can maneuver a virtual Tony Hawk around in, it is more impressive to me that in 1982 Activision released Pitfall!, a game that contained 32 treasures spread across 255 unique rooms containing varying combinations tar pits, water holes, quicksand, rolling logs, campfires, snapping crocodiles, scorpions and swinging vines … all in 4k worth of code.

If that last fact made your jaw drop, or caused you to smile, or sent chills down your spine, or got any sort of physical reaction out of you at all … then Racing the Beam is for you.

Written by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam chronicles (in technical depth) the development of six seminal Atari 2600 games: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. With the development of each game, readers are exposed to the capabilities (read: limitations) of the Atari 2600 platform. From a hardware perspective the 2600 was developed to play variations of Combat and Pong, and only contained the ability to render five moving objects (two players, two bullets, one ball) at a time, and had 128 bytes of RAM in which to do it. The random, colorful explosions in Yars’ Revenge and the smooth, parallax scrolling in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back become all the more impressive in that context. In order to perform some of those complicated tasks, programmers found themselves literally racing the television’s electron beam down the television display.

Each game discussed within the book marks a milestone in the life of the Atari 2600, whether it’s the evolution of text adventures into a graphical environment (Adventure), the birth of movie licensed-games (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back), or the genre of arcade-to-console conversions (Pac-Man). None of these games were developed within a vacuum, and the book does a good job of encapsulating not only the technical achievements of each game, but also the historical context in which they were developed. The chapter about Yars’ Revenge, for example, talks about the game’s roots as a port of Star Castle, and compares and contrasts the game with Atari’s Asteroids. The game’s Easter Egg, the code used for the seemingly random level-ending explosions, and its unique sonic landscape are all discussed in detail.

At multiple times throughout the book, Racing the Beam reminds us that these classic games weren’t compiled by teams of skilled programmers, but rather were labors of love, quite often imagined, developed, and programmed by a single individual. While general concepts and technical knowledge was passed along between programmers, because of the way these games were designed it was difficult to recycle and/or share specific code among projects. The concept of having different people work on graphics, sound, and gameplay mechanics would not come to pass for a few more years. The book does a good job of introducing us to these men behind the keyboards.

Racing the Beam is not always an easy read. While the anecdotes and memories documented within are both interesting and informative, the book occasionally delves deep into the technical hows-and-whys involved in producing these games. I encountered some conversational hurdles as I waded through information regarding Atari’s TIA chip (the 2600’s sound and graphics chip), clock cycles and horizontal and vertical blanks — interesting Jeopardy material to be sure, but definitely deeper reading than your average light-hearted romp down retrospective lane.

Upon finishing this book you will never again look at the background trees in Pitfall or Pac-Man’s flashing ghosts in the same way. While not an encapsulating history of the Atari 2600 itself, Racing the Beam does an excellent job of explaining the demonstrating the hurdles and limitations early programmers had to overcome in order to create great video games.

(One final thought: this review contains almost 6,000 characters, approximately 2,000 more than any of the Atari 2600 games dissected in Racing the Beam. Food for thought.)

Console Video Games, Hacking / Security

Deconstructing the PS3 Hack

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Last week at the 27th annual Chaos Communication Congress (CCC), a group calling themselves “fail0verflow” displayed the single-most important PlayStation 3 hack to date. A few months from now, when everybody who wants one has a modified PS3, you’ll be able to point your finger back to fail0verflow’s CCC presentation and say, “that is where is all began.”

Just like the original Xbox, the PlayStation 3’s defenses didn’t fall to pirates, but to Linux experts. The quickest way to have your security precautions ripped out of your device, run up the flagpole and laughed at is to prevent people from running Linux on it. In fact, the general consensus has been all along that since the PlayStation 3 allowed users to install Linux on an unmodified console, Linux hackers have had no incentive to tinker with the console’s security measures. As a result, the PS3 has remain “unbroken” for over four years, the longest of any modern console. However in the late spring of 2009, Sony removed the OtherOS feature from PlayStation 3’s through a mandatory (if you want to play online and/or new games) BIOS upgrade. While this made a lot of PlayStation 3 owners mad, it apparently made fail0verflow really mad.

The reason your PS3 (or any game console) won’t play a copied disc is because games must be digitally signed. As with any encryption, this digital handshake requires a private key and a public key. A PlayStation 3, using its private key, examines public keys and, based on its findings, determines whether or not to execute the code. This is why games you buy off the shelf will run on your PS3, but a copy of that same game will not.

(Old mod chips for the original PlayStation used to trick consoles by returning the right answer, regardless of what the question was. The PS1 was looking for region codes instead of digitally encrypted signatures, but the concept was the same. When a backup copy was inserted into the original PlayStation, the console would ask, “should I play this game?” The console checked for the region code and, when it could not be found, would reply with “no.” That response was sent back through the modchip, who slyly changed it to “yes!”)

While digging through the PlayStation 3, fail0verflow didn’t just find a private key — they found the private key. The master root encryption key. Using this key, hackers can generate working public keys. With valid public keys, hackers can boot anything they want on the PS3. There are two important things to note here. One, is that this key is included in the PlayStation 3’s hardware. It does not appear that a BIOS upgrade can change the master key. And two, changing the key could cause all PlayStation 3 games to stop working — so that’s not very likely. fail0verflow went looking for this key in the name of Linux. Other folks may not be so kind.

You know how there’s that one guy that takes things to another level? In the hacking world, that guy is GeoHot. GeoHot perfected the iPhone jailbreak; if your iPhone is jailbroken, you owe it to GeoHot. The PlayStation 3 has been a thorn in GeoHot’s side for quite some time now. He’s picked at it, poked at it, and even released a couple of hacks that were eventually closed up by Sony. fail0verflow announced that within the next month, they plan on releasing some tools that will allow the homebrew and hacking communities to start looking at the PS3. GeoHot said to hell with that, and posted the master key on his website.

Click to Enlarge

Right now, this kid’s house is probably surrounded by lawyers. Or assassins. Or both.

Now, I don’t know what to do with that number, and chances are you don’t either, but you can get your booty there are people that do, people that have been waiting four long years for those numbers. The PS3’s homebrew and hacking scenes are about to light up. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Console Video Games

U-S-B for U and Wii!

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(Aren’t I the clever one!)

Last year, a hack was released that allowed gamers to connect USB hard drives to their Nintendo Wiis, allowing them to store copies of their games (and play them) from the hard drive. While this sounded really cool, the last time I looked at it the instructions were fairly complicated, and I didn’t have any real incentive to get it working. Fast forward to this past weekend, when I found my copy of Rock Band had been chewed beyond repair by either the dog or the five-year-old (surprisingly similar bite patterns). After finding that, I decided to set aside a couple of hours over the weekend to finally get this hack working.

When finished, this hack allows you to (A) backup your Wii game discs to an external USB hard drive, and (B) play those backed up games directly from the hard drive, alleviating the need for the original discs. While warranty voiding, both of those actions are legal. The hack also allows you to (C) illegally download Wii games from the Internet, copy them to the USB drive, and play them on your Wii. With great power comes great responsibility.

There are several sets of instructions floating around for performing this hack. I chose to use the one on Lifehacker.com, simply because I’ve used some of their tutorials before, and they tend to be easy to follow.

Hardware-wise, all you need is a USB hard drive, an SD card, and a modded Wii (hard or soft, doesn’t matter) to pull off this hack. That being said, it should be noted that the “Wii USB HD Hack” is not a single hack at all — it’s series of hacks. You’ll also need the Homebrew Channel installed on your Wii, which I didn’t have. Each step of the tutorial seemed to send me on a 5-10 minute digital goose chase across the Internet. To get the Homebrew Channel, I had to install BannerBomb. With the Homebrew channel installed, I had to run DOP-Mii v12 to exploit the Trucha Bug. With that installed, I was able to add the cIOS Installer. With that, I was able to install both USB Loader GX and the forwarder (so USB Loader GX appears as a channel when you first turn on your Wii).

The Lifehacker tutorial says that the whole process should take “5-10 minutes”. It took me around two hours. One reason for this was I (foolishly) was using the computer in my office to download everything, but the Wii is located in our living room. I’d estimate half of my two hours was spent walking back and forth between rooms. Also, I may have moved slower than the average person because each step I previously mentioned could, if performed incorrectly, brick your console. (For those of you not familiar with the term, that means permanently destroying a device to the point where it effectively becomes an expensive “brick”.) So yeah, I read each step very carefully.

And believe me, I was plenty nervous. Many of the steps and programs involved connect to the Internet from your Wii to download exploit code to run. Setting aside the whole “I am running code from people I don’t trust or even know” angle, there are so many things that could go wrong along the way that my palms were sweaty the entire time. Each time I attempt something like this, I just assume whatever I’m working on will end up irrevocably broken. That way, if things don’t work out, I’m not too disappointed.

In this case however, things did work out. After two hours of work, I now have a “USB Loader GX” channel on my Wii that allows the kids to pick their games from a menu and play them without ever touching my original games. USB Loader downloads cover images from the Internet, so even Morgan (who is just learning to read) can easily find the games she wants to play. The USB Loader GX front in is faily configurable. You can sort games alphabetically, by “most played”, or even by rank (you can rate each game from 1-5 stars).

If you want to access your external HD from your PC, you’ll need one additional program: WBFS Manager. With it, you can extract your dumped games back into burnable ISO images. What’s amazing to me is, each Wii ISO image is 4.3 gig, but when stored on the hard drive, many of them are less than a gig in size (one was less than 200 meg!). This isn’t compression — this is the actual size of the code stored on the disc.

This hack isn’t for everybody. (In fact, it won’t even work for everybody — those with the latest 4.3 update can’t play. Sorry.) If, however, you have lost games due to the scratches and smudges from pets or children, this may be something you should look into. Installation is fairly simple if you follow the guide. Like all mods and hacks this voids your warranty and could potentially get you banned from online play someday in the future, so you’ll have to decide whether or not the benefits outweigh the risks for you personally.

Console Video Games, Main

Are you there, Sony? It’s me, a gamer …

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When it comes to gaming, I’m not one of those guys (nor have I ever been) who is particularly loyal to any one single manufacturer. I buy what I like, regardless of who makes it. You could say in regards to specific gaming brands, I’m “gaming agnostic” — I own a PlayStation 3, an Xbox 360, and a Nintendo Wii. This is the disclaimer one has to give if a person plans on saying anything for or against a gaming company — and even then, most public responses will quickly spiral into a pile of fanboy mudslinging.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 is a powerful piece of hardware. In fact, despite belonging to the same generation of consoles, it could be as much as 10x as powerful as the Nintendo Wii. The PS3 plays Blu-Ray movies, has better graphics, and more online games than the Wii, but what it doesn’t have is that silly little Wiimote, the controller that launched a thousand “waggily” mini-games (and broke almost as many flat screen televisions …) To date, the Nintendo Wii (which originally sold for $249 and now sells for $199) has outsold the PS3 in the US two to one (I originally paid $599 for mine).

So what’s a console maker who is being outsold by the Wii to do? The answer is, imitate the Wii.

This week Sony introduced the “PlayStation Move”, their answer to the Wii. For gamers such as myself who already own a PlayStation 3, getting “Moving” will cost you/us. At a minimum you’ll need a PlayStation Eye Camera ($39.99) and a Move controller ($49.99). Realistically you’ll also need the PlayStation Move Navigation Controller ($29.99), Sony’s answer to the Wiichuck.

That’s $120 without a game. Sony plans to offer a bundle that contains one Move controller, the PlayStation Eye, and a game (Sports Champions, which sounds a lot like Wii Sports) for $99.99. You’ll still need to drop another $30 for the Navigation controller, which puts the total back up to $140.

Keep in mind this is all for one player. If you wanted to go nuts and get four sets of controllers (the maximum the console supports), you’re looking at $320 in controllers and another $40 for the camera. Note that you wouldn’t be able to charge all those devices at once via the PS3’s 2 or 4 (depending on the model) USB ports. Fortunately Sony also plans on offering a charging station — another $30 (or $120 in our four controller scenario).

Or, you know, you could just go buy a Nintendo Wii …

Console Video Games, Main

Nintendo Wii Won’t Get Fooled Again

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Yet another case of consumers getting screwed.

This week, Nintendo released a new version of the Nintendo Wii. It’s just like the old Nintendo Wii, except it’s black. Apparently, that’s enough to get lots of Wii owners excited enough to buy a new one.

The Nintendo Wii includes a Virtual Console. Games for the Virtual Console are purchased online and downloaded directly on to your Wii, where they are stored. There are approximately 350 games available on the virtual console, each one costing between $5 and $12.

So right about now you might be asking yourself, “How do I get all those games I purchased from my old Wii to my new Wii?” And the answer is, you don’t.

So to those of you who have spent a couple hundreds bucks on Virtual Console games, you’re just out of luck if you want to upgrade. And if I decide to buy one of the new black Wii consoles, do you know how much money I’m going to lose?

Nothing. Nada. Zero Doleros. Because I refuse to support virtual gaming. I have said it time and time again. When these companies make stupid decisions, we have to stop supporting them! And thank God, you people finally listened to me! The Virtual Console has been a complete failure!

Oh wait, no it hasn’t. According to Wikipedia, Nintendo has sold more than 10 million virtual console games. That means you people have spent between $50 million and $120 million dollars on games that you don’t really own. It’s just unbelievable. And it’s unbelievable that people continue to support systems such as this one.

I vote with my wallet. We must vote with our wallets! By supporting systems in which you download (but don’t own) games, you’re allowing game companies to do this to us again, and again, and again.

Wait — not to us. To you.

Nintendo isn’t the only culprit, of course. Electronic Arts announced this week that all of their future games will come with a one-time code for online play. Gamers who buy used copies of EA’s games will have to pay an additional $10 for online play. Sony made headlines earlier this week by removing the Other OS feature from their PlayStaton 3 consoles, a feature that many PS3 owners (such as myself) paid for and had used. Last year we had the story about Amazon deleting books off of people’s Kindles. It’s like they’ve screwed up every single attempt at digital content delivery. The best of the bunch has been iTunes, and the fact that iTunes is the best of anything makes me want to bash my own brains out with an iPod.

I hate to sound like a crotchety old man sitting on my front porch in a rocking chair while waving my fist in the air, but I feel like game companies are personally daring me to never buy another modern console or game again. And with all the old games I have piled up around my house (both real and via emulation), I honestly do have a lifetime supply (at least) of video games to play without putting up with this crap any longer.

Man, I really do sound like a crotchety old man. But at least I’m a crotchety old man who owns my own video games.

Console Video Games

Pac-Clones

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(I’m not sure who I wrote this for or where I submitted it to, but I found it on my hard drive and decided to post it here before deleting it. Enjoy!)

In one of the earliest copyright lawsuits involving video games, Atari Corporation sued Magnavox over the release of their 1981 game K.C. Munchkin, claiming it was a direct rip-off of Pac-Man. Although Atari had previously purchased exclusive rights to publish the first home version of Pac-Man, they had not yet released their (infamously bad) conversion for the Atari 2600 when Magnavox beat them to the punch. Magnavox won the original lawsuit, but Atari had the ruling overturned on appeal, forcing Magnavox to pull Munchkin from store shelves. While Atari may have managed to temporarily stop its competitors from releasing Pac-Clones on home gaming consoles, they had no such luck in the realm of personal computers. As Pac-Mania swept the country so did generic Pac-Clones, invading every retro-computing nook and cranny.

One of the earliest Pac-Clones was Scarfman for the TRS-80 Models I and III, written by Philip Oliver and published by Cornsoft Group in 1981. Scarfman set many precedents that Pac-Clones would follow for years to come. The basics of the game are the same as Pac-Man: avoid ghosts while eating dots. Eating a larger power pellet makes the ghosts themselves edible for a short period of time as well. What’s different are the details; for example, there are five ghosts and five power pellets instead of four. Another obvious difference is that the maze does not resemble the original arcade version. This is partly due to the fact that the arcade version of Pac-Man is displayed on a vertical monitor, whereas computer monitors are conventionally horizontal. Rather than trying to force a round peg into a square hole, most Pac-Clone authors opted to simply redesign their mazes to fit the shape of a normal computer monitor. This worked in the favor of computer programmers, who hoped that unique maze designs would keep them from being sued.

That same year (1981) saw the release of Taxman, written by Brian Fitzgerald and published by H.A.L. Labs for the Apple II. H.A.L. Labs had hoped to escape Atari’s wrath by changing a few minor details in Taxman. The ghosts were reborn as insects and squids and given new names, and the bonus fruits were changed into random objects (a cactus?), but the changes were not enough to ward off the long arm of Atari’s lawyers. With a lawsuit looming, H.A.L. Labs withdrew Taxman from the market and either sold or surrendered (I’ve read both versions) the Taxman source code to Atari. After making a few minor graphical updates, Atarisoft re-released Taxman as Pac-Man for the Apple II. H.A.L. Labs went back to the drawing board and released Super Taxman 2, which was similar to Taxman/Pac-Man but used different mazes. Years later, H.A.L. Labs rechristened themselves HAL Laboratory and went on to develop the Kirby and Super Smash Bros. franchises. Taxman programmer Brian Fitzgerald also remained in the game business. You can find his name in the credits of games such as Dark Seed, StarCraft, Diablo I and II, Warcraft II and III, and World of Warcraft.

Unfortunately for Atari, so many Pac-Clones began popping up that their lawyers did not have the time to pursue them all. By 1982 dozens if not hundreds of Pac-Clones had been released, many by small companies that financially weren’t worth legally pursuing. One such clone was Snack Attack, written by Dan Illowsky and published by Datamost. One look at Snack Attack will tell you it is nothing like Pac-Man at all. Instead of a hungry yellow Pac-Man, players controlled a hungry white whale. See? Not the same! Instead of the ghosts being red, blue, pink and yellow, in Snack Attack they are red, blue, green and purple. That’s completely different! And finally, while the dots in Pac-Man are yellow, the dots in Snack Attack are purple and green. Obviously Snack Attack is nothing like Pac-Man at all.

One of the biggest problems Atari had in fighting these waves of generic clones was that many of them were considered to be better than the official Atarisoft versions! (Then again, almost anything is considered to be better than Atari’s version of Pac-Man for the 2600.) Acornsoft’s 1982 release Snapper for the BBC Micro looked nearly identical to the arcade version of Pac-Man, down to the mazes and characters. Again, under the threat of legal action, Acornsoft withdrew and re-released the game with altered graphics (the main character magically sprouted legs and found a green cowboy hat). H.A.L. Labs, whom Apple had sued for their release of Taxman, obtained the license to release home Pac-Man ports in Japan. H.A.L.’s version of Pac-Man for the VIC-20 is superior to Atarisoft’s official version (and beat Atarisoft’s version to market by two full years). To avoid marketing confusion between the two versions, Commodore changed the name to Jelly Monster for its US release.

Some Pac-Clones attempted to avoid the courtroom by creating similar (but not too similar!) maze games. Munch Man for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A saw a small Pac-shaped character “laying down links” versus eating dots. Another popular maze game, Lock ‘n’ Chase, had players controlling a thief and collecting coins and money bags instead of dots and power pellets. Several other games such as Lady Bug, Amidar, Mouse Trap and Make Trax used similar “maze” concepts, but made enough changes to keep their respective publishers out of hot water.

Other developers simply ignored Atari’s copyright, hoping to fly below the company’s legal radar. Here are just a few known Pac-Clones from the First Church of Pac-Man’s list of False Idols: Ack!-Man, Bac-Man, Dac-Man, Hac-Man, SnackMan, Mac-Man, Plaque Man, Wack-Man, Crap-Man, Chomp, Chomper, Chomper-Man, Gobble-Man, Mouth-Man, Munch Man, and TrashMan, among others. And don’t forget Pac-Bar, PacBoy, Pac-Classic, Pac-Em, Pac-Guy, Packman, PacMac, Pac-Maniac, Pac-Men, Pac-Mon, Pac-PC, PacWar, Pakacuda, Pax, PC-Man, Pucman, and simply Pacman, which, as the site’s webmaster noted, is “just a hyphen away from copyright infringement.”

And if the market wasn’t already flooded with Pac-Clones, it surely was after the release of Data Trek’s Maze Craze Construction Set. Written by Eric Hammond, Maze Craze Construction Set for the Apple II allowed creative Pac-fans to design their own maze games. The program’s editing tools allowed everything from maze layouts to the design and attributes of each individual character to be modified. As a kid I made my own Pac-Clone using the program. I made my game as close to Pac-Man as I could, with the only difference being that in my version, Pac-Man was constantly moving backwards. Its name was naM-caP.

One of the most interesting innovations in the world of Pac-Clones was the transition from two dimensions to three. In 1982, Scott Elder released 3-D Man (also released as 3D Pac Man), a first-person Pac-Clone for the Commodore 64 that literally put players down in Pac-Man’s trenches! Due to the visual limitations of a first person maze game, Elder included a radar on the side of the screen to show players the layout of the maze. The same concept was used the following year in 3-Demon for the IBM PC.

As home computer technology advanced throughout the years, so did the quality of Pac-Clones. Specifically with the advent of VGA and SVGA graphics on DOS machines, colorful Pac-Clones continued to appear. One early popular version was CD-Man, which had players eating dots (of course) while running away from animated spiders. By the mid-to-late 1990s, emulators were powerful and fast enough to run the original Pac-Man arcade code; and yet still, programmers continue to crank out Pac-Clones. Due to the proliferation of the World Wide Web, over the past ten years creators of generic Pac-Clones have migrated to the Internet. There are now hundreds of Pac-Clones online today, written in languages such as Java and Flash. Due to the portability of these languages, many of these Pac-Clones can be now downloaded and played on your cell phone or iPod.

If the thought of playing a Pac-Clone on a small cell phone screen doesn’t sound like much fun, consider Tiny PacMan, a flash-based Pac-Clone which is played on a grid of 10 pixels by 10 pixels. On my monitor, the entire maze appears smaller than my thumbnail. There’s only one ghost (a green pixel) and the dots are flashing purple which, thank goodness, makes them easier to see on such a small scale. The “ghost” gets faster with each level cleared which theoretically makes the game harder. The hardest part for me is simply seeing what’s going on.

One of the newest additions to the Pac-Clone family takes us full circle, back to one of the oldest forms of computer gaming that predates Pac-Man itself: text adventures. Pac-Txt (pac-txt.com) begins by displaying a descriptive paragraph to players: “You awaken in a large complex, slightly disoriented. Glowing dots hover mouth level near you in every direction. Off in the distance you hear the faint howling of what you can only imagine must be some sort of ghost or several ghosts.” Like classic text adventures, the game is played solely through issuing text commands, typed into an interpretor; all information about the game is delivered to players via text as well. Typing “LOOK” and hitting [ENTER] reveals, “You are in a long corridor. You may go forward or backward and there are glowing dots in every direction. There is a glowing dot hovering near you.” EAT DOT [ENTER]. “You have eaten the glowing dot.”

Through years legal battles it has been determined that while specific characters can be trademarked, specific styles or genres of games cannot. And thanks to that ruling, we have more than twenty-five years worth of Pac-Clones available for us to “gobble” up.

Console Video Games, Hacking / Security, Main

Sony Making a Grave Mistake (Please Read)

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Sony’s decision to remove OtherOS from the PlayStation 3 could change the future of all electronic devices as we know them. You may not agree with or even completely understand that statement yet, but if you own anything (even a computer or a phone) that connects to the Internet, I urge you to read today’s post.

Today’s story begins back in 2006 with Sony’s release of the PlayStation 3 (PS3). The PS3 was (and still is) the most advanced video game console ever released. In fact, the console was so powerful that not only could it also play both PS2 and PS1 games, but using a feature called OtherOS, you could actually install Linux on the PS3’s hard drive and use the gaming console like a computer. Due to built-in restrictions the end result isn’t a terribly powerful computer, but it does work, and it is useful. I use it.

Most video game consoles contain some type of internal copy protection, to prevent people from downloading/burning/copying games instead of buying them. This was obviously a much smaller problem back in the days of cartridges, as most gamers had no way of creating pirate circuit boards and/or EPROMS. In today’s world where every computer has a DVD burner installed, this is a much bigger problem. So, companies like Nintendo and Microsoft and Sony include copy protection inside their video game consoles that prevent copied games from working. Many console manufacturers lose money on each game console sold, but recoup those losses over time by selling games for a profit.

To circumvent copy protection, pirates develop custom chips (“mod chips”) that allow these consoles to play copied games. Installing a mod chip requires a certain amount of technical ability as well as a certain amount of courage — one wrong move can both void your warranty and destroy your console all at the same time.

In the old days, once a console was modded, it was game over for the manufacturer. For example, consider the original Sony PlayStation. Once a mod chip was released, there was little Sony could do but watch as pirates sold mod chips by the thousands on the Internet and games were freely distributed. Suing the sellers, distributors and even makers of mod chips turned out to be a fruitless game of whack-a-mole. Sony’s only recourse was to redesign the internals of the PlayStation so that old mod chips wouldn’t work on it; pirates quickly countered with new mod chips that worked on both old and new machines. These days, it’s not a matter of if a new gaming console’s security measures will get “cracked”, but when.

The ultimate nightmare, however, is when pirates find flaws that don’t require any sort of hardware modification at all. The most memorable example of this was Sega’s Dreamcast. Utopia (a pirate group) released a boot disc for the Dreamcast that allowed burned games to be loaded and played without physically modifying the machine. Eventually, the boot loader was included on copies of pirated games. Utopia released their boot loader in June of 2000; Sega announced the death of the Dreamcast in January of 2001. Piracy is often (unofficially) cited as one of the major causes of the death of the console.

Enter George Hotz, aka Geohot, who by all accounts is a teenage genius. Geohot made his name in iPhone circles by creating and publicly releasing software to jailbreak iPhones. “Jailbreaking” allows iPhones to run unsigned code and change settings (including carriers) that customers are not supposed to be able to change. The first time I jailbroke an iPod Touch, it took me about two hours of dumping, patching, and reapplying firmwares. With Geohot’s blackra1n utility, you can do it in about 10 seconds by clicking a single button.

The seventh generation of video game consoles include the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and Sony’s PlayStation 3. Two of those three — the Wii and the 360 — have already been cracked. Early Wii mod chips have since been replaced by a software exploit that anyone with access to Youtube can figure out and perform in about 10 minutes. The 360 is a bit more complicated and requires flashing a BIOS, but it’s still relatively easy and requires no soldering or real technical skill. To date, only the PS3 remains unmodded … which is why Geohot set his sights on it last November.

By January, the whiz kid announced that he had successfully rooted the console, but it wasn’t easy. Circumventing Sony’s security measures required not only opening the console and soldering wires to the machine’s internals, but also required using an exploit found, apparently, in the PS3’s OtherOS feature. According to Geohot’s blog posting, “Sony may have difficulty patching the exploit.”

In fact, Sony has found a very simple way to patch the exploit. Sony’s latest mandatory update removes OtherOS from the PS3. And by mandatory, I mean you will not be able to play online any longer without applying this update. PS3 owners have two options; apply the patch and lose the ability to use OtherOS, or stop playing online. It’s that simple.

I’m not a lawyer and I’ve not read every license agreement, but I’m guessing Sony has and that in some bizarre way, this must be legal. It sure doesn’t seem like it should be to me. I bought a PS3, and when I bought it, it came with the ability to run additional operating systems. And now, that option is being removed from a device that I bought, paid for, and is sitting in my living room. It just doesn’t seem right.

Geohot, for his part, has promised PS3 owners a custom firmware that will allow both the use of OtherOS and the ability to play online. More power to the guy should he release it, but installing a custom firmware would most definitely void my warranty, something I don’t want to do (and shouldn’t have to do) just to keep the functionality my PS3 had when I bought it new.

For the record, other companies have waged wars against pirates as well. Microsoft, for example, routinely bans gamers running modified BIOS versions or pirated games. I have no problem with this. What I have a problem with is the removal of features that I paid for after I paid for them.

To some, this may seem like an essay about video games, but it’s not. It’s a question: what does it mean to own something in this day and age? Could AT&T or Apple prevent my iPhone from dialing 1-800 numbers if people start prank calling 1-800 numbers? Could Chevrolet remotely lower the top speed of my truck if they decide I drive too fast? Can television manufacturers retroactively lock TV channels that they decide aren’t worth watching? Where is the line between consumers and manufacturers? I don’t know, anymore.

Amazon pissed off thousands of paying customers last year by quietly removing books people had already bought and paid for on their Kindles. It was a public relations nightmare that caused loud discontent from Kindle owners (an obviously web-friendly demographic — oops). It appears that Sony is about to commit two giant faux pas with one stroke. Simultaneously, Sony plans on screwing millions of customers that own launch PS3s by removing the OtherOS option, and drawing the ire of Geohot, a technical genius who really doesn’t need that kind of prodding in order to chew up Sony’s security and spit it back up at them. Prior to this last announcement I was content to sit by the sidelines and see how this all played out, but after Sony’s latest blunder, I’m actually rooting for Geohot.

C’mon kid, let’s see what you got.

Console Video Games, Main

Nintendo DS Valentine’s Day Box

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For the second year in a row, Mason decided to go with a Nintendo-themed Valentine’s Day box for school. Last year, Mason and I made this Nintendo Wii box:

That’s his box on the right, and a real Wii on the left for comparison. Covering a box with white paper turned out to be a pretty good idea, as it lets you fill in all the details with a black marker. All we really had to add was a piece of licorice for a Wiimote strap which, if I remember correctly, had either been pulled off or eaten (probably both) before Mason got to school.

This year Mason wanted to make a Nintendo DS. His first effort (which involved a shoe box and half a roll of masking tape) didn’t look very DS-like, so yesterday Susan wrangled up a couple of boxes for us, and last night Mason and I got to work on his super-sized DS.

We started with two boxes without lids, like a box that cans of soda would come in. We cut slits in the side so the box would fold over on itself, backwards (like Pac-Man). We then cut up the second box and used those parts (and a lot of masking tape) to complete the boxes. The point of all this was, I wanted the “hinge” to be made out of cardboard, not masking tape. When we were finished we had two completely enclosed boxes, connected by a cardboard hinge.

Here’s the box with the first coat of blue spray paint applied. We ended up doing three coats, one gray and two blue. On the left are a couple of print outs from some Pokemon game Mason likes. Our laser printer only prints black and white, so Mason added some color to them with markers. Durign this time he also drew all the necessary DS buttons and cut them out.

Here is the finished box, next to Morgan’s (infamously dead) Nintendo DS for a size comparison. Our DS folds up just like a real one, thanks to the cardboard hinge. As you can see, Mason added all the buttons he wanted. We also added speaker holes to the top half using an awl. The only thing we did after this picture was taken was cut a slot in the front (where the GBA slot is on a real DS) where Valentines go. I’m not sure everything is glued down great, but it only has to last a couple of days.

The only cost involved was the spray paint (of which we now have lots left over), and the longest part of the project was waiting for the paint to dry.