Shrimp and Grits

I’ve had an XBOX 360 “Elite” (the one with the 120 GB hard drive) for a while now. Since the hard drive in my 360 is largely empty, I thought it might be nice to use the 360 as a media center. More specifically, I thought the 360 might be useful as a music center, since it’s got the ability to play mp3 files.

I’ve ripped all of the family’s CDs. It’s nice to be able to listen to anything in the music collection without going to the CD racks and searching. But listening to these music files on the stereo in the living room is a bit awkward. The DVD player will play mp3 files from CD, but that still means I have to shuffle discs around. Plus, the DVD player’s interface for doing this is clunky at best.

So why not use the 360? It’s got plenty of disk space for holding our music collection, and it’s already hooked into the stereo. Unfortunately, the 360 is a typical Microsoft product. By that, I mean it’s been hobbled - either accidentally or by design. How?

• You can - albeit very slowly - rip audio CDs to the 360’s hard drive.
• You can play mp3 files from a data CD.
• You can plug an external hard drive into one of the 360’s USB ports and play the mp3 files on the drive.
• You cannot transfer mp3 files from the external hard drive or a data CD to the 360’s internal hard drive***. If you put in an audio CD, there’s an option to copy the music to the hard drive. If you hook up an external drive or put in a CD with mp3 files on it, that option disappears. (What the f#%?)

I guess it’s all for the best. It’s rather difficult to hear quiet music over the roar of the 360’s jet-engine-like fans.

---

***If you can actually copy mp3 files to the 360’s internal hard drive and play them from there, clue me in on the method. In the meantime, there’s always my TVisto…

You might remember, if you’re somewhat close to my age, the dawn of video games. Early games were not beautiful. In fact, they were quite ugly!

Death Race (1976) - Screen shot from Wikipedia

If you’re lucky, you might be able to guess what the graphics in that screen shot are supposed to represent. It might be surprising, but this almost indistinguishable pattern of lights was one of the first shots in a thirty year battle: the battle over violence in video games.

The screen shot is from the game Death Race. The object of the game was to run people down to score points. This didn’t go over too well with many folks, and led to quite a bit of outrage. The outrage, of course, made this otherwise unremarkable game famous.

Skirmishes over video game violence continued throughout the 1980s. Later, in 1992, Midway released Mortal Kombat, which was condemned in the Senate by none other than Senator Joe Lieberman (who seems to prefer violence directed at real people to on-screen violence). More recently, there’s been controversy over the Grand Theft Auto series of games.

After video game ratings became popular (after Mortal Kombat), it seemed that the outrage against violent games got its teeth pulled. So, even though some people still get upset over the latest violent (and mature-rated) game, nobody’s very serious about it.

If you don’t believe me, look at what’s happening with the most popular violent game currently available: Halo 3. Churches are using it to lure teenagers to church youth groups!

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

Even the churches are embracing violent games. The battle over violent games is over, and gamers won.

---

Postscript: I wonder how effective the Halo series can be as a recruiting tool for churches. The central idea of Halo is that the humans (who aren’t portrayed as religious) are attacked by the Covenant. The Covenant is a group of fanatical and dangerously deluded religious zealots. One of your objects as the player is to prevent these deluded religious fanatics from destroying all sentient life in the galaxy. It’s not a game that presents a favorable picture of believers.

A little while ago, I pointed out that

[O]ne of [Cate's] favorite games so far is Frogger - though her usual strategy is to jump the frogs directly into cars. Given her love of running stuff into and underneath cars, maybe Grand Theft Auto 3 will be her next favorite?

Well, I was almost right.

(more…)

As a kid, I missed part of the evolution of video games. When my Atari 2600 was knocked out by a power surge, I moved on to the Commodore 64 for my gaming fix. And from there, I moved to the Commodore Amiga (a computer that it took Microsoft and Apple a decade to equal). I didn’t get another console until well into the lifespan of the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo.

So I missed out, by and large, on console games for the original Nintendo NES and Sega’s Master System. I’ve since purchased a NES, but I never did buy a Master System. That’s changed a little bit with my latest find in the Target clearance bin.

(more…)

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. — Proverbs 22:6

Cate enjoys a quick game of Castlevania

So we’re training!

Cate is fascinated by the buttons on this machine and the colorful graphics of the older games it plays. In particular, one of her favorite games so far is Frogger - though her usual strategy is to jump the frogs directly into cars. Given her love of running stuff into and underneath cars, maybe Grand Theft Auto 3 will be her next favorite?

[Break Time! is a series of posts about video games that Rick has spent entirely too much time with over the years.]

Due to my busy summer at work, I haven’t been very good about keeping this blog updated over the past couple of weeks. But … it’s time to squeeze in another “break”!

Another one of the Imagic titles in my closet of games is Cosmic Ark.

At first glance, Cosmic Ark appears to be an Atari 2600 knock-off of Midway’s Space Zap^***. Your “Ark” is stuck in the center of the screen, and you fire at asteroids by moving the joystick in whatever direction you want to fire.

First, the asteroids come right at you. Later, they weave and dodge your shots^****. As is usual for this sort of game, the asteroids come at you faster the farther you progress.

Sounds a little … dull, though. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if - instead of sitting in one place waiting for asteroids to destroy it - your Ark actually went somewhere and did something useful?

It turns out that the your Ark’s real mission is to do more than serve as a large target for asteroids. It’s supposed to collect animal specimens from different planets. After each wave of asteroids passes, your Ark visits a planet surface to collect these specimens. You fly out of the Ark in a landing craft and use its tractor beam to pick up your targets.

Your targets, though, are understandably wary of being abducted by alien spacecraft. They’ll dodge your tractor beam. Once you’ve locked on to them, though, you can bring them up into your landing craft without further trouble.

After you pick up all your targets, you fly your landing craft back up into the Ark and depart. Most of the time, there will be an asteroid you must blast (with the Ark) first.

On later planets, your targets become a little more sophisticated. They put up planetary defense lasers that move up and down and blast across the screen. If your landing craft gets zapped, your captured creatures go back down to the planet surface and you have to hunt them down again.

The lasers, combined with the fact that the creatures you want to grab move faster with each wave, make your job much more difficult. Even so, you can’t loiter around the planet too long. If you do, an asteroid will show up and destroy your Ark.

You can fly back into the Ark and blast the asteroid - even if you haven’t caught all your targets. But, there’s a price. You’ll have to fight off another wave of asteroids and then come back to the same planet again to finish collecting your creatures.

Cosmic Ark is another Atari 2600 game that’s still worth popping into your system today. You can pick up the actual cartridge cheaply on Ebay - it’s not a “rare” title. It’s fast-paced, simple, and fun. Plus, it’s a good example of the kind of variety a developer could cram into such a small package.

---

^***…but I didn’t know that back in 1982. Space Zap wasn’t in our local arcades.

^****Wait a minute! Asteroids weaving and dodging?

[Break Time! is a series of posts about video games that Rick has spent entirely too much time with over the years.]

If you’ve glanced at this series before, you’ll know that I’m a game collector, and have a decent library of Atari 2600 titles to choose from. Most of them aren’t worth pulling out in 2007, but there are still a few that still manage to be fun.

Demon Attack, by Imagic, is one of the fun ones.

Demon Attack’s attract mode^***

The premise of Demon Attack is pretty simple. You control a ship at the bottom of the screen, and your mission is to shoot wave after wave of flying “demons”. The demons? Well, their mission is to destroy you by any means possible.

Part of the fun of Demon Attack is that the game is very simple to play - yet there’s a bit of variety. As is the case in almost all of these games, the aliens get faster as the game progresses. Demon Attack also varies the aliens and their tactics a bit.

First, the aliens change their appearance and how they shoot at you - varying between beams and small clusters of bullets (the small clusters seem a little easier to dodge).

Another variety of aliens

The first few waves of aliens simply die when you blast them. Later on, each alien will split into two smaller ones.

Still more aliens. These aliens split into pairs of smaller ones when you shoot them!

These smaller aliens are not just hard to hit. They have an entirely new tactic. If you shoot one member of the pair, the other member dives at your ship. In later waves, dodging these little guys becomes extremely difficult.

If you shoot one of the pair, the other one tries to dive into your ship!

Like Dark Cavern, Demon Attack is surprisingly intense - and a nice test of your reflexes. It is simple, fast, and fun - well worth looking at if you have an old Atari 2600 or an emulator around.

---

^***An arcade-like attract mode is somewhat uncommon for Atari 2600 games. Often, game coders didn’t bother with them on the machine, or would show a nearly static screen with cycling colors!

[Break Time! is a series of posts about video games that Rick has spent entirely too much time with over the years.]

I’m a game collector. It’s not rare for me to have multiple copies of the same game in my collection, since I often buy games in large lots along with other games. It is rare for me to buy two copies of a new game, though. Star Ocean 2: The Second Story is the only game I have ever bought twice - while it was still a new game.

Why did I buy the game twice? The short answer is that my copy got damaged to the point that it wouldn’t play anymore. Here’s the long answer.

Star Ocean: The Second Story (which I’ll call SO2 from now on) is a Japanese-style role playing game for the original Playstation.

Title screen

SO2 boasts some unique gameplay elements (for its time). First, there’s the combat system.

In the twentieth century, most Japanese-style role playing games had what I’ll call a “whack-a-mole” combat system.^*** Your party would stand on one side of a battlefield, while your enemy would line up on the other. You and the enemy would take turns attacking each other. Sometimes, the only actions you could take would be to choose what enemy to attack, or use an item or magic spell. Some of these combat systems made your position on the field important, and some didn’t. But these systems, by and large, had one thing in common - extremely tedious combat. There’s only so many times you can mindlessly select “attack” from a menu before you want to throw the controller down onto the floor and stomp on it. Add to this the fact that battles could occur randomly and frequently, and these games could get rather frustrating.

SO2, though, features a real-time combat system. You control one of your four combatants, while the computer controls the other three. You’re free to run around the battlefield and attack enemies. You can evade many attacks by … moving out of the way. You can surround an enemy and beat him to a pulp. (But they can do the same to you, so you have to be careful!)

Combat

Combat is fast and furious. Characters have many special moves, which you use much like the moves in a fighting game. Battles are usually fairly short, and there’s always something going on.

Combat

If your characters are strong enough, you can sometimes sit back and watch the computer kick enemy butt. (This is good for random battles with weak enemies.)

In short, combat in SO2 is actually entertaining, which means that the battles necessary to progress through the game’s storyline don’t seem like a chore.

Speaking of the story, that’s another area where SO2 tries some new things. For one, there are two main characters. You choose your main character at the beginning of the game, and the story is told from that character’s perspective. The events in the story are often similar for both characters, since the two meet each other within the first hour of play. Your choice of main character, though, dictates how you’ll see the story unfold. Some events will only be seen by one of the characters, and some secondary characters will join you only if you’re playing the right main character.

You will see many of the usual Japanese-style RPG cliches. There’s a young girl with a mysterious past and strange powers, a world to save, etc. - but SO2 keeps it entertaining.

You can also influence the outcome of the story. SO2 has about eighty or so different endings (you get more than one “ending” per game - each of your party members gets one) - which depend on your actions in the game. Most Japanese-style RPGs have a single ending. You either get “the ending” at the end of the game, or you die in battle somewhere and get a “game over” screen. But SO2 allows you to interact with your party members. What you say to them (or do to them) influences how much they like you, and will change their fate at the end of the game. You can even pair characters up at the end of the game if you like. How? Mainly through something called “Private actions”:

Private actions

When you enter a town, you usually have the option for your party members to enter either as a group or individually. Entering the town individually starts a “private action”, and you can go find your characters in the town and talk to them.

Private actions

Your choices in these conversations - or your actions in the little quests they may want you to go on - cause characters to like you more or less. There are even characters that may join your party (or not) as a result of these private actions. This adds a lot of variety to the game.

There are mini games (a bunny race, a combat arena, an “Iron Chef” cooking competition) and side quests to keep you entertained as well. You can build custom weapons and armor using items you find or buy. You can customize your characters by buying all sorts of “skills”. You can write novels to earn money or influence how much characters like each other. You can even make your character into a pickpocket who can steal items from the people you meet in your travels. Just don’t steal in front of (or from) your other characters, or they’ll start to dislike you! There’s also a huge bonus dungeon for those who want even more challenge. You won’t be hurting for something to do in this game!

The game isn’t quite flawless, though. The English translation leaves a little to be desired. There are random battles, so it’s sometimes difficult to explore areas without getting disoriented by combat. Plus, the game crashes occasionally in the last dungeon (so make sure to save your game!)

Even with those flaws, Star Ocean: The Second Story is an excellent game. And it’s one I’ve probably spent far too much time on over the years.

---

^***Sadly, this trend of boring, annoying combat systems has continued into the twenty-first century. I’m looking at you, Xenosaga!

[Break Time! is a series of posts about video games that Rick has spent entirely too much time with over the years.]

One of my hobbies is collecting and restoring old video game systems. Not arcade machines, since I don’t have a house nearly large enough for a bunch of arcade machines, but consoles.

As a kid, I owned an Atari 2600 console - which gave me years of entertainment until it had an unfortunate run-in with a thunderstorm. Many years later, I bought a secondhand Atari 2600 at a flea market, then dug my old cartridges out of the attic. I was bitten by the collecting bug, and now I have a “library” of old game consoles and their games.

There are some who say that Atari 2600 games were the best games ever made. I am not one of those people. As someone who owns nearly three hundred different Atari cartridges, I’ll go on record to state that most of the Atari 2600 cartridge library is complete crap. The only entertainment value many of these games had was the “wow” factor: you could actually control the images on the television screen!

In 2007, most of the Atari 2600 game library is worthless - unless you’re interested in the evolution of video games. But there are some games that stand out; games that were more than just moving blocks around on the television screen. Dark Cavern, by Mattel (a.k.a. “M Network”) is one of those games.

You are a man in an unfortunate situation. You have a gun, and are thrown into a dungeon populated by spiders (which paralyze you), bulletsuckers (which … suck your bullets away), and killer robots. The robots chase you around the dungeon relentlessly, and shoot at you if they “see” you. You can shoot back at all of these enemies. There’s a catch: You can run out of bullets, but the robots have an endless supply.

You can scrounge up more bullets by picking up a flashing “gun” that appears occasionally in the dungeon. This is often harder that it sounds; the gun often pops up in the midst of a gang of robots, and disappears if you don’t claim it quickly enough. Such is life in the Dark Cavern.

On the easiest difficulty level, you initially battle only two robots. Once you blow away enough robots, the game sends out three robots at a time. Then four. The robots get faster as you kill more of them. They also get “smarter”. Earlier robots can only shoot in the direction they’re facing. Later robots rotate their heads to face in all directions - making it impossible to score an easy kill by sneaking up behind a robot.

(These screen shots were taken on the highest difficulty setting - four robots with rotating heads.)

As you run, hide, and shoot, you hear the roar of the robots prowling the dungeon - a sound that changes depending on how many robots are in the maze. If you’ve managed to blast all the robots, it’s eerily quiet - until the next batch of smarter, faster robots thunders in to kill you.

All in all, Dark Cavern is a surprisingly intense game. It’s one of the rare group of Atari titles that will actually entertain you in 2007. Or at least, it will entertain you until the killer robots blow you away. And they will blow you away. This is an old-school game which cares nothing for your self esteem. You will not win.

… but you might get a high score.

---

Additional note: Dark Cavern is one of the few games of its era to have “friendly fire”. The robots can and will occasionally shoot each other trying to get you. In Dark Cavern, a bullet is a bullet.

Ask any kid who was old enough to hang out in an arcade in the early eighties what he would really love to have in his house. Chances are, the answer would be … an arcade game. Or, many arcade games.

More that twenty years later, home consoles barely break a sweat delivering the graphics and sound that we could only get at the arcades back then. But there’s still something about an arcade machine. Maybe it’s standing up in front of the machine. Maybe it’s the large control panel right up beside the screen, where the arcade sounds can blare in your face. I don’t know what it is - but there’s something…

Back in 2005, I happened across the Big Electronic Games Ltd. Midway Arcade at the local Target, which promised to deliver a multi-game arcade system to the living room. The Midway machine was a disappointment. The monitor was small and of very low quality. As a result, the games looked awful. The games didn’t sound very good, either. But above all else, there was the asking price: $499. That’s a lot of money to blow on a machine that plays twelve games on a small, blurry screen.

In late 2006, Target carried another Big Electronic Games Ltd. product - the Konami Arcade - this time with a lower price of $399.

$399 is still steep, but this was Target. Target eventually puts things on clearance. Deep clearance. As a result, here’s what my living room now looks like:

Patty says that Cate’s going to “grow up in the funhouse”!

The machine comes partially assembled in a single, smaller box that I was able to fit easily into the back of my Jeep.

The Konami Arcade has three sections. The middle section, with all the electronics, joysticks, and screen is pre-assembled. The top and bottom sections have to be assembled after unpacking. Assembly was fairly easy - everything is pre-drilled so that you only need a pair of screwdrivers to build the machine. One gripe I had about assembly was that one of the pre-drilled holes was drilled at the wrong angle, so one screw (out of the many that hold the machine together) wouldn’t sink properly.

The bottom of the machine is a storage cabinet with two small shelves. (This is done, perhaps, as a selling point to whoever in your house doesn’t play video games?) But enough about storage and shelves. It’’s time to talk about the games.

The Konami Arcade comes with a dozen games, all from the eighties.

1. Hyper Sports - Konami (1984)
2. Time Pilot ‘84 - Konami (1984)
3. Shao-Lin’s Road - Konami (1985)
4. Jungler - Konami / Stern (1981)
5. Super Basketball - Konami (1984)
6. Vs. Castlevania - Konami / Nintendo (1987)
7. Blades of Steel - Konami (1987)
8. Green Beret - Konami (1985) (released as Rush’n Attack here in the US)
9. Contra - Konami (1987)
10. Frogger - Sega / Gremlin / Konami (1981)
11. Gyruss - Konami (1983)
12. Scramble - Konami / Stern (1981)

(dates from the Killer List of Video Games and the attract modes of the games)

Not a bad list, though if I were designing this machine I’d have replaced Blades of Steel and Super Basketball with Gradius and Lifeforce.

You control all of these games with two sets of 8-way joysticks and buttons:

Joysticks

You can see six buttons on the panel for each player (a holdover from the Midway machine?), but only the top three buttons are actually wired. The lower three buttons don’t even “click” when pressed like the upper ones do.

You play the games on a 15″ screen mounted into the cabinet. Unlike the Midway Arcade’s screen, the Konami Arcade features a higher-resolution computer monitor as the display. How do I know? Take a look.

This system uses a computer monitor mounted sideways into the cabinet. You can adjust the monitor’s settings if you turn your head a bit.

As a result, the screen display is nice and sharp - with no flickering or dot crawl. I wish the monitor was a little larger, but I have no complaints about the picture clarity.

Game sounds come out of a front-facing speaker mounted on the front panel. The volume is adjustable (and can be turned off entirely). At lower volumes, some of the games have distorted sound - Contra is particularly bad at the two lowest volume settings. Turning the volume up makes Contra’s sounds much less distorted, but is not an option when the baby is asleep.

To start a game, select from the menu, and hit either the 1P or 2P start button to get to the game.

Select a game from the menu

When you hit either start button, the game begins immediately (after a 1-2 second pause while the game loads), rather than simply going to the game’s attract mode or coin inserted screen.

I’d prefer a way to select a game that would take you to the game’s attract mode, but I suppose that I can get used to the way the Konami Arcade starts games.

When a game is over, you get to enter your initials for a high score (if that particular game supports initials), and the game goes briefly into attract mode. After a few seconds, the machine goes back to the game select menu. I think the machine would “feel” more like the arcade if the games would stay in attract mode longer.

High scores are saved, even after you turn the machine off. You can access the high scores from the main game menu by pushing the joystick to the left or right … because bragging rights are important.

How are the games? The ones I most remember (Time Pilot ‘84, Gyruss, Scramble, and Green Beret) seem pretty faithful to their arcade counterparts. The controls respond well; in other words, my dying was my own fault and not a lack of response from the buttons or stick. The graphics are sharp and look good. The sound (aside from the distortion problem in Contra) was passable, but could have been better.

You can pause the games during the action by holding down the two game start buttons together. This brings up a menu which allows you to adjust the volume, blocking the game graphics. Since I was using a digital camera, I couldn’t get pictures of any fast-moving game graphics. I was able to manage a couple of shots of the attract modes of two of the games. (I blocked out the family initials - it’s not a graphics glitch in the games.)

Time Pilot ‘84

Gyruss

To sum up, the Konami Arcade is a vast improvement over Big Electronic Games Ltd’s Midway Arcade machine from 2005. It still costs too much at $399 for a purchase, but it’s worth a look if your local Target is clearing them out for under $200.

On the minus side, the sound from the Konami Arcade is disappointing. It’s loud enough, but isn’t as clear as it should be - especially at lower volumes. The games don’t display their attract modes long enough for you to figure out the controls (if there’s a game you don’t remember well) before going back to the main menu. And, of course, there’s the small monitor.

On the plus side,. the small monitor does give a decent picture, the controls are responsive, and the machine saves your high scores for future bragging. The assortment of games gives you a little something for everyone (side-scrolling shooter fans excepted - Scramble is no Gradius). You can also move the machine easily - should you decide you want the machine in some other room, you can disassemble/reassemble it into its three sections and move it very easily. And, it’s just cool to have a stand-up machine in the house.

Since the system incorporates what appears to be a standard computer monitor, I wonder how difficult of a project it would be to convert the Konami Arvade into a MAME cabinet - replacing the guts of the machine with a small PC. But that’s a project for another day - I just got this thing and I don’t want to tear it apart just yet!