Player 1 Start

Caring For Your Carts

Anyone who collects retrogames has undoubtedly popped a newly purchased old game into their favorite console only to be greeted by a blank screen or the dreaded blinking system light.  Most people will reinsert the cartridge once or twice, and when that fails, they'll resort to the trick they learned when they were kids: just blow into it.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING, YOU MONSTER?!  STOP DOING THAT!

"But it worked when I was a kid," you'll say.  Yes, but you were stupid when you were a kid.  We all were.  Now you're an adult, hopefully wiser, and not a goddamn savage. 

I'm not saying blowing into an old NES cart was a placebo.  It was often the trick to getting games to work.  The problem is why that trick worked.

You see, blowing into a cartridge basically coats the connectors with a thin layer of moisture as your breath reaches room temperature.  Since water, and indeed moisture, are conductive, it's conceivable that it helped transfer electricity from the cartridge slot in your console to the gold pins inside the cartridge.  Over time, however, that moisture will eventually corrode those same pins, making your beloved games look something like this:

When it comes to old games, years or dirt, dust, and moisture can render a cartridge unplayable, but that doesn't mean you have to throw out the cart and buy another.  There's an extremely simple and inexpensive fix that only takes a minute or two.

The first thing you'll need is a way to open the cartridge.  To prevent bootlegging, Nintendo and Sega both used special security screws in their cartridges.  Gamebit screwdrivers are your answer, and they're readily available on eBay, various game stores online, and your local game shop may even sell them too (mine does) for around $10 (or less).  Unfortunately, Nintendo and Sega did not use the same security screws, so you will need one of each gamebit if you want to properly clean all your carts.

It's also worth noting that unlicensed NES games used yet another different screw, this time with a star-shaped indentation.  Most modern PC repair kits should have a bit that will work to open these up, and you may even have one in your standard toolkit for your home.  The catch is that, at least for Tengen games, you'll have to pierce the label on the back of the cartridge to access a screw.  If you're really anal about the condition your carts are in, this may pose a problem.  Personally, I couldn't care less about the label on the back of a cart telling me not to open it.  Screw you, label!  It's my cart now and I'll open it if I want to! 

Anyhoo, once you separate the plastic casing, you'll probably be surprised to see the PCB (printed circuit board) is smaller than you expected.  For NES games, it's probably one-quarter the size of the cartridge housing itself, which makes me wonder why Nintendo of America wasted so much plastic when the original Japanese Famicom carts were closer to the size of a cassette tape.  Regardless, remove the PCB and get yourself one of these:

Yes, that is an eraser.  Sorry, you can't enlarge the picture, but why would you want to?  It's a friggin' eraser.  You can find them in art shops, your local CVS or Rite Aid, Target, Wal-Mart, probably that one aisle in your grocery store, and numerous other places.

Take your eraser and scrub it over the gold contacts on the board.  There's no need to be too gentle.  It may look like a delicate piece of electronics, but PCBs are very resilient.  Just try to hold it around the edges to avoid bending any diodes.  With some good scrubbing, you should see the dirt and years of accumulated grime wipe away, and the eraser shavings are easily cleaned up. 

Next, you'll need a bottle of isopropyl alcohol.  Most drug and department stores sell this, and you want the highest concentration possible.  Anything over 90% should do fine, but if you want the best stuff, you can find 99% on Amazon.  The higher the concentration, the less water is in the mixture and the quicker it will evaporate, leaving no residue unlike your filthy breath and spittle from your mouth.

Dip a Q-tip into the bottle and scrub both sides of the contacts with it to clear off any excess shavings and any remaining dirt.  Use the other side to help wipe away excess alcohol, though it will likely dry almost instantaneously after application. 

By the time you're done, which probably took all of one minute or two at the most, your cart should now look like this:

Put the PCB back in the housing, screw it shut, and pop it into your system.  I've yet to purchase a single cart that hasn't been made like new again through these simple techniques.  I've seen some other people recommend Brasso, which is a polish, but it's also quite abrasive and can strip the pins of their gold coating so I wouldn't recommend it personally. 

You can also apply these techniques to most carts inside their housing if you don't have a gamebit, but why wouldn't you just buy one?  They're like $10 each.  Don't be a cheapskate.  If you're spending money on old video games and consoles, you can afford to make a small investment to keep them working.  The other benefit is you can verify the game you just bought is genuine by opening it up.  Pirated games are easy to spot with a cursory glance at the board and almost no prior knowledge.  They're really obvious, and you'll want to make sure that copy of Little Samson you found on Craigslist for $200 is real (ProTip: if you only paid $200, it probably isn't). 

The moral of the story is DO NOT blow into your cartridges.  Treat them with the tender love and care they deserve so future generations can hopefully enjoy them too.

A Work of Box Art #1: Deadly Towers

For lack of a better term, eye-catching packaging is a lost art these days.  So many games are content to put a boring render of a game's protagonist on the cover.  I suppose it still requires an artist to create the 3D model, but so many games fail to evoke a sense of excitement, terror, or wonder.  With the ubiquity of the internet, consumers can see screenshots and videos of games in action on their smartphones.

If you were a gamer in the 1980s, you probably remember walking into your local toy store or video rental place and scanning the covers of all the games available.  Oftentimes, we'd make our decisions about a particular game based on its box art - for better or for worse.  That's how I ended up renting Deadly Towers, whose box looked like this:
Not bad, right?  There's a ripped warrior standing in front of the titular towers, and presumably a dragon lurking behind him judging by the tail and what appears to be a scaly leg.  "Yeah, this game looks cool," 10-year-old me probably said.  This is what Deadly Towers actually looks like:

Hot garbage, right? 

In fairness, no game from that era could match the box art, unless we're talking about the famous NES black boxes that featured little more than a screenshot on the front cover.  But come on...!  Where is the musclebound barbarian warrior from the cover?  Why am I wearing teal blue full-plate armor and fighting purple balls and worms?  Talk about misleading!

Deadly Towers is widely considered one of the worst games of all time.  I remember it being so terrible that I returned it to the video store well before it was due - an anecdote I've told several times, but one which underscores just how impenetrably obtuse and awful it is.  The game itself doesn't even come close the fulfilling the promise of adventure its cover art hints at.  Instead of fighting dragons, you wander around a maze of nearly identical rooms, fighting mostly geometrically-shaped enemies, and dying frequently.  The guy on the cover doesn't look like he'd go down without a fight, but in the game you can be killed by a purple bouncy ball. 

Easily the best thing about the game is its packaging.  It has a nice hand-painted look, akin to many of the fantasy novels I would grow to love in my teens, and a nice use of color.  Even the title font looks cool.  The only thing that spoils it is the giant bluish-purple block taking up 40% of the cover.  It would have been much cooler to see the dragon.

The Japanese Famicom version is considerably worse:
Known as Masho (literally, "Evil Bell"), the hero on the Japanese cover is definitely more representative of the in-game sprite, right down to his stupid "derp" face.  Look at his stupid face.  The color scheme of his armor is still way off, and I don't know why they drew grassy hills or mountains, considering you never see any of those things in the game.  Perhaps it was an attempt to trick players into thinking it would be a game similar to The Legend of Zelda, with a vast word to explore.  I'd also like to draw your attention to our hero's left hand holding his scabbard.  As you can see, he has some kind of horrible deformity that gives him stubby, claw-like fingers, except for his grotesquely large thumb.  I suppose it could be handy in a fight, but I'm sure he was teased a lot.

Deadly Towers is a prime example of why you should never judge a book, or a game, by its cover.  Even the worst covers can hide a great game, but even the best artwork ever commissioned can't hide a turd like this.

A History of Video Games: Arcades

I’m not exactly sure when I first set foot into Major Magic’s.  It was probably during one of my older brother’s birthdays that I got to tag along, but I do remember the intoxication I felt every time I set foot in that place.  The red carpet, the cacophony of sounds, the smell of pizza wafting through the air.  Arcades were mesmerizing and it wasn’t long before I requested to return on each of my own birthdays.

I may not remember when it was, but I remember the layout with near photographic perfection.  As you entered the prize shop was on your left.  This is where you could redeem tickets earned on the wall of skee ball lanes against the back wall.  The prizes were always cheap and worth far less than the amount of money you likely spent to earn the tickets, a tradition we still see today at places like Dave & Buster’s.  To your right was a small fenced-in area where infants could play.  There were small slides and balls to knock around.  It was all very cute and colorful since it was designed to look like an outdoor playground.  There were benches just outside of the fence where my dear mother would sit patiently and read while her young son spent $20 (or more) on various arcade machines.  I was a short kid for a while, so I often required the aid of a plastic footstool to stand on so I could see the monitor properly.

From the entrance, the main floor was populated by clusters or arcade machines with no particular rhyme or reason.  They weren’t grouped by manufacturer or type of game – they were mixed in.  Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja was coupled with Operation Wolf.  Pac-Mania and Galaga sat back to back nearby.  Street Fighter II: The World Warrior was clustered with Hat Trick and Time Pilot.  Rampage was coupled with Ms. Pac-Man and Centipede. 

From the entrance, the far left corner of the room was my favorite.  While the right side housed larger environmental cabinets like Pole Position and After Burner, as well as nearby Xybots and APB machines (back-to-back), the left side was home to a row of classics.  Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Dig Dug lined one side of the U-shaped nook.  The original Pac-Man and Super Pac-Man were shoved against the back wall, near an emergency exit.  The final side contained both Tron and Satan’s Hollow, two games I remember vividly for their distinctly bright colored joysticks – blue for Tron, red for Satan’s Hollow.  The cabinet artwork for the latter was mesmerizing and terrifying at the same time, with a giant depiction of the winged devil himself.  Sandwiched in the open space on the floor were Tapper and Frogger, both in wood-grain cabinets.

Around the corner from Satan’s Hollow, on a low wall with dark windows that enclosed the room where creepy animatronic robots sang and “danced” while kids ate pizza, was a bubble hockey table and the unique Hang-On machine shaped like a motorcycle.

There were plenty more, of course, and new games would often replace older ones.  Double Dragon eventually disappeared in favor of the more modern Final Fight.  Oddly enough, Street Fighter II: The World Warrior remained even after the addition of Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, which was placed back-to-back with Final Fight.  Opposite the latter is where the larger arcade machines usually sat.  Double-sized games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Captain America and the Avengers usually went here, and in a colossally bad decision, they eventually squeezed in a Simpsons arcade cabinet in the same area.  That area was so thick with onlookers there was no room to move as kids waited, patiently and impatiently, for their turn on either of the popular beat ‘em ups.  At some point, I remember the holographic Time Traveler arcade machine being added to my favorite corner.

Contrary to belief, arcades were a popular hang-out for both nerds and so-called cool kids.  They were places to kill time, and cooler kids would often beg (or bully) for quarters or, in this case, gold tokens you exchanged real money for.  The vast majority of games were still only 25 cents when I first started going, but later games like TMNT would cost double that.  The biggest exception to this rule was Dragon’s Lair, Don Bluth’s now legendary laserdisc-based arcade game.  As simplistic as it was, the Disney-quality animation was an instant draw even though each play cost one whole dollar in tokens.  After many trips to the machine, I eventually memorized the patterns and finished the game at a cost of $18.

Deciding what to spend your allowance on was often the toughest part of any trip.  The cabinets themselves vied for your attention with often stunning artwork and a multitude of control schemes.  Sit-down cabinets like Pole Position brought you into the experience, but even APB’s more standard upright cabinet drew me in with its steering wheel and pedals.  The bright red joystick of Satan’s Hollow drew me to it, and the game was one of a select few that I always made sure to play at least once on every trip.  Though it was similar to Galaga, the addition of a shield to block enemy fire, the bridge mechanic, and awesome graphics made it my favorite static shoot ‘em up.  Xybots had a very unique, futuristic-looking cabinet and a rotational joystick that you could twist to turn your field of view in the game’s maze-like environments.  Operation Wolf really stood out with its mounted black replica Uzi machinegun attached to the cabinet.  Then of course there were trackball games such as Centipede and Crystal Castles.  Everyone who has ever played one of these knows the pain of getting your finger pinched between the ball and the hole it sits in.

Back in the 80s, arcade cabinets were practically ubiquitous.  Super markets often had a machine or two just beyond the registers, usually next to the gumball machines or that incredibly loud mechanical chicken that would “lay eggs” for a quarter.  It was an ingenious move, really.  Kids would be spared the boredom of being dragged through a grocery store, and parents were spared being asked for every sugary item on the shelves – at least until the child ran out of quarters.  I remember the Ghosts ‘n Goblins machine that sat in the Oak Ridge Market where we used to shop.  Restaurants also typically had a game or two, usually of the cocktail machine variety – a sit down cabinet with a flat top.

Skate rinks and bowling alleys usually had small arcades of their own.  I always found it strange that bowling alleys always seemed to have a bowling video game amongst the cabinets.  I bowled in a kids’ league with several friends in my youth, and between turns I used to run to the Rastan arcade cabinet near the concession stand.  That game was so hard that I would always die before I had to return for my next turn.  They had an OutRun machine as well, if I recall.  No trip to a skating rink ever resulted in me skating.  Seeing as how my brother broke his leg ice skating when he was little, I never had much desire to learn how to skate in any fashion.  Instead, I spent my time in the arcade playing games like Paperboy with its unique bike handle controller or Gauntlet, whether alone or with others.  Even the indoor soccer arena where my dad played in a league had several cabinets, most notably Black Tiger.  It was the only place I ever saw the cabinet in the wild, and I spent years trying to remember the name of the game until I rediscovered it in MAME in high school.

Lastly there were movie theaters, whose lobbies were often populated with several games.  The local dollar show in my town used to be a haven for the latest and greatest arcade games.  They were one of the only places that had the deluxe X-Men cabinet, a monstrous six-player machine with two monitors side-by-side.  Unlike the bigger corporate theater in the area, they had fully uncensored versions of games like Mortal Kombat II, Primal Rage, and Killer Instinct.  Whereas the Star Theater would turn off the gore in the dipswitch settings, Cinemark left it fully intact – drawing crowds just to watch strangers play against each other.

Lightgun games seemed to be prevalent in movie theaters too.  Major Magic’s never got a Lethal Enforcers cabinet, but several local theaters had them.  Years later, House of the Dead cabinets would replace those, and still to this day you’ll often find Cabela’s hunting games in the lobbies.

What struck me even as a young man was the quality disparity between the arcades and the home versions.  As simple as Pac-Man seemed, the Atari 2600 absolutely paled in comparison to the graphics and sound of the arcade cabinet and it was tough to go back to the former once I had played the latter.  Even the best ports couldn’t match the graphical and audio fidelity of their arcade counterparts, which would be a trend for several console generations to come.

It wasn’t just the graphics and sound that suffered, but often elements had to be removed or changed entirely.  Many games were changed completely for their home release.  Nintendo Entertainment System ports of Capcom’s Bionic Commando and Trojan, Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden, and even Tengen’s unlicensed port of Gauntlet shared a name and some basic game mechanics, but were more or less entirely new games loosely based on their arcade progenitors.  Even Rampage, a game I adored from the first moment I saw it at an arcade in Mount Pleasant, MI,  had to drop one of its three monsters on the NES, though Ralph the Wolf was present in the Sega Master System release.  The NES version of Double Dragon eliminated the game’s two-player cooperative mode and changed several game mechanics, making the arcade version’s memorable final one-on-one battle versus the second player impossible as well.

As home consoles became more powerful, the ports got a lot better.  The Super NES made waves with its Street Fighter II port early on.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was markedly improved over what the NES was capable of.  Sega launched their Genesis console with a port of Altered Beast that fairly close to the arcade, but still felt lacking.  Furthermore, home consoles couldn’t compete with one of the arcade’s biggest draws – the competitive nature.

Most console games offer a 2-player mode, whether alternating for high school supremacy or simultaneous cooperative or competitive play, but you were limited to your friends and family.  Nobody was going to invite a stranger into their homes for a game of NBA Jam, but in the arcade you were always at risk to be challenged, and potentially embarrassed.  I’ve never been very into competitive gaming, so when I took a shine to Stret Fighter II: Champion Edition I used to have a friend stand at the second player side and pretend he was playing just to prevent strangers from buying in.  Even still, the improved technical capabilities of the arcade machines kept me coming back even after I’d bought home ports of my favorite games.

Cooperative games were also a big deal.  The crowds that surrounded the average Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles machine were thick as kids waited for their turn.  You claimed your spot in line by placing a quarter or token on the cabinet's bezel, and it didn't matter which turtle was your favorite - when a spot opened, you took it or you lost your place in line. 

Little more than a decade ago I used to go to a local adult fun center after late shifts at work.  They had Go Kart tracks, pool tables, and an awesome arcade where we’d play games like Crazy Taxi and Gauntlet Legends until the wee hours of the morning.  Now that whole complex is a labyrinthine home improvement store.  Arcades are largely a relic of the past.  You’ll still see machines in restaurants or movie theaters, but they’re often things like Golden Tee Gold or Cabela’s Deer Hunter.  What passes for arcades these days are usually filled with redemption games, with a few proper games peppered in.  High concept arcade games such as Star Wars: Battle Pod are more commonplace because they offer a more immersive experience with environmental cabinets, and operators can charge premium prices for them.  I miss the vintage arcades.  Putting a Ms. Pac-Man/Galaga combo machine in a dark corner of Dave & Buster’s certainly does not count.

A History of Video Games: The Atari 2600

Every story has to start somewhere.  The Atari 2600 was my introduction to the world of video games, and the beginning of my journey.

2600 carts of various shapes & sizes.

I was born in 1979, eight years after my brother.  Being the younger sibling meant I got to enjoy all the things my older brother had, which included the black and wood-grain console hooked up to our General Electric television set in the living room.  Three shoeboxes were crammed to the point of bursting with cartridges of various shapes.  Some were wedge-shaped with simple blue text on black labels.  Others had shiny silver reproductions of the game’s box art or a thin plastic handle.  Still others had slightly rounded edges and bold, bright colors.  There were even a few carts that were double the size of the others, with a game on each side.

I don’t know exactly how old I was when I first played the family Atari, but from my family’s accounts it was pretty much as soon as I possessed the motor skills to operate the joystick.  I quickly fell in love, and in the intervening years a fourth shoebox was added as Atari games hit clearance bins.  I played the 2600 well after we had upgraded to the Nintendo Entertainment System, albeit with less and less frequency. 

My next door neighbor Carl, who was a year or two older than me, also had a 2600.  We quickly became good friends and began swapping games.  Eventually he grew out of gaming and moved on, bequeathing his carts to me, including Activision’s Enduro – one of my favorite games on the console.  This endless racer requires you to pass a certain number of cars “per day,” which meant it also had a day and night cycle.  At night, cars would become harder to avoid as only their headlights could be seen in the darkness.  There were even rudimentary weather effects such as fog, which made cars even harder to see and avoid.  It was simple, like most of the 2600’s games, but it was incredibly addictive.

Activision were easily the best developers for the system, outside of Atari themselves.  In fact, the company was started when a group of former Atari employees left the company to form their own.  Nowadays Activision is best known for churning out repetitive cash-in sequels, but back then they created some of the most exciting games you could buy.  MegaMania was a Galaxian-style shoot ‘em up with fast-moving oddball targets like hamburgers and bow ties.  In Keystone Kapers you played a police officer chasing a criminal through a multi-level mall filled with obstacles like shopping carts and bouncing balls.  Seaquest took place underwater as your submarine blasted away all kinds of dangerous marine life, while Plaque Attack took place literally inside of someone’s mouth and it was your job (as a tube of toothpaste) to defend a set of teeth against various foods that would rot them away. 

Many games were variants on a simple formula.  Spider Fighter wasn’t altogether different from most other shoot ‘em ups, but each one was just different enough to make it fun in a unique way.  Nearly all the games that required the use of a paddle were either Breakout clones or object catch games such as Kaboom or Oink, though there was a very serviceable port of Tac-Scan for the system. 

The Atari was also a major leap forward for sports games.  PCs of the era focused mostly on management aspects and statistics, but the Atari was a more arcade-like experience.  The representations of most sports were spotty at best, especially early on, but they were generally more exciting and interactive than staring at a bunch of numbers on a screen.  Some of them bore only a passing resemblance to the actual sport, such as Basketball which is limited to one-on-one on the world’s smallest court.  Activision’s infamous Decathlon was murder on your joysticks because it forced the player to wiggle them back and forth to gain speed in nearly every event. 

My complete-in-box Moon Patrol.

What really helped the 2600 succeed were ports of popular arcade games.  In spite of its notoriously poor quality, the 2600 port of Pac-Man was my introduction to the game and it would be several years before I saw the original game in my local arcade.  Likewise, I played copious amounts of the far more faithful Ms. Pac-Man port, as well as Berzerk, Kangaroo, Jungle Hunt, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and Crystal Castles.  As arcade games became more complex, the 2600 struggled to keep up.  The console’s port of Double Dragon is as unplayable as it is unrecognizable. 

No conversation about the Atari 2600 would be complete without mention Pitfall!.  Activision’s early platforming adventure is a classic in every sense of the word – challenging, addictive, and fun.  The graphics were some of the best the system had to offer, at least until its underrated and innovative sequel, Pitfall II: Lost Caverns.  Lost Caverns was a revolutionary game in many ways, with a large open world that scrolled both horizontally and vertically and puzzling gameplay.  Figuring out how to obtain all the treasures needed to beat the game required careful planning.  It also featured the first soundtrack on a home cartridge, which changed dynamically depending on your performance. 

Just as they proved that home video game consoles with interchangeable cartridges were a viable market, Atari’s lack of quality control was the major contributing factor the industry crash of 1983.  Not only did their hastily-made E.T. movie tie-in game flop, leaving thousands of unsold cartridges on shelves and in warehouses (that were eventually buried and, later, unearthed in a New Mexico desert), the lack of licensing meant that anybody could create games for the console.  This led to a glut of poor quality titles that ultimately confused consumers and drove them away, and even the rare and oft-discussed pornographic games.  Atari tried to rekindle interest with more powerful consoles likes the 5200 and 7800, but most of the games were slightly enhanced ports of 2600 games and did little to convince consumers that video games were more than just a fad. 

My own personal Atari 2600.

For me, the Atari 2600 was revelatory.  It wasn’t just fun – it enflamed my imagination.  I found myself imagining a far-away kingdom in Adventure or creaky floorboards and cobwebs covering the mansion in Haunted House – details the system itself couldn’t provide due to technological limitations.  I thought up backstories for characters like Pitfall Harry, and I even used GI Joe and Star Wars figures as stand-ins for their continuing adventures in the real world.  Video games weren’t just blocky graphics and buzzes and beeps – they were whole new worlds to explore, and the 2600 was my doorway.

Pac-Man's 35th Anniversary Round-Up

Do you see what I did there?  ROUND-up?  Hurr durr!

But seriously, 35 years ago today the world was forever changed when a hungry little yellow ball was introduced to Japanese arcades.  Namco’s Pac-Man left an indelible mark on the world of video gaming, and has transcended the medium to become a famous piece of pop culture.  He’s as instantly recognizable as Mickey Mouse or Spider-Man, even for many people who have never played a video game in their lives.  As one of the first character-driven video games, it was a groundbreaking achievement in the medium with complexities far beyond that of earlier arcade games.  Its mass appeal to both men and women, children and adults, hardcore and casual players exploded into a phenomenon coined Pac-Man Fever.  Over the years, his image has graced t-shirts, lunchboxes, coffee mugs, cereal boxes, underwear, several TV shows, and even cans of pasta.  Google even made a playable version of their logo that proved so popular they have made it accessible ever since.  He (and the rest of his family) have appeared on nearly every device capable of reproducing the gameplay – handheld personal electronics, cellphones, game consoles old and new, and personal computers of all makes and models.

Pac-Man is a cultural icon.  Throughout countless games of varying quality, he has remained a beloved, relevant mascot.  He has appeared in everything from the original maze-like games to kart racers, platformers, and most recently a foray into mascot-based fighting games.  Here now is a look at some of the many games starring Namco’s biggest star and greatest creation.

Pac-Man (1980)

What more needs to be said about the original Pac-Man?  I couldn’t even begin to calculate how many quarters were plunked into stand-up cabinets in arcades and cocktail machines in bars.  For its time, Pac-Man was incredibly revolutionary.  It drew players in with its colorful ghosts and main character, unique sound effects, and addictive gameplay that was simple to understand but almost impossible to master.  Naturally, someone eventually did when Billy Mitchell played the first ever Perfect Pac-Man game, eating every dot, power pellet, fruit, and ghost until the game’s 256th level when it glitches out and becomes unplayable.

Pac-Man has been ported to just about every video game console known to man in some form or another.  Versions of the original arcade game have appeared in compilations throughout the years, but I’d like to focus more on the versions that had to be reprogrammed.

The Atari 2600 version (pictured right) was a huge deal, and Atari knew it.  They produced 12 million copies of the Pac-Man cartridge, expecting people to swarm to the stores to bring the arcade hit home.  At first they were right, until word of mouth began to spread about the port’s dubious quality.  Due to the limited memory of the 2600, the game was practically unrecognizable.  The maze layout was completely changed, with the escape routes on the top and bottom of the screen instead of left and right.  The graphics were plagued by terrible flicker, and the sounds were abrasive and unpleasant.  Even Pac-Man himself was more angular, looking more like a hexagon than a circle.  Despite this, I grew up playing this version on my family’s Atari 2600 and I still have fond memories of it, but I still made sure to put a few quarters in the Pac-Man cabinet every chance I got to the go to my local arcade.

The NES version, originally released as an unlicensed port by Tengen, was much closer to the arcade.  The graphics and sounds were still off, but the maze was properly designed with the right proportions, putting the player’s score in the negative space to the side of the screen to account for the lack of the arcade monitor’s bezel.  A more arcade accurate port appeared in Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo as an unlockable bonus.

Through the magic of emulation, the original arcade version is playable via MAME on a PC, or if you prefer legal versions, available on multiple Namco Museum packages across a multitude of platforms.

Ms. Pac-Man (1982)

After signing a deal with Namco to distribute Pac-Man in North America, Midway became impatient while waiting for the game’s creator to deliver a sequel to their arcade smash.  A solution was discovered in the form of a Pac-Man hack called Crazy Otto.  Programmed by several employees at General Computer Corporation, who had already produced a hack of Atari’s Missile Command and ended up helping them produce games for the 2600, Midway ended up altering the game’s sprites and releasing it as an unofficial sequel, Ms. Pac-Man.

Featuring four unique mazes, more complex AI, and bonuses that bounced around the maze, Ms. Pac-Man was a smash, eventually becoming one of the biggest selling arcade cabinets of all-time.  Namco, however, were not pleased that their American distributor had created a game based on their property without their consent.  This would ultimately lead to the two severing business relations in the wake of further unauthorized sequels, and Midway turning the rights to Ms. Pac-Man over to Namco.

Regardless of the behind the scenes ugliness, Ms. Pac-Man was as big as her beau, and saw an equal number of ports.  Most players praised it as superior to the original Pac-Man, and it is still widely regarded as the best game in the franchise.  This time around, Atari learned from their mistakes and produced a much more faithful port, with greatly enhanced graphics and mazes that closer resembled (though still differed) its arcade counterpart.

Not one, but two separate versions exist for the Nintendo Entertainment System, one being a direct arcade port from Namco themselves, and the other an unlicensed cartridge from Tengen, based on their enhanced 16-bit versions.  This version, as well as the Genesis and SNES versions, featured not only the original arcade mazes, but 32 additional mazes as well, broken up into various categories including ones small enough to fit on a single screen without scrolling, extra large mazes, and crazy mazes with asymmetrical geometry, tight corners, dead ends, and even invisible walls.  In addition, the port introduced the Pac-Booster, a feature found in some hacks of the original arcade cabinet, that could make Ms. Pac-Man move faster at the push of a button and even included simultaneous cooperative play with the second player controlling Pac-Man himself.

Super Pac-Man (1982)

Namco’s official sequel to Pac-Man was released in the same year as Midway’s unofficial one, and it was overshadowed as a result.  While Ms. Pac-Man featured multiple mazes, Super Pac-Man opted for another single layout that could change dynamically.  Instead of eating dots, the player had to eat keys to open doors within the maze, allowing access to the fruit inside these corridors.  Which doors the keys unlocked changed in successive levels, making it much harder for players to follow a single pattern.

The other game-changer was the introduction of the super pellet.  While the original power pellets which allowed Pac-Man to turn the tables on his pursuers remained, the super pellet turned the hero into a giant version of himself, capable of breaking through the doors without requiring a key or harmlessly “flying over” (e.g. – passing through) the ghost sprites for a limited time.  The stage bonus items also returned to being stationary, but this time were presented as a slot machine, with varying points for matched or mismatched items.
 
Though it’s still a great game (one of my favorites in the series, personally), Super Pac-Man was underwhelming to most players in the wake of Ms. Pac-Man, and never saw as many ports.  A version was released for the original Gameboy Color as a bonus on the Ms. Pac-Man cart, but none of the popular home consoles saw a port until the Namco Museum compilations.

Pac & Pal (1983)

One of the rarest and least known Pac-Man games, Pac & Pal was a game I never knew existed until I discovered MAME and emulation.  Apparently, there’s a good reason for that – it never left Japan, and saw no ports to home consoles.

At first glance, it doesn’t seem too different from the other Pac-Man games.  There’s a maze, ghosts, keys, and fruit.  The biggest changes in Pac & Pal are the addition of a computer-controlled friend for Pac-Man, and the card mechanic.  Instead of eating dots, Pac-Man flips the cards, which act similar to keys in Super Pac-Man and open a corresponding gate leading to the item shown on the flip side.  Once you collect the items, the stage is cleared.  Your Pal assists you in grabbing the items so you can, hopefully, focus on dodging the ghosts, but the AI in the game is merciless, which makes it incredibly difficult.

This time around, there are no power pellets, but there are power-ups that allow Pac-Man to temporarily stun ghosts with a projectile.  Stunning a ghost yields a point value, just as it did when eating them in previous games.  The whole experience feels very strange, even if it looks familiar.  It’s easy to see why this one never made it out of its native country, and it’s probably best left forgotten.

Jr. Pac-Man (1983)

Instead of Pac & Pal, Midway took it upon themselves to release a new sequel, this time starring the youngest member of the Pac-family.  With the help of the General Computer Corporation employees who created Ms. Pac-Man (now working for Atari), they gave birth to Jr. Pac-Man.

Returning to the standard gobble ‘em up gameplay, Jr. Pac-Man further altered the formula by introducing large mazes which scrolled horizontally, meaning the ghosts would not always be on the screen.  To account for the expanded playfield, several of the game’s seven mazes feature additional power pellets, but all of them lack the escape routes.  Another major change was made to the bonus items.  Not only did they bounce around the maze, like in Ms. Pac-Man, but any standard Pac dots they touched were made larger and increased their point value from 10 to 50, but with the caveat that Jr. would be considerably slowed down by them.

Jr. Pac-Man was met with relative apathy when compared to the phenomenon of his progenitors.  It seemed like people were tiring of the maze game formula as newer, even more complex games like Nintendo’s Donkey Kong and Namco’s own Dig Dug were making a splash in arcades.  As a result, few ports of Jr. Pac-Man were made, but one of them was the Atari 2600 version which swapped out the horizontal mazes for vertical scrolling ones, but left the other gameplay elements intact. 

Unfortunately, the friction between Namco and Midway got worse as Midway continued to develop games without Namco’s blessing, including the hybrid pinball/arcade game Baby Pac-Man, which featured a miniature pinball table that could be triggered by entering the escape chutes on the top and bottom of the video screen above it.  Namco eventually made their own Pac Jr. as a hidden bonus game in the Sega Genesis version of the ill-advised point and click adventure game Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures.  This version is completely different from Midway's unofficial sequel, but has remained an obscure piece of Pac-Man history due to its limited market.

Pac-Land (1984)

With the popularity of the core games waning, and tensions between Namco and Midway over the latter’s unlicensed use of the former’s IP, Namco decided to take Pac-Man in a different direction.  One year before Super Mario Bros. would change the face of video gaming forever, the industry’s biggest star appeared in a horizontally scrolling run and jump game.


Pac-Land’s bright and cartoonish graphics were a refreshing change from the previous games and their solid black backgrounds.  While the maze element was gone, power pellets still allowed Pac-Man to tackle his nemeses, the ghosts, who were constantly trying to hinder Pac-Man’s joyful walk home.

That was pretty much the gist of it.  Pac-Man walked from left to right, avoiding ghosts, jumping over fire hydrants, in order to get to his family, and it was a success.  Pac-Land was one of the very few reasons I wanted a Turbo-Grafix 16, though an unlicensed Tengen port for the NES also existed with a major graphical downgrade.

Pac-Mania (1987)

Perhaps the most underrated Pac-Man game, Pac-Mania saw Namco attempt to go back to the series roots by returning to the maze-driven formula of earlier games, but this time with a pseudo-3D perspective.  This new isometric look gave the appearance of fully three-dimensional characters and walls, as well as a sense of depth, but was met with mixed response from players who argued that the close-up camera and large mazes prevented them from seeing the ghosts at all times and strategizing accordingly.  To account for this, Namco gave Pac-Man the ability to bounce (read: jump) over his enemies, giving him as escape in tight spots until jumping ghosts were also introduced in later levels.

Personally, Pac-Mania remains one of my favorite games in the series.  No trip to the arcade was complete without at least a few plays, and I would frequently rent the Sega Genesis port years later.  It’s also worth noting that the game features some stellar music tracks, several of which have become series staples in the years since its release.

Several other ports exist, including the Sega Master System and yet another unlicensed Tengen cart for the NES.  It is also included as part of the Pac-Man Collection on the Gameboy Advance, though it should be noted the music is edited and looped differently.

Pac-Man: Championship Edition DX (2010)

In 2007, original Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani returned to create new mazes for the last time.  Pac-Man: Champion Edition was released on Xbox Live Arcade to widespread critical acclaim for breathing new life into an old classic.

Championship Edition built on the simple formula of the original game, but with drastically faster gameplay and a multitude of mazes that changed on the fly, with no breaks in the gameplay.  Taking advantage of modern widescreen displays, the maze is split into two separate halves with the ghost generator in the middle and escape routes all over the place depending on the maze.  If the player clears the left side of the maze, a bonus item appears on the right that, when eaten, changes the cleared side in real-time, allowing the gameplay to continue.

Championship Edition was later upgraded further with the DX version that included new gameplay elements, such as massive combos.  In addition to the usual chaser ghosts, there were sleepers in the mazes who would awaken and begin following Pac-Man after he passed by.  Players could use this to create a huge trail of ghosts that could be decimated in seconds with a single power pellet.  As the player's score increases, so does the speed of the gameplay until it becomes positively frenetic.  Should the player really get in a bind, they could earn bombs to clear ghosts and escape death at the expense of points and slowing the game back down.

The glowing neon colors and pulse-pumping music only make the experience more intense, and players can unlock a variety of graphical options that, while purely aesthetic, pay tribute to the history of one of the most significant video game franchises in history.

Though it lacks the endless play option of the original and is limited to time attack based modes, Championship Edition DX is easily one of the best and most exciting arcade-style games in existence, and proves that Pac-Man can still hold his own in today's modern gaming landscape.

Lest you doubt that, just consider that he is also part of the roster in Nintendo's mascot-based brawler Super Smash Bros. for 3DS and Wii U alongside the likes of other icons such as Mario, Link, Mega Man, and Sonic the Hedgehog - right where he belongs.

The Responsibility of Game Makers

In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning California's First-Amendment-violating law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children, the firestorm has kicked up again with both sides - for and against - shooting their mouths off.

One such person is the San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford whose tweet stating, "Dear videogame makers: sort of pathetic to cheer that you can now freely sell ultraviolence to children.  Just FYI," was retweeted by film critic Roger Ebert.

Ebert is no stranger to video game debate.  His opinion - and it is just that - that video games are not, and cannot be art received much attention, and he often brings the topic up again and again on both his personal Twitter account and his blog.  With this latest retweet, and his utterly tactless (now-deleted) tweet in the wake of Jackass cast member Ryan Dunn's death, Ebert is quickly proving he is quite possibly the internet's greatest troll.

Jamie Kennedy vs. Gamers

In 2007, actor/comedian - and I use both terms very loosely - Jamie Kennedy hosted one of the most disastrous press conferences in the history of the Electronic Entertainment Expo.  Kennedy's gig as the emcee for Activision's press conference has become the subject of mocking in the four years since, and apparently the thin-skinned, self-obsessed actor has had enough of it.

Butting into a conversation about the worst E3 gig of all-time between former PC Gamer editor Gary Whitta and Michael Pachter, best known for his financial prognostications involving the game industry, Kennedy fired off the following tweet: "wow u dorks can't let that go, You have no idea what really happened, because ur not in the biz, ur a spectator."  Please note that the period in that sentence was added by me.

That opened the floodgates for gamers on Twitter, who began taking Kennedy to task, resulting in some hilarious exchanges and an insight into his delusions - namely that he is a huge star and we should all be impressed by him.

Said one tweeter, "dude if you want to talk about 'in the biz' I actually had to Google you to find out who the fuck you are. #bList," to which Kennedy replied, "I still don't know I, gay list."  Please note, the period was added by me again.  It's obvious that Kennedy meant to hit "U" and not "I," but that doesn't make his toothless, gradeschool-caliber comeback any less hilarious - though probably not in the way he intended.  Instead, it makes him look like a barely-literate homophobe with a serious superiority complex. 

When another user responded, "You're such a fucking moron.  Thanks for making me laugh this morning.  @garywhitta owns you," Kennedy's response was simply, "I'll kill you."  Once again, I added the period.  With such witty retorts as these, it's no wonder Jamie Kennedy has skyrocketed past Kathy Griffin on his climb to the C-list!

The irony is that Kennedy's insistence that he's super-famous is by far the funniest thing he has ever said or done.  He's pointed out that we dorks have no articles written about us, but considering that some of those articles include UGO's '20 Worst Actors of All-Time,' where Kennedy sits at #19, that's probably not something I'd brag about. 

What the star of Kickin' It Old Skool doesn't realize is that he's probably most famous for his role as Randy, the horror movie nerd in Scream.  Either that or being mistaken for Seth Green, which I'm sure irritates nobody more than Seth Green, who is actually funny, talented, and has never starred in Son of the Mask.  Flaunting your acting career isn't that impressive when Malibu's Most Wanted is on your resumé.

His desperate attempts to pass himself off as an A-list celebrity make Kennedy seem insecure.  More than anything, he seems to be trying to convince himself that he's somebody, but the end result is that he appears self-obsessed - the type of lunatic who has a shrine to himself in his home, complete with newspaper clippings and press photos taped to every square inch of available wallspace so he can bask in his own perceived awesomeness. 

His inability to ignore the insults by faceless Twitter users and trying to prove his fame by way of examples seem to validate my theory.  Seeing as how he cannot handle criticism or heckling, it's a miracle he continues to pursue an acting career given the steady stream of critical and commercial disasters that bear his name.  The smart thing to do would be to poke fun at yourself, stripping the insults of their impact, but instead he struts around Twitter - with less followers than the gaming website Kotaku and considerably less than Epic game designer Cliff Bleszinski, both of whom he'd call "dorks" - as if he's the world's greatest artist and that simply opens him up to further mockery. 

It's both funny and sad to see how famous Jamie Kennedy thinks he is, but the reality is that he should be thankful for his negligible celebrity status.  As singer Chris Brown has found out numerous times, chucking homophobic slurs around when you're in the public eye typically doesn't go over so well.  Luckily for Kennedy, nobody from the press follows him so his "gay list" tweet will go unnoticed. 

In Jamie Kennedy's bubble, he's winning the battle against the dorks.  In the real world where the rest of us reside, he's a blip on the Hollywood radar.  To say his estimation of his self-worth and success is an exaggeration is an understatement when he can't even get as many Twitter followers as a game developer, despite his heightened visibility by way of his choice of careers.  To put it as clearly as possible: There are more of us dorks than there are Jamie Kennedy fans, and none of us are impressed by you.  Welcome back to Earth; enjoy your stay.

Innovation vs. Entertainment: Reviewers Gone Mad

Can someone, anyone, show me where it is written in the Video Game Reviewer Guidebook that each and every video game must innovate?  At what point in time did it become a prerequisite that a new game in a familiar, popular franchise must suddenly change everything about what made people enjoy it in the first place?  When it comes to new games, when did it become the equivalent of a crime against creativity to focus on doing something really well instead of doing something new just for the sake of it?

This is just one of the many hypocrisies that made me start blogging in the first place.  It seems that all so-called professional reviewers take their jobs as art critics so seriously that they've forgotten the first and only rule that truly matters in gaming: The goal is always to have fun.

Sega Dreamcast: A Retrospective

It all started with an arcade game.
 
I was a young man of 21, working for the largest electronics retailer in the United States, and after many late shifts my friends and I would frequent a large recreational facility about a mile away.  They had everything - pool tables, minigolf, a bar, and a fully-fledged arcade stocked with newer arcade games ranging from Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Mace: The Dark Age, Gauntlet Legends, Silent Scope, War: Final Assault, and the game that led to one of the best gaming decisions of my life - Crazy Taxi.
 
One February night, I decided to give the game a whirl.  Upon sitting in the cockpit and plunking in my quarters, I was treated to only about a minute of gaming as I was clueless about what to do.  All I knew is that as bad as I played, I wanted more.  I put more quarters in and did significantly better the second time around, so I put in more quarters after I was done with that.  Then more, and more, until I'd spent over $10 on that cabinet alone.  Several of my friends had gathered around to watch me play, laughing with glee as I crashed through traffic, drove on the sidewalk, and caught air while going over steep hills of a pseudo-San Francisco to deliver my fare to their destination. 
 
The next day, I went to work bright and early on my day off, plunked down $350 cash and purchased a Dreamcast, a Visual Memory Unit, as well as copies of the just-released port of Crazy Taxi and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.  Before stopping home, I decided that two games simply weren't enough and hit up Toys R' Us, where I walked out with Zombie Revenge.  My car filled with treasures, I went home and quickly hooked my new system up to my television. 
 
I waited with baited breath as the orange dot bounced along the screen, making watery sounds as the orange swirl I would grow to love so dearly appeared for the first time.  After the monumental task of setting the system's clock and date, an act that always seems to take forever when all you want to do is play a new system for the first time, I was finally ready to make some crazy money at home.

Playing Devil's Advocate: The Upside of In-Game Advertising

It seems there's a big to-do over in-game advertising, and I can't help but feel the whole argument is a little bit silly.  Personally, I don't see what the big deal is.  Does seeing a billboard for a real life product whiz by as you race past really affect your gameplay experience that much? 

Many gamers feel that in-game advertising is intrusive or that the publisher is just greedy and saw a way to rake in even more money from their game.  Newsflash, folks: the video game industry is called an "industry" for a reason.  It's true that there is money to be made from in-game advertising, but it's no different than watching commercials on television shows or ads before movies in theaters.