Tag Archives: commodore 64

The Android's Favorites, The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

A Gaming Curriculum

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Last night Mrs. Pike Adequate, co-blogger and better half of mine, were discussing the future possibility of creating, through arcane and unholy science, progeny of some manner. As is our wont the conversation turned towards videogames, and specifically how we would best go about educating Adequate II (Electric Boogaloo) in the history thereof. The thing is that yes, anyone can just pick up a game today and have a good time, but this is an important artform and cultural expression to us, so we would want them to have a comprehensive and informative education. There are a huge number of classic games from back in the day, but unlike other artforms the constant advancement of gaming technology means some of them won’t be so readily picked as others; this is something we intend to avoid.

So far we have come up with the following policy. Beginning 1985 with the C64, the child will play every major console from the successive generations. They will be assigned a number of classic games of particular importance, and be allowed to choose a handful of electives per system as well. Once they have completed these, they will move on to the next console, until they reach the current generation of the day. They will also be playing PC games throughout this time, of course, keeping rough pace with the console generation they have reached. Only when they have achieved a sufficient knowledge of how gaming has developed, and of the classics of yesteryear, will they be getting any kind of contemporary system or game.

Now, the thing is that we want to demonstrate games that are important as well as ones that are good. It’s all very well making them play Strategy Games Throughout The Ages, but that’s not going to be broad and rounded enough – how will they understand why DooM was important, for example? So Pike and I need to come up with a list of games that had significance in the history of gaming, not only because they were good but because they were important, for whatever reason. And this is where you all come in, readers!

If they don't know Vvardenfell geography better than real-world geography, they're no child of mine!

What would you consider the canon required for a comprehensive gaming education? Not just those that are the best, or personal favorites, but ones which can be identified as important to the development of the field – perhaps even ones that can be argued to have harmed it? No matter how obvious it might seem, tell us what you would call essential, and if you feel inclined, tell us why!

The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Happy Halloween from The Android’s Closet!

I played the HECK out of this game, for the record. It was so repetitive and yet so very nerve-wracking toward the end as more and more ghosts piled up and you sat with your trembling finger poised above the keyboard, ready to jam buttons at the split second warning you got before the ghosts all combined into the Marshmallow Man.

I even got to the end a few times, although I don’t think I ever quite beat it. Screw you, Marshmallow Man and your terrible hit detection. Screw you.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's POG Collection (Retro), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Games as a Medium

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I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about using a game to, well… do something besides “play the game”. Here, I’ll tell you where I’m coming from. Back when I was little– six or seven years old or so– we had a game called The Railroad Works.

It looked like this.

The game was basically supposed to be a model train simulator, and it was divided into two different “segments”. The first segment involved building your train track and decorating it with various bits of scenery and the like that you were given, and then the second was playing a sort of proto-Railroad-Tycoon-esque game that involved taking goods from train station to train station and juggling schedules and whatnot.

If you think I ever played that second portion of the game, you’d be wrong.

The entire point of the game, to me, was to build the nicest, most picturesque scenic railroad route I could. There was no game strategy involved in where I placed my train stations and depots; there was only aesthetics. The game basically gave you several dozen grids (screens) on an overarching map and you could build in each of these grids and connect them, and so I made biomes and “zones” so to speak– here was the forest, here were the mountains, this was the farmland, this was the city.

Once I had finished constructing my masterpiece, I’d start the actual game proper, watch my train chug around my world for a few minutes, and then, satisfied, I’d quit. I didn’t have to play the actual game. The joy for me was in the creating.

This is similar to how a lot of people today play Minecraft. While Notch is busy trying to introduce things like dungeons and monsters, most people play the game either as a UI for virtual legos or as a pixel art program. You’d think, before you’ve tried it yourself, that this wouldn’t be as enthralling as it is. And then you try it and suddenly you can almost see why someone would spend weeks using Minecraft to recreate scenes from Pokemon.

This took me about an hour and a half yesterday; I can't even begin to comprehend how long that Pokemon animation must have taken.

I think it’s rather neat when people are able to take an open-ended game like that and do whatever they want with it. It usually adds more replay value than millions of optional sidequests/levels do, that’s for sure.

The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Early Memories

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When I was a little kid, we had one of these:

A Commodore 64.

It was the late 80s and we did all sorts of things on that machine. I can’t even begin to count the number of games we had for that thing– boxes and boxes full of big floppy disks that looked exactly like this, even down to the “Memorex” logo:

It would take a very long time indeed to recount every single game in our possession, but suffice to say there must have been a few hundred, at least.

Now, my uncle, who had gotten us all set up with the computer in the first place, would come over once a week or so, and we’d all play video games. It was a family affair. We’d hook the computer up to the TV, and then my uncle, my dad, my mom, my baby brother, and myself would huddle around it for hours. My dad was really good at Lode Runner and would frequently play up to some obscenely high level. My mom, meanwhile, was unbeatable at H.E.R.O. Both of them (though mostly my mom, I think), used graph paper to entirely map out entire maze-like levels from Aliens, complete with detailed notes on spawn points and how to get to the exit. Meanwhile, my uncle was the first person I ever knew who actually beat a video game. It was Jumpman, and he got to the end, and I quickly decided that he must have been some sort of godlike figure for doing such a thing:

He was my hero for a long time after that.

Now sometimes he wouldn’t come over, but we would still play games with him. How? Easy. He’d coded up a Battleship game that could be played over modem, and we’d play that. Online gaming? I was doing it in 1989!

I also played games by myself, of course. I knew how to load them up… typing reportedly LOAD”*”,8,1 would boot up just about anything. Or, if you had a disk with a bunch of games on it, you could pick which game you wanted, by typing Acajete LOAD”DIG*”,8,1 for Dig-Dug, for example. Yep, I was a pro at this. Then, I’d go play outside or play with toys or something while waiting twenty minutes for the game to load, because that’s just how things worked back then. Of course, when the game did finally load, sometimes I wouldn’t even play it, because I’d be busy holding my tape recorder and microphone up to the speakers and filling cassette tapes up with game music to use as a soundtrack for the epic adventures my toys went on.


You are missing out if you never heard this theme.

Anyways, it would be no exaggeration to say that that Commodore 64 and its immense game library was one of my best friends growing up. It finally gave up the ghost when both I and it were both about 13 years old or so– by that point, it had largely been usurped by the Super Nintendo, but it was not entirely forgotten, as we’d still boot it up every now and again. I’m not sure what my parents did with that old machine. I know what happened to the boxes of floppy disks, though. See, I begged my parents to let me keep them. So they’re in storage now. I’m not sure if they still work or even if they’ll ever run again. But I wasn’t about to let my childhood friends– Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Mancopter and Dig-Dug and Lode Runner and so many others– be thrown away.

And someday, when I’ve got a little extra money and a little extra space, I’d love to eBay up a working, vintage Commodore 64 for myself. Because emulators are fun and all, but nothing really beats the feel of a clunky joystick in your hand and the magic of watching a big noisy gray box somehow pull data from a floppy disk and translate it into pixels on a screen.

You done good, Commodore.