Tuesday, May 7, 2024
GAME ON
From Zork to No Man’s Sky, home computer gaming has come a long way.
My opinions on computer gaming and some of my favorite games. I've been playing games on the home computer since the days of the Trash 80. I love indie, open-world, unique, puzzle, and resource games. The cake is a lie.
Computer games have been around for almost as long as we've had computers. But until 1972, they weren't small enough to fit inside your house.
My love of home computer gaming started in 1979, when my dad brought home a TRS80. It ran on Basic. To run a program on the computer, you had to type it in, line by line. It took days. If you wanted to create a graphic, you had to enter data for each pixel, including duration, location and color. Then you had to debug the program and make sure every line was correct, or it wouldn’t run correctly. And you couldn’t save the program either, so if you wanted to play the game again, you had to type it in again.
If you think this sounds like a lot of work, you are correct. But for somebody who had never seen a computer before, this simple little machine was amazing. We had a computer magazine and managed to type in a few programs to run on the computer, including a waterfall simulation. Dad eventually got a tape drive and a memory expansion interface (giving it a whopping 16K.) With the tape drive, you could load a program into the computer, then pew pew pew to your heart's content. We had two games, and I learned how to play them whenever I wanted.
That computer, and its replacement, an Apple IIe, was my go to 10 all through college. I wrote all my papers on the Apple, and of course played lots of games. Even though it only had two colors, green and very dark green. (There was a color monitor available, but I only had the monochrome.)
One of my favorite things to play were interactive text adventures. I played quite a few on that computer, including Zork. It allowed you to solve puzzles and progress in the game through a text interface. You could type commands like "kill troll with axe" or "get knife." They made the universe of the game feel larger, because of the seemingly endless possibilities. Zork can still be played online, with advertisements - here's one link: https://classicreload.com/zork-i.html
There were plenty of games that relied on graphics for gameplay. Instead of the smooth lines you see today, games were made up of sprites, which were groupings of pixels used as animation elements. They were typically side scrolling (except for Tempest, which was a weird center scroller,) and only had 16 colors and a 320 x 200 screen to work with. Making a challenging game that was also fun to play wasn't easy.
If you wanted good graphics, you went to the arcade. Up until the 90s, arcade games looked better than a game on a home PC. The onboard computers for these arcade games were built to do one thing only, always had color screens, and sturdy controls so that any ham-fisted teen could smash and bash his/her way to a victory.
And then Pentium came along in 1993, and everything turned upside down.
We got Doom. And Mortal Kombat. And Myst, an arguably revolutionary game in terms of game mechanics and concepts.
As our processors have gotten better, the games have gotten more complicated. It's a natural progression of being able to crunch more data into a rendering, improving the experience for the player. Being able to map an image onto a vector has transformed gaming. We're able to combine vector graphics with bitmaps, and control light and shading.
Embedded AI controls the NPC's (non-player character) behaviors in the game based upon alert statuses. Open-world game play, pioneered by the Ultima series, got even better when we could render three-dimensional foliage and terrain. We even have realistic water simulations, the Holy Grail of game animation.
Now you can play a game called No Man's Sky, which "is a game about exploration and survival in an infinite procedurally generated universe." This means that each player has a unique experience, as it's generating an entire open world for each individual. This is so far beyond "eat sandwich" that it makes me feel old. But in a good way.
I can't wait to see what the future brings. I'm always on the trailing edge of technology, upgrading just enough that I can continue playing my favorite games.
This column will be mostly about games I've played that you might not have heard of, combined with a little game design theory, what I like in gaming, and maybe even some mainstream games that I've played that I'd like to analyze.
All suggestions welcome! Do you have a game you'd like me to review? Just email the Tri-County Reporter at info@tricountyreporter.com, subject line Game On.
