41–50 of 213 posts
Anyone who is in to Atari 2600 knows that ET is verrrrrry far from the worst game available on that system! And it's so sad making it a great game would have take so few tweaks! http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
This. I played the hell out of that game when it came out. I mean, who in their right mind would rank "Skiing" or "Combat" higher that this game?
Anyone who is in to Atari 2600 knows that ET is verrrrrry far from the worst game available on that system! And it's so sad making it a great game would have take so few tweaks! http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
This. I played the hell out of that game when it came out. I mean, who in their right mind would rank "Skiing" or "Combat" higher that this game?
The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer System, AKA VCS, the Atari 2600.
The only other game in mind for the system was Pong, which actually come out for the system in the form of Video Olympics, and it was created by one of the 2600's TIA chip designers, Joe Decuir. That chip literally synced up the processor with the television's refresh rate, and had each scan line drawn out of processing exactly when the electron beam was moving over the proper position on screen. The 2600 has no frame buffer. Essentially, when it's in the CPU, it's drawn on the screen. The machine only had 1024 bits, not bytes, of RAM.
But that's neither here nor there. For more info on the fascinating hardware that was the Atari 2600, read Racing the Beam by Ian Bogost and Nick Montefort. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/racing-beam
Video Olympics could be considered to be the 100-in-1 of Pong games, with dozens of variants on the Pong theme. Combat takes the same sort of approach, with lots of game modes, but the actual gameplay was based on another arcade game. Rather than just recreating the arcade game, however, Combat expands on the theme, as Video Olympics did.
Combat is, to my mind, the only game on the 2600 that really holds up to this day. It's still fun, despite it's graphical limitations. For its day, it was the Super Mario Brothers of the Atari: that cart you could always turn to for fun.
It's elegant in its simplicity, extremely deep in its variations on a theme, and even offers a few asymmetrical playing options: one player can be given a different set of planes from the other.
Combat is the Go of computer games. Oh, and all the graphics are drawn in 1's and 0's. Same for the numbers on screen: big binary sprite maps. Here, look! http://benfry.com/distellamap/150dpi/combat-illus-150dpi.png
> "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex." Eight kilobytes?! How do you build anything meaningful, especially a game, with just eight kilobytes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
Screenshot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger#/media/File:Kkrieger...
Anyone who is in to Atari 2600 knows that ET is verrrrrry far from the worst game available on that system! And it's so sad making it a great game would have take so few tweaks! http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. I played the hell out of that game when it came out. I mean, who in their right mind would rank "Skiing" or "Combat" higher that this game?
Combat is, frankly, one of the greatest videogames ever made. Easily in the top ten. If you don't understand why, you've missed out on a great deal of history. The Atari 2600 was designed, almost exclusively, to play Combat. It has the ability to animate only 3 sprites: player 1, player 2 and "ball". There are many hacks to get around this, but we're talking about the pre-release period of the Atari Video Computer Sy…
A couple of comments based off of the first ET poster/ad in the article: * Atari games like this cost $40? That seems expensive! * Why did Pennsylvania residents have to call a different number? * Funny that a point of advertising was getting the game before everyone else. It reminds you that these were real games people wanted and not just nostalgic blasts, how I view them now. (Link to poster: http://ichef.bbci.co.…
It sometimes blows my mind that this would be $100 in today's dollars, or $12.50 per kilobyte.
Another contender for the title of worst video game: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing was critically panned. The game's criticism is largely directed at its "blatantly unfinished"[2] state: lack of collision detection and frequent violation of the laws of physics, frequent and major software bugs, poor visuals, and severe lack of functionality. As a result, the game is now widely regarded as one of the worst video game…
Yes there's plenty of them. I thought this article was going to be about Daikatana.
The worst movie ever made probably doesn't have enough Rotten Tomato or IMDB reviews to be considered. I was once told I had hosted the "worst program on television"[1], but being community tv there were probably 100 people watching each week and as far as I know no extant copy has survived - we'll never appear on a "worst TV shows of all time" list.
So almost by definition on a site like BBC.com, 'the worst video game in history' means 'which also sold tens of thousands of copies [2]', which is a measure of success and recognition most genuine failures won't achieve.
[1] Someone actually called the station and left a voicemail to that effect. I took it as a compliment - it meant he'd watched the whole show, because nobody calls to complain if they just changed the channel. [2] Or, in ET's case, 1.5 million.
> "It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex." Eight kilobytes?! How do you build anything meaningful, especially a game, with just eight kilobytes?
Well you also have 128 bytes of RAM to work with...
- In 2600 coding you often don't need a stack, so you can use 'S' as a temp register. Very useful in the display kernel.
- The 2600 has a standard parallel port chip. There are configuration registers (e.g., port direction) that can be temporarily hijacked as RAM, when you don't care about input or output (which you generally only sample once a frame). That's a whole 8 more bits of RAM, not to be sneezed at.
One of my cow-orkers at Atari decided that he'd try to learn 2600 programming (he was mostly doing Atari Home Computer stuff). Over three or four months I saw him go through what I can only describe as deterioration and utter discouragement. The people who could get even an awful game out of the 2600 were pretty damned good hackers.
