As for Linux-related posts, I have been writing them in a more specialized Linux blog, Zurgl: Linux Tutorials and Answers to Actual Questions. My idea was to take advantage of the fact that sometimes co-workers ask for help (due to my relatively incredible old age… I mean, vast experience) to also share that answer with the world — after all, if it was useful to a single person, it might be so to more. I also write guides and tutorials, and will eventually answer some reader questions… when I get any.

I still intend to write more gaming-related posts here on Winterdrake, but it may take a while; there’s a lot of stress in my life (mostly related to money, but not only that) that I need to take care of, before I really have time and energy to dedicate to gaming (and writing about it).

First, the good (great, in fact) news: Julian Gollop, author of Chaos, Laser Squad, and the original X-COM: UFO Defense (known in Europe as UFO: Enemy Unknown; note that the recent Firaxis remake combines the two names) has announced that he’s remaking Chaos, and his ideas so far (the previous link goes to his development blog) seem great.

And now the bad news: Mike Singleton, creator of The Lords of Midnight, Doomdark’s Revenge, and Midwinter, has sadly died. He was in the middle of remaking The Lords of Midnight for iOS and Android, among other platforms. Chris Wild, who was doing the remake with Singleton, has announced that he will complete the remake, although it will understandably have fewer changes / improvements than intended.

It is interesting to note that the two guys mentioned above wrote, between them, my favorite 8-bit games of all time.

Beyond that… Gaming-wise, I haven’t had a lot of time for playing in the past few months. I returned to The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) “for real”, and I’ve been enjoying the game a lot, although I don’t play it more than a couple of nights a week. The good part is that I’ve been doing it with a couple of friends, and we only play it when we’re together, making it more like a “normal” RPG, instead of an MMO.

As for books, I’ve just started reading Isaac Asimov’s Black Widowers series. It’s interesting to see how Asimov was able to successfully create something that 1) was outside his “normal” thing (science fiction), and 2) has all its (short) stories following the same format, yet without making them repetitive or monotonous.

In terms of personal projects… no big news here. I’ve been working on and off on something for about a year, but it’s not something to be shared with the world. Otherwise, I’ve recently improved my online Fantasy Name Generator, which now supports new “types”, including hobbit names, science fiction names, and even modern, English-language names. More to come soon… I hope.

… here is what I’ve been doing with some of what little free time I have: playing an 80s game I never actually played back then. The game is The Bard’s Tale II : The Destiny Knight (whew!), which I’m playing using an Amiga emulator. This is not actually the very best version, a title which belongs to the Apple IIGS port, but as I plan to move my party to Bard’s Tale III after I beat this game, and there’s no III port for the IIGS, I had to pick the (arguably) second best version.

As I said, I never actually played BT2 back in the 80s. Though I did play, and love, the first Bard’s Tale, first on the ZX Spectrum (on cassette!), then on the PC. As you can see, it looks mostly the same:

Anyway, I missed games like this. It’s really hard, with no hand holding, and grinding is a big part of the game. I actually like the fact that you can, at the very beginning of the game, go to dungeons or other places where the very first encounter will kill you (Bethesda, take note: scaling enemies to the player’s level sucks). And the dungeons seem designed by a sadist: lots of non-euclidean mazes (think going a step north and then a step south necessarily leaves you where you started? think again), permanent darkness zones, anti-magic zones, teleporters, spinners (they turn you around, which can be very confusing if you don’t have a magic compass, or even if you simply fail to notice it). Did I mention that there’s also no such thing as auto-mapping?

Anyway, I’m enjoying the game a lot. Yes, the graphics and sound are primitive, even for its time, and the game is little more than a grind-fest full of random encounters and dungeons that seem designed just to make your life miserable. On the other hand, there’s a strange pleasure in seeing your characters, which you nurtured since they were level 1 newbies, get stronger and stronger, and be able to face ever tougher challenges. Also, since it’s turn-based, and playable in an emulator window, it’s perfect for playing everywhere, at any time.

Tip 1: all of the Bard’s Tale versions are available for download at BardsTale.de. I recommend either the Commodore 64 or Amiga versions (or, if you don’t care about exporting your party to Bard’s Tale III, the Apple IIGS versions of the first two games).

Tip 2: having your emulator folder on Dropbox makes it easy to continue your game wherever you are (home, work, even at a friend’s).

The idea for it came from reading the comments, about a week ago, in PZ Myers’ wonderful blog Pharyngula, where people were talking about an internet poll they wanted to vote on, but the site required registration, and it was a right-wing paranoia site, so it wasn’t a place they really wanted to be members of. One commenter, then, suggested using a “disposable email service” such as Mailinator. That was the first time I heard of those. I found the idea intriguing, and thought about how I could implement such a thing. It looked doable, so I started programming it in my free time, and Mail60 is the result.

I intentionally wanted to keep this simple, so I didn’t go for features such as “create a mailbox automatically when receiving mail on a non-existent address” or “forward email to a real mailbox for X days and then stop”. Also, since mailboxes are so ephemeral, features such as filters, address books or folders don’t really make sense. And, of course, the only way to allow instant creation of mailboxes with no verification whatsoever and yet prevent abuse was to disallow email sending. But for the most common use I foresee — receiving confirmation emails –, that’s not a problem.

For the techies out there, I’m using PHP, MySQL, Postfix, DBMail, and Hastymail for accessing mailboxes. The (virtual) server runs FreeBSD.

P.S. – yes, this is the “new project” I mentioned a few days ago.

After pulling my hair for a while, I noticed that:

• the problems were restricted to PHP pages, and…
• … those didn’t work on any of my sites except for the default one (www.dehumanizer.com).

A little googling, and this post came up, the author of which had the same problem, and was able to spot the solution. In the /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params file, the upgrade had added (silently, since I had never modified that file) the following line:

fastcgi_param       SCRIPT_FILENAME         $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;

Commenting it out solved everything. My guess is that, since the file in question is included only in my default web site configuration, the $document_root variable never changes, so all my sites (except the default) were pointing the wrong way. Anyway, that line is apparently unnecessary, though I’ll see if including the /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params file in every virtual host (maybe you are supposed to do that), and uncommenting back that line, also works.

I hope to have something to show to the world in a week or two. But I’ll try to write a few new posts here, until then. I have a draft of the second entry in the Conversion Wars series almost finished (and it has been that way for a while, now), so that’ll probably be the next one.

First, we have Lee Chen, the fourth and final playable character, who certainly looks representative of the 80s, with his mullet and pr0n moustache. I still don’t know what “Assassination Ken (Hands)” means; that’s the kind of phrase one would expect from an automatic translator, which would certainly explain a lot about the “Engrish” seen in this entire game…

And now for the bosses:

Out of San Antonio, Texas, here’s Ron Max. Boasting “destructive power” (unlike the constructive power shown by the other characters so far, of course), we are also told that “especially his head is so hard that it can destroy rocks”. I think he’s wasted as the owner of a stock farm, as he could instead have used his head (ouch!) to get ahead (groan!) in the world.

Note also the names of his two “mortal techniques”: health head butts and health blow. One wonders whose health he’s talking about. Does he gain health from head butting his opponents? Or do his blows diminish his adversaries’ health (again, unlike the blows of every other fighter, of course)? Inquiring minds want to know.

And, finally…

… the big boss himself, Tony Won, leader of the poorly named “Black-Will-O” crime syndicate (which we suppose is the “Mafia” part of “Mafia, reckless drivers and general businessmen“). Other than his “overwhelming power” and being “capable of doing anything to win”, he seems to imitate Ron Max, with a technique called health claw. If you ask me, I think Ron should sue. “Hey, buddy, I’m the guy who came up with randomly adding “health” to technique names!”

Let’s start with the main character, mentioned in the intro:

Bat Blue (sometimes called Bad Blue) is, supposedly, the main character in Violence Fight. He’s the “street champion of the last year”, though we’re not told exactly what street he was champion of. Not only has he “a reputation for plenty of technique”, but all that technique is reputed for “it’s sharpness”! ((yes, I know it should have been “its sharpness”, but… accuracy above all, folks.))

Bat/Bad isn’t the only playable character, though; three more of the fighters competing for “no. 1 quarreler” are also available to the player.

Boasting “strong jumping force”, Ben Smith, a.k.a. the “Fierce Eagle of Nevada”, is the second “quarreler” trying for “the no. 1 place of the USA”. It’s not clear whether he’s black or a Native American, as his appearance is ambiguous. The only thing we can be sure is that he jumps higher than the competition. Hey, if it was good enough for Batroc the Leaper…

Now for the third playable character, and certainly a fan favorite (or he would be, if this game actually had fans):

Ah, Lick Joe. There’s so much to say about him and his introduction screen.

The name: how did a wrestler ever get the nickname “Lick”? I assume it’s “lick” in the (slang) sense of beating someone up, but still…

The fact that he was expelled from professional wrestling after killing 13 opponents. Sure, the first one could have been thought to be accidental at the time, and, stretching a bit, maybe even the second, but nobody did anything after the third? Or the fourth? Hell, they still let him fight after twelve dead wrestlers in his wake? Hello?!? Note that it’s a legitimate professional wrestling federation we’re talking about here, not the illegal Violence Fight competition that Lick joined afterwards.

Well, at least “his bodily strength is very strong”. That’s certainly better than his strength being weak, or his weakness being strong. Though I’m not sure how it would compare to a guy whose weakness is weak…

Next: the remaining playable character, and the two bosses. Stay tuned!

So much examples of utter brilliance here!

The fact that the competition portrayed in the video game was in vogue among “Mafia, reckless drivers (!) and general businessmen”!

That the game was a struggle for “No. 1 Quarreler”!

That fighters “were gathered from all parts of the USA speaking boastingly of their strength”!

That the “winner” (the quotes are important here, of course) was given “a lot of winning money as well as the honor”!

That Bat/Bad Blue, “in a downtown in L.A.”, along with his manager “Blinks”, “seek[s] for the winning money eagerly”!

“As a matter of fact”, can Bat — I mean, Bad — “take the no. 1 place of the USA”?

P.S. – wait until you see the actual fighters quarrelers, in a future post…

Ah, Reed Richards. Few characters have been as consistently portrayed as sexist, in mainstream superhero comics. It’s probably because he and Sue were one of the first “real” couples in superhero comics: they were already dating in the very first issue, and were married in the third annual (1965). Therefore, all the “morals” of the late 50s and early 60s could be seen in their relationship; other couples typically came much later, and the moral zeitgeist had, by then, progressed.

Here we see another great example: Reed (and he isn’t depicted negatively, therefore Stan Lee seemed to agree, at the time) treats Sue as if he was a parental figure (instead of a boyfriend, which he was at the time), and insults her entire gender by saying that women are “too scatterbrained and emotional to realize” how, basically, men know best. In other words, according to this view, women should look up to men, including steady boyfriends and husbands, in much the same way as children look up to their parents, trust them implicitly, and obey them, because parents are adults and are, therefore, the only ones who can be rational and responsible.

And what’s worse is that, in the next panel… Sue agrees! Even though she challenged Reed in the previous panel (with, you’ll note, a childish retort: “go polish a test tube or something!”), after she leaves she admits to herself that Reed was right, that he really knew what’s best for her, and that she — like all women — only didn’t accept it at the time because she’s “too scatterbrained and emotional”.

The early 60s, ladies and gentlemen!

From the mind and programming skills of Julian Gollop, author of Chaos, came this masterpiece in 1988: Laser Squad, quite probably the best and most popular turn-based tactical game in the 80s.

If you weren’t around at the time, you may not realize the sensation that Laser Squad was back then. Even though it was a turn-based tactical game, it was, quite uniquely, accepted by many people who’d never touched a strategy game before. I was in school back then, and I remember the game being popular in my class, especially in its two-player mode — and I’m talking about kids (not that I wasn’t one, but I was always… kind of different ) whose favorite genres were sports and driving games. Even later on, in the early nineties, the game was still popular among my friends — and, again, most of them didn’t have any interest in strategy games (except, in a few cases, Chaos… you may be noticing a pattern here).

But what made LS so popular, even with action game fans who preferred their games simple and in small doses? Well, it was polished, easy to learn, and had “arcade-style” graphics, instead of the common symbolic representations in strategy games. The scale was perfectly accessible, and everything looked realistic and was easily recognizable — not only walls, doors and such, but even stuff such as furniture, potted plants, and even the sink and toilet inside a bathroom — not just in terms of looks, but they were actually objects in the game, with a level of detail that wouldn’t be seen until games such as Ultima VI and VII. This scale may seem normal these days (e.g. Jagged Alliance, Gollop’s later X-Com: UFO Defense), but Laser Squad was the first game which showed everything so well ((OK, technically, Julian Gollop had released Rebelstar first, but that one was much more difficult to learn, less accessible and less detailed than Laser Squad.)). And all was controllable with a mere one-button joystick, or with 5 keys (4 directions plus fire). The graphics were good and realistic, and the explosions were a pleasure to watch – especially if an enemy was caught in them.

Playing against the computer was great, but the best part of the game was playing it against a friend (hot-seat only – it was the 80s, remember). Games could be quick, or take up entire nights. And strategies that worked perfectly against the AI would fail miserably against a clever human – forcing one to adapt, to predict what the other was doing. Again, this is normal for this kind of games this days, but at the time there wasn’t really anything like it.

Oddly, to this day I still prefer the 1st scenario in the original game, called “The Assassins”. In it, one player controlled a squad of 5 troopers, who had to assassinate a weapons merchant in his private home – protected by several security droids. There were so many ways to do it – I loved demolishing part of the house with rocket launchers (yes, almost everything was destroyable), although that meant sacrificing other weapons, armor and so on – if the rocket launchers, with their very limited number of shots, didn’t do the trick, you’d find yourself completely outgunned. Of course, you could do it in the “proper” way, by sneaking into the house – which had several different accesses. Playing as the defenders was great too – a normal tactic was to hide the guy somewhere (such as in the bathroom!) and use the droids to mount a defense, or possibly to “lead” the attackers far away from their main target. Even moving the guy out of the house could sometimes work (assuming the first player deployed all his troops in one side of the house and you were lucky enough to choose the other side to run to) — the game included the concept of “line of sight”, and so you would only see your opponents if they were actually in view of one of your characters.

Another brilliant scenario came only in the first expansion pack, but was already included in the C64 and later ports. In it, you had to defend a base from attacking robots – most of which were relatively weak, but one of them was a large battle droid which not only had a powerful weapon, but it was so heavily armored that it was invulnerable from the front — even to rockets and grenades! The only way to destroy it was to attack from another angle ((OK, that wasn’t the only way. But I don’t want to spoil it here. ))- which, if the other player was any good, was anything but easy. I still remember that the first half a dozen times or so I played that scenario, even against the computer on the easiest level, I was completely demolished…

… until I found a way. Which is still one of the things I like the most about computer and video games: the pleasure that comes from finding a way, from solving a problem.

Another unique feature of that level was that more robots would spawn outside the base during the game (the defending side, and both sides in every other scenario, had a fixed number of troops, available at the beginning), so mounting an efficient defense was really essential; the defenders could win by achieving a certain number of points, or simply by defending the base for a certain number of turns; the attackers had something inside the base they needed to destroy to win, but could also achieve victory by killing all the defending troops.

If you like games such as Fire Emblem, Jagged Alliance or X-COM, why not try out the granddaddy of them all? ZX Spectrum emulators work very well these days…

Since the Anti-Communism entries in the Bad Comic Panel series have, so far, been about the Soviet Union, I thought that such a “monopoly” would be unfair to our Chinese friends in the 1960s, who have been ignored so far. This, then, is the first of several panels I have already chosen to show that, when it came to crude anti-Communism, Stan Lee and Marvel were equal opportunity stereotypists.

The panel above shows four fearful Chinese military officers who have been sent to negotiate with the Mandarin, who, interestingly, was a Chinese super-villain but not a Communist; his demeanour and trappings were all from imperial China (at least, as seen by westerners in the 60s). We’ll be seeing more of the four — and the Mandarin himself — in the near future. Meanwhile, I couldn’t be compiling this list and not include such a delicious quote as “Our Communist overlords will slay us if we fail in our mission” — or, translation, Communist leaders are evil (hey, but aren’t you “commies” as well?) and regularly kill underlings for failing. Then again, that comes straight from the official Evil Overlord manual, doesn’t it?

So, the second entry in the series will be a single post (I haven’t decided on a game yet). After a short intro, there will just be a table with the several ports listed, their scores, a small screenshot (possibly linking to an YouTube video, but on the post it’ll just be an image), and an optional short (1-2 sentences) comment. All of this possibly followed by a conclusion. That’s it.

Any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to comment.

Not many more to go, now. First, let’s look at the Sega Master System port:

We’ve already seen two versions (MSX2 and PC) that appear to be based on this one. All of these are colorful, fast and smooth, but the sprites are smaller than average, the roads seem a bit “empty”, and the music, while decent, isn’t as good as that of most of the US Gold ports. Still, in terms of “fun”, I’d rather play this port than any of the US Gold ones, except perhaps for the C64 one.

Now for the NEC PC Engine (Turbografx 16 in the US) version:

Now we’re talking. Have you noticed that, until now, we didn’t have even one Out Run port that looked and played like the original? Even on relatively powerful systems such as the Amiga? This one, however, succeeds. It’s fast, smooth, good looking, and really feels a lot like the arcade game. If there’s anything not great with it, it’s the music, which is again not as good as in most of the US Gold ports.

Considering that the PC Engine is an 8-bit console (though much more powerful than, say, the NES or the Master System, and able to compete with the 16-bit ones), this port, then, is easily the best 8-bit version of Out Run.

But what about 16-bit? Can’t such a machine do at least as good, if not better? Up to now, we didn’t really see it; the best 16-bit version so far would be the PC one, followed by the Atari ST port. Both of them are disappointing in different ways, and neither really looks or plays like the original. Fortunately, there’s yet another 16-bit version, this time for the Sega Mega Drive (or Genesis for the USians), which can do this:

Great port, isn’t it? Fast, smooth, great looking, and plays like Out Run. It’s hard to notice, as it’s so close to the PC Engine version, but the objects seem to be more detailed, the frame rate looks a bit smoother, and there appears to be a little more graphical detail. It would be hard to ask for a better port. Only the music — again — could have been better, but this is probably related to hardware limitations.

No, it isn’t exactly the same game as the arcade, but it’s not that you’d expect such a thing in a home console at the time, right?

Well, in a few years, you would be able to expect it. You’d just need to have a Sega Saturn, and you could play Out Run like this:

This one isn’t really a great achievement, as the Saturn is far more powerful than the original arcade. But I’ve included it here just so you can see what kind of system would eventually be required to have a “perfect” version of an 1986 game at home. Also, it finally gets the music right.

Well, this is getting long, so here are the scores:

[table id=4 /]

(*) No, the Saturn isn’t used to the fullest, but, as mentioned in the intro, that’s OK as long as it’s a perfect port.

When I started this blog, one of the conscious decisions I made back then was to avoid the common “look at this cool thing I’ve just found!” posts. The reasons are several: because that tends to “date” posts (i.e. what’s novelty now will be old hat in a couple of months), because that makes a blog little more than a collection of links, and because tons of other blogs already do exactly that.

However, this time I will make an exception to the rule, as I’m “in love” with this thing I’ve very recently found about, and which is being a joy to watch (I have been watching the episodes in order, and I’m currently in the middle of the first season). Besides, it’s not exactly a “current event”, so it won’t really age.

Time Commanders is a BBC2 show that ran for two seasons, between  2003 and 2005. In it, four players controlled one army (two as “generals”, two as “lieutenants / captains”) in a classical era battle, with a preliminary version of the Rome: Total War engine (which wasn’t yet released at the time, so Total War fans were actually seeing the upcoming game for the first time, at least during the beginning of the first season). Interestingly, instead of players competing against each other (either solo or in teams), all of them were on the same side; their opponent wasn’t run by an AI, but was instead controlled by (unseen) technicians, instructed to use tactics similar to the actual ones used in that battle. Incidentally, the show took care to select players without video gaming experience, which I think actually makes things more interesting: they don’t see it as a “video game” they have to beat, but as an important battle that actually happened, some 2000 years ago. Which is exactly how one should look at it.

Before the actual battle, there were mission briefings (shown, again, using the R:TW engine) in which both the team and the audience were told about the historical background for the battle, the generals and forces involved, what was at stake, and which key troops both sides had available. The lieutenants / captains were also responsible for the initial scouting of enemy forces and positions, and for relaying that information to the generals.

Meanwhile, two actual historians and/or military instructors (one permanent, the other one rotating between several people from episode to episode) gave more insight on the battle, and commented on the team’s tactics, outside the hearing range of the players. Only after the battle ended would they tell the players what they did rightly and wrongly, and how the battle actually went, historically. Note also that quite often the team would lose the battle, and lose spectacularly; in a way, watching how much some of the players could “blow it” was one of the series’ most entertaining aspects.

In short, this show — sadly cancelled after only two seasons — combines four things I love: history, video games, strategy, and British humor. What more could anyone want? The episodes don’t seem to be available on DVD or Blu-Ray, unfortunately, but most of them, if not all, are currently on YouTube (just search for “time commanders“), and, of course, if you’re inventive, there are always other places to look for them. I’d still buy the series on DVD, if it were ever released, just to have it in better quality.

By the way, it’s really a shame that there aren’t more shows like this — interesting, not dumbed-down, and actually instructive and educational, but still focused on fun. For instance, even just sticking with this format, there could be shows based on other eras of history — medieval times, the Napoleonic wars, etc.. But, of course, I doubt it’ll happen.

Moving on to 16-bit home computer versions of Out Run, there are just three to look at.

Let’s begin with the one I believe came out first, the Atari ST version, released by US Gold in 1988:

Oh dear. As you can see… not very good. I’m pretty sure that this is the Spectrum / Amstrad CPC code simply ported to the ST, without using any of its more advanced features or any programming tricks. The game feels exactly like the Spectrum version, the roads are exactly the same, and so on; only the graphics are new (and pretty bad for an ST), and the game is faster simply because the CPU is faster (but still not as fast or smooth as the hypothetical “7 Mhz Spectrum”, which you can try by setting a Speccy emulator to 200% speed). Note also that the music is exactly the same as in the Spectrum version, which makes sense as both machines have the same sound hardware; however, the ST, because of its extra speed and storage, could have used samples (like many of its games did), and no such thing happened here. Or, you know, actually include the third song from the arcade, since there’s memory and disk space to spare. In short: another lazy port. It’s simply the Spectrum game running on a faster machine and with more color.

Now, for the Amiga version, also by US Gold, released in 1988:

Ouch! It’s the Atari ST version, with different music — this time, the sound chip is different, so they couldn’t just port the Spectrum tunes –, but, in my opinion, it also sounds worse — which is even sadder when you consider how good Amiga music often was. Also, again, it’s the same code as the ST version, with no Amiga features used — which means the game is even slower, as the Amiga’s CPU runs at a lower frequency than the ST’s; usually that was more than compensated by the Amiga’s co-processors, but it’s obvious that they’re standing idle, here. Once again, an incredibly lazy port.

Incidentally, the Amiga version allows sound effects and music at the same time, but the author of the video turned them off before starting the game, and with good reason: they’re terrible. Also, the game seems able to play only one sound effect at the time, so, for instance, when you’re skidding, the engine sound is actually temporarily turned off. On an Amiga.

Finally, we come to the PC (MS-DOS) version, released in 1989 by Sega:

Much like the MSX2 version (see part 1), also by Sega, it’s closer to the Master System version, with little resemblance to the US Gold ports (which, except for the C64 version, all seem to share the same algorithms and maps). It’s fast, smooth and colorful, but the sprites are smaller, and the game feels “emptier”, both in terms of roadside objects and other cars (the smallness of the sprites probably helps). Being an old PC game, it’s limited in terms of hardware, supporting only up to EGA graphics (16-color, with probably the worst palette you can imagine) and PC speaker sound.

It’s probably the best of the three 16-bit home computer ports… but still not a very good one, in my opinion. To see one (if we don’t count the extremely playable but not very “Outrunnish” C64 port), we’ll have look among console ports, which is the subject of part 3.

Welcome to the first entry in Winterdrake’s new Conversion Wars series, where I’ll be comparing the various home computer and console ports of several popular games (it’s only fun if they had a lot of conversions, after all). For details, please see the intro. The first entry, following on my previous post from another series, is Sega’s Out Run. This entry will actually be split into 3 separate parts: one (this one) focusing on 8-bit home computer ports, another one where I’ll look at 16-bit home computer ports, and a third one about console ports.

So, Out Run. In the arcades, it was a very popular game in the late 80s, and a big part of it was its atmosphere. As I mentioned in my last post, linked above, Out Run wasn’t about some “highly competitive race”; instead, it was about driving an expensive cabriolet sports car, a girl at your side, in several almost paradisiac scenarios based on the United States — beginning, very famously, with a road parallel to a beach. Providing at least a fraction of that sensation, then, would be essential to any port; by turning Out Run into a generic driving game where you couldn’t even tell where you were supposed to be (“is this a beach or a snowy mountain?”), you’d be completely missing the point.

A feeling of speed would be essential, as it is for any driving simulation. If you can read “250 km/h” on the screen, and yet it looks and feels like you’re driving a tank, then you should go back to the drawing board.

Out Run was also famous for its graphics and music, and, therefore, reproducing at least some part of both should be a priority.

So, how do the several ports compare?

Let’s start with the ZX Spectrum port; again, shown in the last post:

Released by US Gold (a British company, whose name came from the fact that they originally began as licensees of popular American games for the UK market), much like all the following ports (except the MSX2 one). As mentioned in the last post, it actually has great graphics (for a Spectrum) and music (when running on a 128K Speccy). It includes all the levels and features of the original version, and, in screen shots, it looks like Out Run. However, it was ruined by a terrible frame rate, killing both any feeling of speed… and any fun. (As I said in the comments for that post, the game is actually very smooth and playable if you set the emulation speed to 200%, which means that the released code required a non-existing “double speed Spectrum” for it to be a decent game.)

Next, we have the Commodore 64 version:

As you can see, it looks much less “Outrunnish” than the Spectrum version (the girl isn’t even a blonde! Sacrilege!), the objects (including other cars) looks more “2D-like”, and the road is made up of simple lines. Also, most of the sensation of speed comes from the alternating colored “bars”; still, it works well, and, fact, really does feel like you’re driving fast; as we’ll see, it’s the only home computer version that really does so. The music is great: again, only two of the three arcade tunes are reproduced, but these are the best versions of any home computer. Several features are missing: the branched map, and varying road widths (which all the other versions include). In short, it’s the version that looks the least like the original, but on the other hand it’s the fastest, smoothest ,and probably the most fun them all.

Moving on, there was the Amstrad CPC port:

This version was infamous for being one of the worst ports ever on the Amstrad. It’s basically based on the ZX Spectrum code, but with different graphics; colorful but garish-looking, and in a much lower resolution and with less detail. The trees look particularly horrible. It was also at least as slow as the Spectrum version, and didn’t even have any music during the game; except for the title music (Magical Sound Shower), the only sounds in the game are when skidding (a beep) and when hitting something (a different tone beep). In short: terrible.

MSX version:

An obvious Spectrum port, as many games by UK companies usually were. The car is red, but, other than that, the game is monochrome, much like the Spectrum version. The lines in the road are more defined, but there seems to be less detail; the game appears to be a little faster, though. Music, again, is the same as the Spectrum.

MSX2 version:

A very different port from the MSX1 version; this one was released by Sega itself, and resembles the Master System version. Fast and colorful, but a little empty, and the music is worse than that of the UK-made MSX1 port.

Next: 16-bit home computer ports. Scores will be given to all the ports at the end.

Anyway, in that mag, one of my favorite bits — which doesn’t even appear in every issue, but the magazine is still great without it ((if you care about any of my “retro gaming” posts at all, look it up, and, no, the previous link isn’t an “affiliate” one)) is the comparison of the several ports / versions of a game, whether the game originated in arcades (common in the late 80s / early 90s) or in a particular computer system. I really love that part: to look at screenshots and descriptions of how a game was ported / interpreted on each system, how it played, and, sometimes, even the stories behind a couple of ports. Call me weird; I really love this; it’s one of the few times I am able to “feed” several parts of myself: video games, computer systems, nostalgia, and history.

So, I thought about creating a series of posts based exactly on that.

Typically, there will be one post per game, with a few exceptions where a particular game will need two posts (say, one about home computer ports and the other about console ports). I intend to pick the games myself, mostly from the ones I remember — and I already have a bunch of them in mind –, though I’m always open to suggestions.

And, because I grew up with magazines that bestowed numerical ratings on different aspects of games (e.g. graphics, sound, gameplay, etc.), I’ll do the same. For now, to make this simple, my ratings will be just between 1 and 5, for “terrible”, “bad”, “average”, “good” and “great”. And the aspects I’ll rate each conversion in are:

1. faithfulness: how well a port reproduces its original version, in terms of levels, features, and so on. In almost every case, there is an original version, even if that’s not immediately obvious. If there really isn’t one, then all ports get a maximum score (5) here, as will happen if we’re talking about the original version of a game. ((e.g. Out Run ports will be compared to the original arcade version, which won’t be included here. But, say, Cybernoid ports will be compared to the original ZX Spectrum version, which will be included as a “port”.))
2. hardware use: how much a particular conversion takes advantage of the system it runs on. In other words, top scores for “this system couldn’t really do much better than this”, and lowest scores for “this computer/console could have handled a much better version”. Exception: if a version reproduces the original perfectly, it will get a maximum score here, even if the original hardware was much more primitive (e.g. a port for modern systems of a 30-year-old game). ((for instance, an Xbox 360 version of Pac-Man which emulated the original perfectly wouldn’t be penalized, even though the 360 is capable of much more than an 8-bit 1980 arcade machine. On the other hand, if the Amiga port of Space Harrier plays slower than the Spectrum 48K version, doesn’t really look much better, and has loading pauses between levels that the Spectrum port was able to avoid…))
3. fun: in a world where this game wasn’t a port at all, where there were no other versions of it, and where you were playing it on its merits alone, instead of pining for the fjords the original, how enjoyable would this particular version be to play (assuming you enjoyed the genre)?

For instance, suppose you’re talking about a conversion of a beat ’em up game, and not only doesn’t it include most of the features of the original, but in fact it doesn’t look or play much like it… yet it’s still a great, enjoyable game by itself. It’d get a low score in faithfulness, but a high score in fun. On the other hand, if a port reproduced every feature and level of the original, but played like a dog, its scores would be the other way around.

It wasn’t just that it was technically impressive — and it was, for the time. The main appeal of Out Run was that it wasn’t a typical “racing” game in which professional drivers run against each other in specially prepared tracks or sections, such as a Formula 1 or rally race. Out Run was different: it was about a guy trying to impress a girl in his Ferrari Testarossa, through several North American scenarios. It wasn’t a “race”, there were no “opponents”; the other cars on the road were just normal traffic. Even advertisements at the time, instead of talking about some “ultimate driving challenge”, just said that you’d almost be able to feel the wind in your hair. In short, it was a very different driving game, and there’s a reason people still remember it well.

So, naturally, there were ports for home computers and consoles. Nowadays, it’s easy to try them all out, using emulators and such, but at the time the teenager I was didn’t have any options other than to play it on his trusty ZX Spectrum (a 128K +3, at the time). In other words, I didn’t really have other versions of the game to compare the Speccy port to (OK, there was the original arcade version, but nobody expected a home computer port at the time to compare to that!). If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have played it so much.

It looked like this:

Now, don’t get me wrong. These are actually pretty good graphics for a Spectrum. They’re mostly monochrome, as was usual on that machine, due to its infamous color clash (basically, it could only have 2 different colors for each 8×8 square of pixels), but they’re well-drawn and detailed, and you can identify most of the other cars easily. The graphics are not the problem here.

Neither is the sound, which you’ll be able to hear in the video coming next, sporting faithful renditions of two of the three classic Out Run songs, “Magical Sound Shower” and “Splash Wave”. Unlike most versions of the game (including the arcade itself), you don’t pick one song at the beginning and stay with it for the entire game; here, instead, it alternates between the two songs every time you go to the next stage. If you ask me, this way it actually works better, since you don’t listen to the same song over and over.

It also includes all the levels of the original arcade version, including the split paths, a feature left out of the Commodore 64 version, for instance. Yes, it’s a multi-load, which on tape could be pretty annoying (though at least in the 128K version it could keep several levels in memory, so, if on your second time around you chose the same stages, it wouldn’t have to load them again), but, again, it’s pretty understandable, considering the hardware and the size of the game.

So, what’s wrong with it? Take a look at it and see for yourself (the video spends about one minute on the menu screen, so please be patient):

Noticed the problem? No, it’s not the annoying “skid” sound (which, incidentally, was even worse in most of the other ports, including the Amiga one). It’s the speed, or, more precisely, the frame rate. Not only does it kill any possible sensation of speed, but it actually makes the game much harder to control, since, with a frame rate of 2-3 fps, it’s quite possible that you have pressed a key and the screen hasn’t updated yet — noticeably. And the speed you saw here is on a mostly empty level; the one with the rock structures, I’m sure, goes below one frame per second… and, no, I’m not exaggerating.

Now, yes, the Spectrum had its limitations, but, come on. I’d think it obvious that a game that played like this wasn’t ready for release. Couldn’t they lower the graphics detail? Optimize some routines? A racing game needs speed, needs a decent frame rate; if you’re not getting it yet, you don’t release.

It wasn’t as if the Speccy couldn’t handle a decent conversion of an arcade racing game:

or:

or:

or even:

So, why did I play it so much? I think I already mentioned it at the beginning of this post: it was a combination of 1) drooling over the arcade version, and 2) not having other ports of the game to compare it to, until several years later. This port, then, was the only “way” to play Out Run at home… and play it a lot I did. Oddly enough, more than the 4 examples I’ve just shown, all of them better ports with much smoother frame rates…

Unlike other entries in the Bad Comic Panels series, this one’s main quote is from an actual historical figure. I really love how the morally simplistic comics of the 60s (and earlier) depicted their opponents — such as Communists, in this case — as “hi, I’m evil!” card-carrying villains. In this particular case, we have a dictator describing himself as such — which is rarer than you might think.

Other things to appreciate here:

• the Commies are depicted as not just being in competition with the US, or “the capitalistic countries” in general, but as actually living just for beating them. They actually sit around a radio set waiting for news of their counterparts’ demise. Guys, get a life, will ya? ((in Soviet Russia — and, here, this is actually appropriate –, life gets YOU!!))
• not only that, but two of them are shown holding glasses of wine or champagne. Nice! Though I’d have though vodka would have been more appropriate…
• can you really see Khrushchev’s “number twos” addressing him as “Comrade K”? And don’t tell me that this was a case of censorship, as, if they printed comics like this, they weren’t particularly worried about what the Kremlin would think of them, or how it would affect US-USSR relations…
• “Comrade K” is actually depicted relatively benignly here, being the only one among the Communists in the room with a brain. Very different from an Iron Man comic from the same era ((the one with the origin of the Crimson Dynamo)), where he is presented as a sniveling, treacherous coward (we actually see his thought balloons)… and fatter and uglier, too!
• is the guy on the left, the one wearing purple, supposed to be based on Trotsky? He had been dead for 23 years when this comic was published, you know… Or perhaps that look was based on an “archetype” of the “evil Commie intellectual” common during the 50s-60s… anyone?

In general, pretty good. Bing’s search results seem to be at least as good as Google’s; during an entire week of heavy internet use, there wasn’t a single time when I couldn’t immediately find anything I wanted using Bing and had to resort to Google. I think this says a lot about the quality of the search engine itself: it really seems to be as good as the world’s most popular search engine.

It’s also very, very fast. Again, both search engines give results almost instantaneously, so nobody will really picking one over another because of speed, but, again, the fact that MS was able to match Google’s near-perfect performance says a lot — especially when you consider that we’re talking here about a company quite infamous, in the past, for making bloated, under-performing and unstable software.

As I mentioned in the past, Bing actually seems to rate my sites better for most of the keywords I tried. Yes, one can argue that this doesn’t mean that the engine itself is “better”, but, as I said on that post, the queries I used were reasonable, and the pages on my sites were relevant.

Bing seems to have some “intelligence” in indexing, say, WordPress blogs, that Google isn’t showing: for instance, even before I added “noindex” to my category and tag pages in Winterdrake, Bing was already not indexing them, and Google was. It’s arguable whether the search engine deciding these things for itself is a good or bad idea; in this particular case, it’s good (both for SEO and for usefulness to users, it’s better, for a blog, to index only the front page, the posts, and the pages, not categories, tags, date archives, author archives, or anything else), but I can perfectly see how a webmaster wouldn’t like this.

Bing seems slower than Google to index a new site, but, after it “gets going”, it appears as quick to index new content as the big G, if not quicker.

Bing’s Webmaster Tools page has been improving since I first used it several months ago, but it’s still not as good as Google’s, missing several of its features, and its use of Silverlight actually makes it less user-friendly. It’s especially bad on a small screen, such as that of a netbook. Microsoft really should allocate a couple of user interface people to it.

There are some quirks in the Bing user interface I don’t like much. For instance, a typical results page is much more colorful than the Google equivalent, which I find distracting, though I admit that this may just be due to being used to Google, which I have used for many years. Also, when you’re using image search, in Google you can quickly middle-click on several of the results and open new tabs in the background, something I find very useful; in Bing, that doesn’t seem to work well (possibly due to Silverlight?).

In conclusion: if, for some reason, I “had to” use Bing, I wouldn’t mind it at all. It has a few quirks that Google hasn’t, but is actually better in other respects, and in what really matters — search results quality and speed — it’s at least as good as Google. The best praise I can give it is this: during a week of heavy Internet use, I didn’t miss Google at all. I could perfectly live with either search engine without ever “pining” for the fjords other. And, in fact, I think I’ll leave this PC’s Firefox using Bing by default for a while longer, simply because I’m in no rush to switch back.

Another infamous one, by Frank Miller, and much parodied on the Internet. Much like the Tarot example, I’m posting it just so that, when this blog has thousands of readers a day ((any day now)), I’m not inundated with emails and comments asking me if I don’t know about this one ((OK, and also because I didn’t want to do “crude anti-Communism” twice in a row)). I’m not going to write much about it, instead referring you to an article titled All Suck Batman and Robin, which talks about this comic in detail.

In fact, ASBAR has a lot in common with Tarot: great art, professionally done, but the plot is absolutely crazy. In this case, it’s kind of worse, though: Frank Miller used to be a brilliant writer, with a long run on Daredevil that defines the character to this day, and other works of art such as Daredevil: Born Again, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Ronin, Batman: Year One, and Sin City, especially the early ones. Today, however, not only does he seem to be the laziest writer in existence, with delays of 6 months or more between issues, and several projects announced years ago that still haven’t seen the light of day, but his writing seems almost to be a parody of himself and the “grim and gritty” style he was so influential in some 30 years ago, with lots of repetition (“Dick Grayson: Age 12”), and mostly unheroic, unappealing, psychotic characters — even the ones supposed to be the heroes. Just read the dialog above… or look at the link I provided for more details of just how insane ASBAR is.

The first is after the Hulk, disguised as the Abominable Snowman (don’t ask), had destroyed a few of Fang’s tanks and weapons. Naturally, his men are worried:

But Fang, reminding me of a couple of bosses I had in the past, knows how to deal with those pesky outside contributions. I bet the other guy, the one with the simian look and the ridiculous huge bowl with a star, will not ever think, in the future, of offering the slightest suggestion to his most glorious general!

The next panel comes a bit later in the story, after Fang has ordered the launch of his missiles into the peaceful neighboring country of “Llhasa”, which is of course not meant to be Tibet (whose real-life capital is “Lhasa”, with just one “L”), perish the thought.

As the caption in the panel says, the Hulk stops the missiles, but Fang doesn’t know that yet, and so he orders his cavalry (just the right choice for attacking snow-covered mountains, I guess) to attack, and to “strike terror to those who were foolish enough to survive (his) missile attack“.

Because, when General Fang attacks your country, to even survive is but mere foolishness. Makes sense. I must use this phrase more often…

Back in time, to a 1982 game I played in 1983, on my first computer (well, technically my father’s), a 48K ZX Spectrum: Melbourne House’s The Hobbit.

This game… well, it has a story, and I’m not talking about the “Bilbo, Gandalf and a bunch of dwarves go on a quest to retrieve a dragon’s treasure” one. I mean a personal story. I guess I could say that this game changed my life — as much as anything can change one’s life, I guess.

So you’ll have to bear with me — or, of course, skip this post. Because this one is as much about “why I’m the way I am” as it is about the game — perhaps more. And it’s a long one. More after the break…

The Hobbit is a text adventure, with some graphics, but quite limited ones; the computer it was originally written on, the Spectrum, had existed only for months, and, besides, Melbourne House (the software house) would never be known for good graphics. The only decent image in the game is the loading screen. But, at the time, they were impressive, simply because they were there — most text adventures, even ones on “bigger” computers, were really text-only. Also, the parser was quite advanced for the time: while other games only supported 2-word commands in the form “verb noun” (e.g. “get sword” or “kill troll“), The Hobbit understood commands such as “take the short sword then viciously attack the troll with it“. You could also give instructions to NPCs, and they even had “personalities” of their own: they would move around independently of you, get into fights (and possibly even die off-screen), pick up and drop objects, and so on. They also could like you more or less, depending on both who they were, and your actions. That made the game much more unpredictable than most “standard” adventures, which could have solutions printed in magazines – not in The Hobbit, as one never knew what would really happen – “solutions” could, at most, tell you how to solve some specific puzzles.

And now, for the personal part. You see, that game was one of the half-dozen or so my father got with the family’s new ZX Spectrum, in 1983, and the only one of them that wasn’t a simple action game. Now, as a 9-year-old Portuguese kid, I knew virtually no English at the time. Not enough to read a book in English, not enough even to read a kids’ book, and certainly not enough to play a text adventure game in English. I am not exaggerating when I tell you I couldn’t even leave the starting location (Bilbo’s house).

Nor did I have the slightest idea of who Tolkien was, what Middle Earth was… I had never read a fantasy book in my life. It was a long time ago, but I think I recall that the most “advanced” books I had read at the time were Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five, in their Portuguese translation.

So, naturally, I put the game away – “boring text stuff”, I thought. And I played the other ones to death. But, soon, I got bored with them (and it would be a long time before my father got any more games)… yet I was still fascinated with the Spectrum, and that “strange text game” continued to intrigue me. So, I tried to find something more about it. I found some translated instructions, which at least told me how I was supposed to play the game – but that didn’t teach me English, of course. I read newspaper reviews (it wouldn’t be until 3 years later that I bought my first Speccy magazine, the 3rd issue of “Your Sinclair”), which said great things about the game, and, from them, I discovered some small things. Namely, that it was based upon a book, also called “The Hobbit“.

Which, being a curious kid, I asked my father to buy. A couple of weeks later, I had a nice Portuguese edition of the book. Which I read. At nine. (I only read The Lord of the Rings at 11, but that one’s not a children’s book at all.)

Next year, I got English for the first time at school, and I began to learn. And I always came back to the game, and a couple other text adventure games I later got. I also became more and more curious about fantasy, Middle Earth, and Tolkien.

So, this single, ancient computer game caused all the following changes in my life:

• it got me interested in reading “bigger” books (I had only read kids’ books until then);
• it make me discover that I really loved reading;
• it got me interested in fantasy (which, along with science fiction, is still my favorite literary genre today);
• it got me interested in Tolkien and Middle Earth (LotR is still my favorite book — I’ve read it more than 30 times –, along with The Silmarillion);
• it inspired me to learn English, and even in my early teens I was able to read anything in that language;
• it got me interested in more “complex” computer games (at a time and age when everyone else only enjoyed the simpler, reflex-based ones – even today, many older people still think of computer / video games as “dumb, basic kids’ stuff, with little spaceships shooting each other”, and can’t conceive of the idea of an adventure or strategy game);
• by “forcing” me to change my mind away from my initial impression of the game, it made me shake off some common prejudices, such as “if I don’t understand it instantly, then it can’t be good or interesting” — something most people sadly continue to believe, even as adults. This is one of the most important lessons I ever learned in my entire life;
• related to the above, it made me discover that there are some fascinating things out there that most people don’t know about, because of preconceptions, prejudices and intellectual laziness – but which, with a little bit of initial effort and thought, can be wonderful experiences. Why do you think I love heavy metal music, for instance?
• it made me discover the exhilarating feeling of solving a problem, or a puzzle, by thinking – a discovery which, incidentally, would be quite useful to me, decades later, as a sysadmin.

I could shorten most of the above in this way: I’m a geek mainly because of that game, 28 years ago. It was the turning point in my life; maybe if it wasn’t for it, I would have ended up being “normal”, “average” — listening only to “top 40” music, being obsessed with soccer (watching, not playing, of course ), TV, cars and dumb women… and not caring about fantasy, reading, learning, or even simply thinking.

I would have been just like everyone else. In some ways, a horrifying thought. Because, for all the price I’ve paid and am still paying, for all the rejections and disappointments and isolation and alienation and unfulfilled dreams and broken expectations… being a geek is, indeed, what I am, what I love to be, and what I’ll always be proud to be.