AGAIN with the "worst video game ever" crap!!!

[Dauber]

My wife and I were watching WGN (Chicago) Morning News on the TiVo (it's a very unusual news program in that they get very silly and irreverent and aren't all stiff and formal like most news programs), and I saw the Atari 2600 E.T. graphic. I paused the TiVo and said to my wife, "If this is a story about how E.T. is the 'worst video game ever,' I'm gonna go ballistic." Unpause. I hear Mike Toomey say, "Now, here's a story about the worst video game ever." DAARAAAARHHHERHGHRHRHGRHGRHRGHGHHAHGHRGHHGRHGRRGHHHH!!!!!

 

Some of the claims Toomey spread included:

• it was a poor seller
• it was so bad that retailers shipped so many back to Atari that they had to be buried in a dump
• It nearly tanked the video game industry

 

I messaged him on Facebook on the off chance he 1) checks his FB messages and 2) will notice that a non-friend messaged him.

 

Edited September 12, 2023 by Dauber

[4ever2600]

Nice call out.  Good old wgn. Seems that's only gotten worse since I left Chicago 25 years ago.  Big surprise.

[Dauber]

FWIW, still the #1 rated morning news in the market.

[+save2600]

All ch.9 news needed was Harry Caray to fill in once in a while.  🤣

 

 

[bikeguychicago]

On a side note, I really wish Cubs games would come back to WGN (no chance whatsoever). I am SO tired of the FanDuel show ... err Cubs games... on Marquee. 

 

On a side note of a side note, if FanDuel is allegedly the #1 sports gambling app (as we're told every 2 minutes during the broadcast), why did the Cubs partner with #2 (DraftKings)?

 

Edited September 13, 2023 by bikeguychicago

[Flojomojo]

[zzip]

I think I cracked the code

 

Instead of complaining about them repeating inaccuracies about this game, we just start telling these journalists to "git gud"

 

Then watch the narrative change from "ET is the worst game ever" to "Why ET needs an easy mode"   

[roadrunner]

It was great having baseball games on tv everyday.  Don't even have to be a Cubs fan to enjoy baseball. A shame WGN Superstation changed over to Newsnation.

Sad times

[bmulligan]

Pac-Man on the 2600 was the worst game ever, or at least the most disappointing.  It was all downhill from there.  ET just got in the way of the trainwreck.

[davyK]

 

My issue with the Pacman hating on the 2600 is that I don't really like Pacman in any form. I remember it in the arcade and didn't like it all that much. So that meant that the port was no real disappointment to me. It's OK on 2600 - it had all the core gameplay elements but I wouldn't play it now as you have Ms. Pacman and Jr. Pacman. I really quite like Pacman CE (have that on the 360) but even then it's only something I play once in a while.  Jr. Pacman is the best of the bunch for me.

 

And as many have said 2600 Pacman was a huge disappointment for fans but it's far from the worst game on the console.  Same with ET. ET's main (only?) issue is the pit detection. If it was intuitive people would have liked it great deal more. It's just as convoluted as Raiders - you need a manual for both.

 

By the time Pacman came out, the 2600 was well past its sell-by date. Tech was moving so fast at that time that those ports are miracles. A 1980 game running on custom hardware costing thousands of dollars squeezed onto a 1977 console costing $100 in the early 80s? Stupendous achievement - technically and financially. Cart sizes in those days were dictated by costs remember. A few K of memory cost quite a bit.

 

It really shouldn't have happened - the 2600 should have been replaced long before arcade ports were being squeezed onto it. But - if the dev had been allowed to use black as the background, and been given more ROM space to code flicker management it would have been a great deal better and maybe not the disappointment it was.

Edited September 20, 2023 by davyK

[zzip]

3 hours ago, davyK said:

And as many have said 2600 Pacman was a huge disappointment for fans but it's far from the worst game on the console.  Same with ET. ET's main (only?) issue is the pit detection. If it was intuitive people would have liked it great deal more. It's just as convoluted as Raiders - you need a manual for both.

I would say Raiders is even more convoluted.   Without the manual, you will not get far in that game.   But you don't hear complaints about it being terrible.    I think it was the rumor (at the time) of large amounts of ET carts being buried in the desert that created the urban legend around ET in the games media (step 1: "it must have been terrible, why else would they bury it?"   step 2:  "not only was it terrible, it was the worst of all time!"  step 3:  "it was so bad, it single-handedly crashed the entire industry!")

 

3 hours ago, davyK said:

By the time Pacman came out, the 2600 was well past its sell-by date. Tech was moving so fast at that time that those ports are miracles. A 1980 game running on custom hardware costing thousands of dollars squeezed onto a 1977 console costing $100 in the early 80s? Stupendous achievement - technically and financially. Cart sizes in those days were dictated by costs remember. A few K of memory cost quite a bit.

 

It really shouldn't have happened - the 2600 should have been replaced long before arcade ports were being squeezed onto it. But - if the dev had been allowed to use black as the background, and been given more ROM space to code flicker management it would have been a great deal better and maybe not the disappointment it was.

But what can you do? consumers were still buying 2600s in droves, but not really embracing the next-gen replacement (5200/CV)   The low-price and large library made the 2600 a desired console in spite of the limitations.   Atari had originally planned to replace it by 1980, but they would have missed out on the 2600's prime years had they done so.

 

Back then, we all knew the 2600 was limited, but we also played enough 2600 games to know that a bunch of the issues plaguing the 2600 Pac-man port were not technical limitations, but design choices (color scheme, giving Pac-man an eye, sounds that don't even try to mimic the arcade, and so on)

[+bent_pin]

On 9/13/2023 at 11:41 AM, zzip said:

I think I cracked the code

 

Instead of complaining about them repeating inaccuracies about this game, we just start telling these journalists to "git gud"

 

Then watch the narrative change from "ET is the worst game ever" to "Why ET needs an easy mode"   

This

 

I bet Mike Toomey would take the advice and jump off the cliff in Dark Souls, then complain about it on his show.

[davyK]

@zzip   I agree that Raiders is far more convoluted!     Good point about the 5200 - but really the home video game market was still in its formative years and it was hard to predict what consumers would do.   Seems they had no interest in upgrading.  Atari were a victim of their own success by pushing that hardware so far - and while Pacman wasn't a step too far (as Ms. Pacman and Jr. Pacman showed), management got greedy by keeping the ROM size small (probably because of the cost of the Pacman licence) and with silly rules like "only space games have black backgrounds" they damaged themselves.

 

 

Edited September 20, 2023 by davyK

[zzip]

1 hour ago, davyK said:

Good point about the 5200 - but really the home video game market was still in its formative years and it was hard to predict what consumers would do.   Seems they had no interest in upgrading.

I think the interest in upgrading was there- kind of.   As kids, we salivated over the graphics of the CV and 5200,  but the parents buying the console would balk at the cost, especially if they just bought the 2600 in the past year or so.    The other issue was the 5200 had very few exclusive titles that weren't on the 2600.   It needed a killer game to get people to flock to it (like Space Invaders did for 2600), and it just didn't have that.

 

EDIT: And Atari killed the 5200 off before it had a chance to amass a compelling library.   It took the 2600 3 years to get its killer app in Space Invaders.   The 5200 didn't even get 2 years on the market!

 

1 hour ago, davyK said:

ri were a victim of their own success by pushing that hardware so far - and while Pacman wasn't a step too far (as Ms. Pacman and Jr. Pacman showed), management got greedy by keeping the ROM size small (probably because of the cost of the Pacman licence) and with silly rules like "only space games have black backgrounds" they damaged themselves.

Yeah, it seems like Pacman came out just before 8K rom carts were commonplace.   It should have been Atari's most important IP that year and they should have pulled out all the stops to get it right.  Instead they just treated it like "We can slap the Pacman name on anything and it will sell!"   But a better job could still be done in 4K

Edited September 20, 2023 by zzip

[davyK]

Wasn't the 5200 basically a consolised version of the Atari 400 micro?

 

 

A better job of Pacman can be done in 4K now - but that's with 40 years of dev technique development. Imagine being back then and having to create it.   The quality of homebrews now is astounding but the devs now have the benefit of all that experience and existing codebase.  Not taking anything away from modern homebrew devs as 2600 coding is still stupidly hard, but they do have the benefit of that.

Edited September 21, 2023 by davyK

[zzip]

34 minutes ago, davyK said:

Wasn't the 5200 basically a consolised version of the Atari 400 micro?

 

 

A better job of Pacman can be done in 4K now - but that's with 40 years of dev technique development. Imagine being back then and having to create it.   The quality of homebrews now is astounding but the devs now have the benefit of all that experience and existing codebase.  Not taking anything away from modern homebrew devs as 2600 coding is still stupidly hard, but they do have the benefit of that.

Yes 5200  was based on Atari 400, but different enough so carts/peripherals from one don't work on the other.

 

There were a number of changes that could have been made to 2600 Pacman that don't require modern tools, these seem like the easiest:

- get rid of pacman's eye, and make the Pacman sprite rounder and less like diamond-shaped

- make the maze colors more reflective of the arcade

- make the sounds closer to the arcade:   no "boing boing", should be able to get closer to "wakka-wakka"

 

Here are changes that might require more work or exceed the 4K rom, but should still be doable with tools of the time:  (they were seen in Ms Pacman)

- make a maze that more resembles the arcade with tunnels on sides

- intro music melody should be arcade accurate, not the 4 notes we got.

- fruits not vitamin pills or whatever they were called.

- better flicker management.

- ghost sprite changes when blue

- Pacman faces up and down when moving up and down

- Pacman stops chomping when he isn't moving.

 

I think if they had done some of the above, the game would have been better received.   It would have felt like they tried.    Ms Pac-man is far from arcade-perfect but it definitely feels like they tried.   Pac-man feels like they didn't even try for accuracy.

 

 

[Flyindrew]

3 hours ago, davyK said:

Wasn't the 5200 basically a consolised version of the Atari 400 micro?

 

t.

The 5200 version has the famous cut scenes. Its missing in the 400/800 version.

[davyK]

On 9/21/2023 at 5:10 PM, zzip said:

Yes 5200  was based on Atari 400, but different enough so carts/peripherals from one don't work on the other.

 

There were a number of changes that could have been made to 2600 Pacman that don't require modern tools, these seem like the easiest:

- get rid of pacman's eye, and make the Pacman sprite rounder and less like diamond-shaped

- make the maze colors more reflective of the arcade

- make the sounds closer to the arcade:   no "boing boing", should be able to get closer to "wakka-wakka"

 

Here are changes that might require more work or exceed the 4K rom, but should still be doable with tools of the time:  (they were seen in Ms Pacman)

- make a maze that more resembles the arcade with tunnels on sides

- intro music melody should be arcade accurate, not the 4 notes we got.

- fruits not vitamin pills or whatever they were called.

- better flicker management.

- ghost sprite changes when blue

- Pacman faces up and down when moving up and down

- Pacman stops chomping when he isn't moving.

 

I think if they had done some of the above, the game would have been better received.   It would have felt like they tried.    Ms Pac-man is far from arcade-perfect but it definitely feels like they tried.   Pac-man feels like they didn't even try for accuracy.

 

 

Making Pacman rounder would require more pixel data which means more ROM space.

I agree about the maze colours. - Having a black background alone would have made the ghosts more visible.

More complicated sounds needs more data to define them. That data needs more ROM space.

 

The arcade game is displayed on 4:3 monitor that is rotated so that it is taller than it is wider. So you can't fit an accurate maze onto the screen of a 4:3 TV that isn't rotated with the display capabilities of the 2600. Even the SNES and MD ports had to scroll the mazes to retain accuracy and scaling. More code to handle that needs more ROM.

If the maze was to be more accurate it would require more data to define it (even with using reflections) and maybe more coding. That would need more ROM.

I am guessing that having the tunnel at the top and bottom was for technical reasons and I do not know what they were.

Better intro music would need more data to define the notes - that means more ROM space

Fruit graphics would require more space to hold the sprite data - that means more ROM space.

Filcker management needs more code (to check for when ghosts are or are not on the same scanlines. More code needs more ROM size.)

Sprite changes on the ghosts means more sprite definitions which need more ROM space.

For pacman to face the way he is going you need sprite definitions for facing up , down and left - that would need more ROM space. Maybe the programmer could have been clever to use reflections  for up/down and left/right but you still need more space for the up and down facing Pacman. And it would need more code to implement which might need more ROM space.

 

 

What I'm saying is that the developer could have made a better version at that time with a bigger ROM which Atari wouldn't pay for.

 

Nowadays with modern techniques there are good looking 4K versions of the game. But back in '82 those techniques were unknown.

 

Todd Frye (the dev) worked his butt off on the port over six months. It was damn hard to do back then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600_video_game)

Edited September 22, 2023 by davyK

[zzip]

17 minutes ago, davyK said:

Making Pacman rounder would require more pixel data which means more ROM space.

It depends how the sprite is stored,  if they are mirroring parts of it or using some algorithm to generate it, it might require more space.   But on the other hand, if they are doing any of that, then removing the eye should save space, since the top of the sprite could mirror the bottom.

 

20 minutes ago, davyK said:

More complicated sounds needs more data to define them. That data needs more ROM space.

But the existing "boing boing" sounds aren't the simplest sound either, you have to play with volume to get that effect,  I think you could get something more Pacman like with the same amount of code

 

23 minutes ago, davyK said:

The arcade game is displayed on 4:3 monitor that is rotated so that it is taller than it is wider. So you can't fit an accurate maze onto the screen of a 4:3 TV that isn't rotated with the display capabilities of the 2600.

Other hacks and homebrews show that a better maze can be done on the 2600 in 4K.   Yes you probably can't get it arcade-perfect on the 2600, but you can get a better maze than what we were presented with.   This Ebivision version is 4K and was created over 20 years ago before many of the modern tools were developed.

 

Now maybe the 1982 version wouldn't look quite like that, but it still could have been better than it was

34 minutes ago, davyK said:

Todd Frye (the dev) worked his butt off on the port over six months. It was damn hard to do back then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pac-Man_(Atari_2600_video_game)

It could also be that Todd Frye wasn't the right person to work on it.     The job that GCC did on Ms Pac-man and all their other 2600 arcade ports shows that having the right talent matters.   Also part of the problem is management,  since Pac-man was such a high-profile title, they should have given Frye the resources he needed.  They probably should have splurged on an 8K rom to get it right instead of assuming it would sell on name alone.

 

[davyK]

I'm sorry but you don't sound like someone who has a lot of experience in writing low level code; certainly not 2600 assembler within the hardware limitations. Removing an eye does not save space (although as you say it help with reflections).Coding for reflections (as I said in my post) and to be fair to you - as you say in your post - requires more code - more ROM.  Frye had to implement a 2 player mode which also took up RAM and ROM. (It's in that wiki leak in my previous post). So making it even harder in 4K.

 

Ms. Pacman and Jr. Pacman have larger ROMs. Twice the size. GCC were talented but so were the Atari developers.

 

The 4K Pacman you mention (which is the one I was thinking of in my earlier post) was created 20 years after Frye's port. You seriously suggesting that Frye wasn't up to the job? Most homebrews of today trump the original games.

 

You are correct in saying Frye should have been given 8K.

Edited September 23, 2023 by davyK

[davyK]

btw @zzip

 

I hope I don't come across as being argumentative. It's just it's really hard to appreciate just how tough the 2600 is to code for unless you have tried. I have. The best I have done so far is create PAL60 versions of my favourite games (see the PAL60 thread). These old devs literally worked miracles without the tools and knowledge base of today and having deadlines. 

 

I'd argue the devs of today still perform them even with something like Stella's debugger - it is still monumentally difficult to juggle bytes and cycles even with the capability of creating larger ROMs.

 

I see my prev post has been marked for moderation (it is currently marked has hidden) - that hasn't happened before and I'm not sure why it has happened now. I'm hoping it isn't a sign of Atari weighing in now post buy over.

 

Anyhow '82 Pacman isn't playable to me now but I did play it in 82-83 albeit not that much as I wasn't a great Pacman fan then. Ms. Pacman and Jr. Pacman are still very playable. I just want to defend the belief that the '82 port was a lazy or rush job. It was a tough task to create back then with 4K and it deserves a bit more credit than it gets. 

Edited September 23, 2023 by davyK

[tep392]

1 hour ago, davyK said:

 

 

I see my prev post has been marked for moderation (it is currently marked has hidden) - that hasn't happened before and I'm not sure why it has happened now. I'm hoping it isn't a sign of Atari weighing in now post buy over.

 

There are certain words, some political, that will flag a post for moderation.  Your use of the word "trump" triggered it. It has nothing to do with Atari. 

edit: I just had to approve this post.

 

[davyK]

Ah!!!  That's genuinely hilarious!

 

 

Makes sense too!

 

 

 

[zzip]

On 9/23/2023 at 8:31 AM, davyK said:

I'm sorry but you don't sound like someone who has a lot of experience in writing low level code; certainly not 2600 assembler within the hardware limitations. Removing an eye does not save space (although as you say it help with reflections).Coding for reflections (as I said in my post) and to be fair to you - as you say in your post - requires more code - more ROM.  Frye had to implement a 2 player mode which also took up RAM and ROM. (It's in that wiki leak in my previous post). So making it even harder in 4K.

Yes I have done ASM and sprite coding

 

I've never disassembled Pac-Man code,  but if the sprite data is stored as displayed,  then it makes no difference whether the eye is present or not,  same amount of data required.

 

However, if the Pac-man sprite had no eye, then the top and bottom could be mirrored, yes this would require a few more instructions to implement, but would require half the sprite data.  however since the sprite is animated and faces two direction,  it should lead to a net savings in rom size of a few bytes (ever byte counts)

 

Either way, my point is there is no technical reason why the eye couldn't be removed.   It's there only because Frye was taking liberties with the IP that Pac-man fans didn't ask for.

 

On 9/23/2023 at 8:31 AM, davyK said:

Ms. Pacman and Jr. Pacman have larger ROMs. Twice the size. GCC were talented but so were the Atari developers.

Remember the reason Atari dropped their lawsuit against GCC and instead asked them to develop 2600 games was because they were desperate for developers.   Atari's best developers kept leaving and starting new companies.

 

On 9/23/2023 at 8:31 AM, davyK said:

The 4K Pacman you mention (which is the one I was thinking of in my earlier post) was created 20 years after Frye's port. You seriously suggesting that Frye wasn't up to the job? 

The 2600 homebrew scene barely existed in the 90s when the Ebivision port came, nor did the modern tools people use today.    Considering Frye's legacy is Pac-Man and the Swordquest series,  both games that should have been great but were ultimately letdowns,  I do question whether he was the right person to do the port.

 

On 9/23/2023 at 9:06 AM, davyK said:

I hope I don't come across as being argumentative. It's just it's really hard to appreciate just how tough the 2600 is to code for unless you have tried. I have. The best I have done so far is create PAL60 versions of my favourite games (see the PAL60 thread). These old devs literally worked miracles without the tools and knowledge base of today and having deadlines. 

I understand this.   But many of the changes I suggested are low effort.   Changing maze colors,  taking the eye out the sprite,  change "boing boing" sounds to something else.   These are all things that could have been done in an afternoon and not have a net cost on rom size.

[davyK]

 

Fair play then @zzip.

 

I don't think we will ever agree on some points apart from the black background and having more ROM.