Retro game bash: The good

Above: Yes, you can hook up an Intellivision to a plasma screen.

What do you get when you combine classic video games, piles of junk food, and a bunch of aging nerds? Besides a funky odor that lingers for days, I mean. You get the retro game bash -- a lifetime's worth of video gaming compressed into one day.

The day before the Fourth of July, some old friends convened and brought with us an Atari 2600, Intellivision, Sega Saturn, N64, Dreamcast, and backwards-compatible PlayStation 3. To ensure an authentic retro experience, we also loaded up on Doritos and Mountain Dew, just like we did when we were teenagers. Playing through a few decades of gaming history, while fueling up on caffeine and powdered cheese, yielded some surprising lessons. In particular:

• Some old games really rock.
• Some old games really suck.
• It is no wonder I never got laid in high school.

Let's start with the good stuff. First of all, I was surprised that it worked at all to hook up an Intellivision and an Atari 2600 to a plasma TV. The Intellivision even looked pretty good. The Atari suffered a bit from screen stretching, which we probably could have tweaked a little in the TV's settings.

Here's a bit of 2600 trivia that's sufficiently interesting to warrant its own paragraph. Did you know that you can plug a Sega Genesis controller into the 2600 and use that instead of the original joystick? Mostly a curiosity, unless of course you've misplaced your joystick. Which we had done.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, for the PlayStation One, is still a great game. Looks nice on an HD screen, too, even on a PS3. No smearing or other ill-advised "improvements" to the visuals. The only problem with this game is that everybody knows that Donovan has the best drop pattern, so everybody plays as Donovan all the time. In the HD remake, the designers tweaked the drop patterns for the sake of balance, which should have made the whole thing better. Only it didn't.

Sega's first-party games were completely badass. We didn't have time for the racing games, but Virtua Fighter 2 and both Virtua Cop games are phenomenal -- no nostalgia required. VF2 still looks great. The backgrounds are sparse, but the character models are colorful and fluid, locked in at 60 fps. And unlike so many fighting games that require a master's degree just to learn the movesets, anybody can jump right in and understand what they're doing.

The Virtua Cop games, too, are swift moving and fun. They don't look quite as good as Virtua Fighter, simply because there's more happening onscreen, so the level of detail is lower. The action is fast and furious, though, still the best designed lightgun shooting I know of. Of note is the car chase sequence in the first level of Virtua Cop 2, in which you can shoot out the tires of enemy cars and watch them flip into the air.

Sega's Dreamcast was well represented as well, if a little less "retro" than some of the other systems there. Crazy Taxi is still a fun romp, although arcade mode starts to seem repetitive to me even after just a few minutes of play. And Soul Calibur, a game I never spent much time with, looks phenomenal on a standard-definition television. You could have told me it was running on a 360 or a PS3 and I'd have believed you.

One big surprise: San Francisco Rush, for the N64, is a game I loved back in the day, but wouldn't have thought would hold up. Big mistake. N64 games in general have not aged well in the graphics department, and scanning Rush's race tracks for shortcuts is no easy task if you're not sure where they are. But racing through the familiar courses -- and hitting those huge jumps -- is as fun as ever. Mostly, that's because of the physics: ding your car just a little and it'll twist and turn in unpredictable directions, leading to insane crashes and the occasional death-defying recovery. It's a blast.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about some games that didn't hold up so well, including some surprises.

Breakdown

I'll not bore you with the details of my PlayStation 3's long, grueling journey toward health, except to note that I still haven't sent it in yet. This is going to take awhile.

I was in the middle of griping to myself about how they just don't make consoles like they used to, when I realized that hardware failures are just a fact of life. The Xbox 360 has gotten all the bad press, but my systems have historically had about a 50% failure rate, no matter who made them. A look back:

Console: Atari 2600
Year Acquired: 1984 (?)
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: A solid performer, although we never touched the damn thing once we got the NES, so who knows how long it might have lasted.

Console: Nintendo Entertainment System
Year Acquired: 1988
Serviced or Replaced: Replaced.
Reason: I can't recall the specific reason why our original NES bit the dust after only a couple years of service. It must have been that warranty-busting Game Genie. Damn you, Galoob!

Console: Sega Genesis
Year Acquired: 1992
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: The first star performer of any console I ever had. As of the last time I plugged it in, probably 2004 or so, it still worked. Can't say the same for the controllers, though. It's hard to play NBA Jam when you can't shoot.

Console: 32X
Year Acquired: 1994
Serviced or Replaced: Junked.
Diagnosis: I uninstalled the 32X to play Virtua Racing for the Genesis, which was incompatible, and after that the 32X never worked again. You may remember that hooking it up involved metal plates and about ten yards of cables, so I think this was actually for the best.

Console: Sega Saturn
Year Acquired: 1995
Serviced or Replaced: Serviced.
Diagnosis: A simple lens error was easy to fix, although dealing with customer service was a nightmare. (Me: "I think it's a disc read error." Them: "Try wiping the memory." Me: "It says 'cannot read disc.'" Them: "Try placing it on the floor, lighting some incense, and dancing around it in a circle.")

Console: N64
Year Acquired: 1996
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: Another solid performer, the N64 was in fine working order as of the last time I hooked it up, probably five years ago or so.

Console: PlayStation
Year Acquired: 1997
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: The first and last time Sony would not disappoint me.

Console: Super NES
Year Acquired: 1998
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: This was the smaller, redesigned SNES, which may have helped, but this thing even survived several weeks in the common room of a dorm, getting stuff spilled on it.

Console: PlayStation 2
Year Acquired: 2000
Serviced or Replaced: Replaced.
Diagnosis: Some kind of massive mechanical failure. The disc tray stopped working, and the whole system took to emitting a loud grinding noise. I attempted to fix it myself, following instructions on the Internet, and ripped an important-looking cable. Ended up buying the newer, smaller PS2.

Console: GameCube
Year Acquired: 2004
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: Like the 2600, this one was obsolete before it had a chance to crap out. Still, a win's a win.

Console: Xbox 360
Year Acquired: 2006
Serviced or Replaced: No.
Diagnosis: Knock on fucking wood.

Console: Wii
Year Acquired: 2006
Serviced or Replaced: Serviced.
Diagnosis: The reason it went in for service was because it couldn't read Smash Bros, for which Nintendo tried to blame me, but was really because the system is cheap and dinky. At least it was free to fix. The bigger problem with the Wii is the graphical artificating, which occurred as a result of my leaving it in standby mode for six straight months, because there was nothing to play.

Console: PlayStation 3
Year Acquired: 2007
Serviced or Replaced: Serviced.
Diagnosis: Pending. I'm not entirely sure what happened. It might just have overheated. Hopefully they'll say what the problem was when they return it.

There you go. 13 systems overall, and 6 died a premature death. I guess they make them exactly like they used to.

Note: This post has been updated since it was originally published, to include the GameCube.

Racing the Beam

The Atari Video Computer System was built to play Combat. That's it. Every piece of its hardware -- each chip, the iconic joystick, and the half-dozen toggles on the console -- was designed to run Combat perfectly. And Combat was an impressive game for 1977. It featured 27 different game types, each with single- and two-player options, and even with the option to handicap the better player. The story of the Atari VCS (later re-named the 2600), as told in Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost's Racing the Beam, begins there.

The book, part of a proposed series of "platform studies," tells the tale of the VCS by examining several important games throughout its life cycle. As the authors tell it, the console's defining hardware characteristic was the Television Interface Adaptor, which displayed the software's visual information at the same pace as the electron gun that draws the picture on a standard CRT television. It was a solution that made perfect sense for Combat, whose playing field was exactly one screen in size, and whose only moving elements were two vehicles and one or two projectiles.

But the more interesting story of the VCS is all the things it wasn't designed to do, and how programmers made it do those things anyway. There were no hardware shortcuts to create the multi-screen dungeon of Warren Robinett's Adventure. (In fact, one of my favorite bits of trivia in Racing the Beam is how the instruction manual for Adventure had to explain to players how to navigate between screens. It was that novel a concept.) The colorful neutral zone of Yars' Revenge was an innovative bit of programming trickery without precedent on the system. And until the advent of Activision, the first big third-party publisher, it was usually a lone programmer hashing out these games in a period of months or even weeks.

One of the most oft-cited examples of VCS failure is Tod Frye's adaptation of Pac Man. As Racing the Beam tells it, it's amazing that the game turned out as well as it did. In contrast to Combat, nothing about the VCS's design was suited to Pac Man. The intricate, asymmetrical pathways of the arcade version were too cumbersome for the system memory. The system wasn't supposed to be able to compute the movements of so many sprites at once. Most troubling for Pac Man, the TIA didn't even allow the display of circular objects. Frye's solutions to the challenges that faced him (in a timespan of only six weeks), frankly, seem like ingenuity at its finest.

Racing the Beam can be a bit technical in parts, but it requires no expertise to enjoy the stories of programmers finding new ways to squeeze more performance out of increasingly antiquated hardware. The jump from Combat to Yars' Revenge to Pitfall is so pronounced that it's almost like moving onto a different platform altogether. Turns out that programming isn't so different from playing games. First you learn the rules, and then you learn how to break them.

Atari 2600 box art vs. Atari 2600 games

No doubt about it, video games look great these days. Realistic character models, lushly rendered environments, and eye-popping visual effects seem to leap off the screen. If only box art had kept pace. In the days of the Atari 2600, the covers for most games were rendered with rich artistic detail, promising boundless visual delights within. If only the games looked anything like the box art promised. Here are some of my favorites.

Berzerk

The box promises:
A pitched battle against super advanced robotic insects through the depths of a Tron-like computerized environment. Your character is a lithe, speedo-clad Bruce Jenner lookalike.

The game delivers:
Several confused golems wait for their turn at the pink water fountain. They all got there at the same time, and no one knows who gets to go first.

Cosmic Ark

The box promises:
A Star Destroyer can pat its head and rub its tummy at the same time, blasting oncoming asteroids while gently scooping up the imperiled citizens of the galaxy.

The game delivers:
The flying oyster is nauseous, possibly from looking too long at the greenish starfield.

Adventure

The box promises:
Dragons! Castles! Hedge mazes! The grandest adventure of all time awaits, if thou are stout of spirit and pure of heart!

The game delivers:
Damn it, Warren left the pool floaty out again.

Custer's Revenge

The box promises:
A horny, nude cowboy ravishes a captive Native American woman.

The game delivers:
A horny, nude cowboy -- ah, crap.