I've decided to murder nostalgia -- or at least become its eternal slave -- by playing Atari 2600 games for an entire day (read Part 1 here). Join me in my single-joystick-buttoned wonderland as I report my emotional state and some highlights of the games played.
The Day Begins
10:00 am I'm going to play Atari 2600 games without break or pause, without having to share or go outside. This is the actual heaven I dreamed of as a six-year-old (before I became a much wiser child at ten, with a Nintendo Entertainment System). Now I have a bucket of games and a whole day -- this is going to be great!
10:10 am I need a drink.
But let's go back a bit.
Hoppy/Alien Force (2-pack)
10:00:01 am This is perfect. The title sounds like two 80's TV shows mated and had a child, a talking marsupial child that could outwit alien invaders! The cartridge contains two games, which is a kid's idea of awesome until you find out it's like a bullet which also contains cancer.
I have no idea how children played these sober, apart from the fact they must have been stupid. The last ten minutes have been more dream-shattering than watching Superman smash the Statue of Liberty with a giant heroin needle.
"Alien Force" apparently means "The worst version of Simon Says you've ever played, which is really saying something. Something hideous and expletive."
Alien Force, which sounds like it only needs Arnold Schwarzenegger and some explosions to be the best thing ever, has your ship motionless in the middle of the screen while an enemy (singular) gradually approaches from four directions. If you identify the direction, it kills the enemy. Imagine a special charity episode of Smash TV where they let a paralyzed contestant play, and agreed to send in unarmed enemies one at a time.
Hoppy is Atari-speak for "Q*Bert flattened into 2D, with only one enemy and no victory condition." This ... this is not how I was hoping this day would go.
Star Warrior/Frogger (2-pack)
10:30 am The curse of my mission is I'm not allowed to say "This sucks" and turn it off -- I have made it a rule that I have to score in each game. Back when we first got these you'd have to play these for months depending on your Present Index Delay (the birthday-Christmas gap which made being born in June the best possible date), so I can't let myself off easy. I'm realizing these games are better educational titles than anything we've built since -- you did the same boring task again and again, as many times as you could without thinking or needing the toilet, and a number gradually got bigger. That wasn't a game, that was minimum-wage training camp.
Star Warrior's AT-ATs remind me that at least people didn't worry about copyright back then.
By the fortieth identical AT-AT, even blowing up AT-ATs had stopped being awesome, which makes me clinically dead for the rest of this article.
10:45 am My article plan has been completely destroyed. I was looking forward to getting paid for some retro fun and a slow realization of flaws, not to discover that I was clinically retarded as a child. These games are are the worst things ever, and the rest of the day stretches out like a prison with incredibly blocky walls and 4-color rapists waiting in the showers. The showers which sound like a broken radio stuck at maximum volume and being jammed into your ear by a dentist's drill.
Frogger
10:46 am Oh thank Christ.
Do you remember having to wait for a truly terrible -- both in length and quality -- song to end, before you could move? I swear I will never complain about a cut scene again. Not even in Metal Gear.
That felt genuinely good.
If I start to make spelling errors or refuse to talk about girls, you'll have to excuse me because I'm seven years old again and this time it's fantastic. The days of repeatedly jerking the stick like you're trying to sexually excite a Dalek, platforms flickering because there are too many objects on that row, and dying because of single-pixel differences. Which is joy! Because I have very low standards again!
I've realized why we love Frogger, Pac-Man and the rest -- not just because they were fiendishly good games, but because only a genius could make something entertaining at this level of technology. Those games were islands of oiled cheerleaders in a sea of crap. Finding a good game wasn't just fun, it was executive relief.
3D Tic Tac Toe
11:02 am As if sensing my happiness, the reverse-Terminator that is this Atari 2600 (sent forward through time to kill me) unleashed 3D Tic Tac Toe, and the idea that someone could not only play this, but spend days programming it in machine code proves it's impossible to die of boredom.
If you think there's some fast way of navigating around the board, you seriously overestimate the target market's quality of life
This game is an extraordinarily tedious lesson in how computers can instantly beat us in any simple game. The computer opponent (I won't use the word AI, as I'd insult the word "intelligence") could crush you in five minutes -- but if you played this game for longer than five minutes, you'd not only let it win, you'd also let it suffocate you without struggling.
M.A.S.H.
12:37 pm Don't worry, I haven't spent the last hour playing 3D Tic Tac Toe, as you can tell by the fact I'm still alive and writing this. You ... you don't want to know what I've been playing in the meantime. Suffice to say I'm only reporting M.A.S.H. because it's an entirely new kind of terrible. M.A.S.H. was about stress, depression, and good men being turned into screaming mounds of pain for no good reason anyone could see. The game captures that perfectly.
In possibly the worst trivialization of human suffering since Vietnam: The Musical!, you race to recover more injured soldiers under enemy fire than a rival hospital, before removing chunks of metal from a Sumo-baby.
Instead of curing cancer, the foremost 80s scientists found a way to make Operation even more annoying
This was so much worse than I imagined. Would I survive this trip into the past? Or would I die, with the sky flickering like an electrocuted rainbow while a tortured electronic raspberry plays through the speakers?
Please continue to Part 3: Pain and Pitfall!
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