Video Game Collecting

I finally received Licensed Gauntlet for Nintendo today. And like most games I receive I try to disect what the programmers were thinking when they make a game. Gauntlet for Nintendo is unique. Anyone who has played it knows the screen can fill up with enemies really fast. And when I say fill I seriously mean fill! On some stages it seems there is an enemy in every space of the screen!

This got me to thinking… why isn’t there crazy amounts of slow down in this game? You consider a game like Super Mario Bros. or Bubble Bobble and if you have more than three or four enemies on the screen you’ll either suffer crazy slow down or flicker.

I know why this happens in those games… with more enemies on the screen the Nintendo has to draw more sprites. The system can slow down or the sprites can be drawn less frequently (causing flicker) to keep the game moving. both of those options suck.

So why is it that Gauntlet can have a screen full of enemies and no slow down and no flicker? The answer is pretty unique. Now before I go explaining it I may have my terminology wrong, and if I do feel free to correct me in the comments.

The enemies in Nintendo Gauntlet are not sprites. Instead, they are part of the background! Huh? Consider Super Mario Bros. for a moment. Mario and the enemies move around on the screen on top of a static background that does not change. For each frame of animation the Nintendo draws the curent background and then the enemies and Mario are drawn on top of it. Once the picture is finished it is then displayed on the screen. I believe its called a “frame buffer”. If the Nintendo didn’t do this our eyes would literally see the sprites get drawn on the screen and the background drawn on top then the sprite drawn on top and repeating over and over and over (I believe this is referred to as “tearing”). The frame buffer prevents this but the system is still limited in the number of sprites it can draw before slow down and flickering occur.

Since the background is drawn once for each frame of animation the programmers were smart enough to make the enemies drawn as part of the background. This would mean that there would never be slow down or flicker associated with it no matter how many enemies are on the screen. Whether it was drawing a ghost or just a floor tile it would take the NES the same amount of time to draw it.

When watching the game this makes perfect sense. The enemies do not move smoothly. Instead they move around in a kind of choppy fashion. The backround is composed of “tiles” and they each have a fixed position. The enemies move in all directions at the same distance of the width of the fixed title.  So instead of drawing a sprite for each of the enemies, the programmers are having the background tiles drawn to look like the ghosts, orcs, etc.

There is one exception to this rule: Death.  Death moves smoothly like your avatar does.  So Death is a sprite and not a background.

I wouldn’t be surprised if other games used this same technique.  Late in the life of the NES there were some incredible games that seemingly did not have slow down or flicker, and its quite possible this technique is what over came the hardware limitations.

Those ten Nintendo games I won from eBay from pedrogames.com arrived yesterday.  I ordered them on Thursday evening, received the Invoice and paid for them Friday morning, and received them yesterday on Monday.  I’m not sure if pedrogames.com is in cahoots with the Postal Service, or if the Postal Service is just suddenly efficient because I also received Hook for Nintendo from another seller as well, with the same circumstance.  Though his game came from Missouri and not North Carolina.  In either case, it was a reasonable turn around time for both.  (I also have Licensed Gauntlet (in the grey cart) on it’s way as well.)

I should also be receiving the Nintendo 72-pin edge connectors soon (I am not receiving them from Pedrogames.com as the title of this post might lead one to believe).  I’ve a handful of NES’s that could desperately use them and the method to fix them is pretty well known on the web so I’m not going to post instructions or anything about that here.  I do want to point out that one of the systems I’ll be fixing with the edge connector came from a thirft store for $5.  The NES itself looks like junk.  It’s filthy and there is an ugly “chip” on one of the corners in the front.  But, a new 72-pin edge connector, and some Windex should clean it up nicely.

I also have plans to restore an NES controller that has been abused by years of cigarette smoke back to it’s original grey color.  I was at a thrift store recently where I saw alot of controllers where the buttons were tight and felt great, but the controller itself was deplorable.  The scratches were pretty bad but the yellowing… SHESH..  Anyways, if I can restore one (and I do have a plan for this) then I might start buying messed up controllers to see how many can be restored to a reasonable condition.  Funny… the thrift store that had these wanted $2.99 a piece, yet about two years ago I bought a BRAND NEW Nintendo controller from there for 25 cents.

This past Friday was celebrated with another pedrogames.com spending spree.  There were a handful a games with this purchase including Terminator 2, Total Recall, Spelunker, Tiger Heli, Mickey Mousecapade, Volley Ball, Mad Max, Spy Hunter, Dig Dug 2, and Touchdown Fever.

With the purchase of Touchdown Fever, there will be only two games left for me to complete the SNK collection: Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf and Little League Baseball.  Little League wasn’t appearing on the video game price guides site, but I fixed it, along with a bunch of other issues effecting the Nintendo list as I had mentioned in a previous post (plus the addition of the Tengen games).

Today I’ve added the SEGA Dreamcast price guide and the Nintendo Gameboy price guide.  The SEGA Dreamcast guide looks pretty accurate.  There are alot of games that are obscure to me (which would probably be expected since I’ve never owned a Dreamcast).  The Nintendo Gameboy list is huge.  It contains the original Gameboy games and Gameboy color.

There are few more price guides I hope to add over the next couple days including Nintendo Gamecube, Colecovision and possibly PSP.

Well, today was a busy day for http://www.videogamepriceguides.com/ .  In addition to adding the Nintendo Wii price guide, I had also added the Tengen games (licensed and not) to the Nintendo price guide.

I was hesitant to include them originally, but I had recently added Mike Tyson’s Punchout!! which wasn’t part of the original list (it isn’t officially recognized by Nintendo on http://www.nintendo.com/).  I included this because it was, at one point in time, an officially licensed Nintendo game.  Simply because Nintendo moved on doesn’t mean the game never existed, thus I included.

This would also mean I’d have to include the Licensed Tengen games as well.  Pacman, Gauntlet, and RBI Baseball were all licensed at one point in time.  Simply because Tengen and Nintendo had some bad blood doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be included.  Besides, it’s not like the games were terrible.  The truth is that the majority of the Tengen games were way better then some licensed titles.  Many people praise Tengen Tetris for allegedly being superior to the Nintendo version.

Also alot of the Nintendo games were corrected.  In case you never noticed, any game that had an apostrophe in the title wouldn’t appear.  It would show as “0″ available.  Well, this has finally been corrected!

I’ve added the price guide for Nintendo Wii to the videogamepriceguides.com website.  You can also visit it using the link near the top of this page.

The list of games was lifted from Wikipedia, and its possible that there might be some omissions, and some games that are listed even thought they have not been released in stores.

As you start to collect more and more videogames and really start to understand themes from particular publishers it's easy to understand where certain inspirations come from.

Take for example Section Z for Nintendo. This was, at one time, a very popular game. So much so it was mentioned on an episode of Oprah- NO LIE! But I'll get to that here in a minute.

Anyways both Section Z and Side Arms are developed by Capcom. Both have a similar feel to them although Side Arms had more depth to the game. So it begs the question… did one game inspire the other or vice versa? Could it be that Side Arms was the brain child from the creator of Section Z? Maybe the NES wasn't technically powerful enough to realize the full vision of Side Arms and Section Z was the best the developers could do? If I were to look at the copyrights of the games I could probably solve this mystery… ok ok ok. Enough is enough. What was the scoop on Oprah and Section Z?

In either late 1989 or 1990 the Oprah Winfrey show featured an episode on videogame addiction. The episode being two decades old kinda leaves my memory foggy but I remember a father who Alan Jackson reminds me of complaining about how his wife or kids unplugged Section Z as he was nearing the end of the game. I don't remember if the wife had a shiner or if the kids were turned over to the state, but what ever indignity this man indured by his family pales in comparison to the embarrassment this clown had to feel moaning about his precious Section Z to Oprah. What a loser!

Next year is 2010. Which reminded me of the movie 2010 which is a sequel to 2001. The 2010 movie spawned a game 2010 for Colecovision. It was the first used game I bought… ever! The year would have been 1988. My mom would take my sister and I to an open air swapmeet here in Las Vegas called Broadacres.

Back then Nintendo was popular and me, being a poor kid, could easily afford used Colecovision games because no one played them. To this day I remember buying the game. The vendor had two rows of games. $5 each. I bought it and… well… the game kinda sucked.

Fixing circuits before crashing into the sun is boring. Though trying a new game… that wasn't boring. That was priceless. There was a challenge all to its own… trying to figure a game as obtuse as 2010 without a manual.

Many used Colecovision games would follow: Popeye. Ladybug. Frontline. Carnival. Each were a conquered quest of ownership all to its own. When ownership of my first Nintendo finally game on December 9th 1990 my Coleco and her games were silently put out to pasture.

I played Platoon on Nintendo the other night. I hadn’t touched it in 19 years. I don’t think anyone else on Earth has either. That’s not to say it’s a terrible game because it’s not, but there are definitely some rough edges.

Loosely based on the Movie, you work across four levels to eventually escape the jungles of Vietnam. In the first level you need to find explosives and blow up a bridge. Then you rob the villagers of their supplies and start level two underground. There you play a mini First Person shooter game.. it’s very primitive to group it in that category but I don’t know how else to describe it. After escaping the tunnel you find yourself in a bunker shooting away at ghostly black images that creep up on you slowly. Nice concept and the music fits nice.

And finally with the fourth level you are on the clock. A Vietcong shoots at you and you travel through the jungle and escape.  You have a compass but I don’t remember if it matters which way you go.  It probably does, but after two attempts it was game over for me.

With the exception of Vietnam, this game doesn’t resemble the movie much.  Label it as something else and no one would probably make the connection that it was based (or inspired) by the movie.  But this might be a good thing since most videogames to movies and movies to videogames suck.

The game does have two redeeming features.  The first is the music.  It’s actually very good and sets a mood that would have been difficult to tolerate considering the theme of the game.  The second is the graphics.  Though the animations could be better the lush jungle and opening cut scene was done very well.