nuskadamo

[ULTIMA RECENSIONE PER UN PO' PER PIETA MIA]

There is a handful of people out there, which tends to be a lot louder than the overwhleming majority, that doesn't think a whole lot of historical milestones in #gaming such as Mario 64 and Zelda OOT, when it comes to actually playing them.

They might respect what these games have done for the industry/art form/whatever-you-wanna-call-it as a whole, but they also might find them non-descriptive and bland once they get around to booting up their dusty Nintendo 64 to see what the hype is all about, and when these people infect the marketplace of ideas with such provoking thoughts, controversy ensues. Hi, i'm people.

Many, observing this conflict from afar, have hypotesized that this is the case because the innovations that these two games have brought to the table may seem banal when put next to anything that came after over the course of 30 years, and when that's the case for a lot of other pioneers in any kind of #gaming innovation, their old-game-jank is the aspect that sticks out the most in retrospect, giving them a roundabout second lease on relevancy. Think of Pokémon RBY.

The problem for the N64 titans in particular is, if we can even call it a "problem", that they are extremely well polished given how unexplored 3D technology was at the time, and their gameplay loop is so basic (and i use basic as a neutral term here, not to dismiss its structure) that there is very little of it that would be considered quirky and endearingly dated.

And when these games can't cling on any kind of novelty, both past and current, or emotional attachment, what are they left with, for an average player?

Their game design and mechanics are perfectly fine, outside of a few excusable anachronisms, but would you have cared anywhere near as much to explore the smaller intricacies of Mario 64's movements by your own initiative if you didn't have a speedrunning youtuber explain them to you in a digestible format? Most likely not, but then againn, maybe you would have.

Mario 64 and OOT aren't JUST aseptic tech demos to show off the capabilities of Nintendo's latest console, of course, Mario especially does do some cool things that have been carried over by its 3D sequels to this day. They did make full use of the new possibilities that the polygons had to offer, in ways that were groundbreaking at the time.

If i was a kid in the mid 90's, or heck even an adult, i would have a completely different perception of both these games, i have no doubt... but then again, i've played dozens of other games from way before my time, earlier and jankier 3D games too, and even if their fundamentals may have been more flawed, i found them a lot more memorable.

And it's not like these are spotless titles either, but that's more to blame on the console they were on rather than their own individual demerits. The Nintendo 64 aged worse than the PSX and the Saturn, considerably so, with its controller that is objectively bad and i will not hear differing arguments, its ugly smeary textures and its low frame-rate, if you didn't grow up with the console, it's a really hard one to come back to, at least for me.

Either way, let's not pretend their toothless and bland aesthetics would have fared much better in other consoles.

I'm not really writing this up to go against some imaginary grain that only exists in my head, and tell you that this game you you like is actually shit just to be mean, even if i do stand by all the negatives i listed. I'm not even trying to elaborate on why other people may share my indifference, maybe they are just contrarians for the sake of it, maybe they just think these games straight up suck but have no proper arguments to back up this claim. I don't know.

I'm just one of those people who would rather play Mario World and A Link to the Past rather than their Nintendo 64 counterparts, and "historical value" can only go so far in making me respect a game that i simply didn't have fun playing.

But i did have fun playing Hockey for the Atari 2600. So what the fuck does it matter what i have to say, really?

MINCHIA l'unica altra recensione qua è anche quella in inglese che buffo

Not quite the real thing, right? But given what we're working with, it'll do.
Realistic enough ball physics for a 2600, but the horizontal layout of the table makes for a rather uninteractive experience, to the point where i'd say nudging has a much bigger impact on the overall score than nailing the timing with the tiny levers.

I love how sassy the instruction manual is. Sure, a real pinball table might sound better in theory, but don't wanna go back to that smelly bowling alley again, do you? With all those gross ugly people, and the distracting noise of those squeaky shoes everyone has to wear, and don't get me started on the terrible music blasting in your ears at all times. Ugh! A child is already playing, how long will you have to wait for?

Somehow there is a dead pixel on the bottom right corner of the screen. I didn't know Atari games could even get such a thing.

[Inglesotto]

Aquaventure, the game that allegedly never was...

I've just heard Tod Frye, one of the more knowledgeable and prolofic VCS developers at the time, explain in the Atari 50 documentary how he had to essentially squeeze blood out of a stone when developing games that were considerably less elaborate, how he had to adopt tricks that resulted in flickering and graphical artifacts for the sake of mantaining arcade accuracy... meanwhile Aquaventure confortably features up to 4 sprites on screen with multiple color palettes, shading AND animations without a itch, when something like this would have been rare on the more powerful 7800 a few years later, and we're supposed to believe such a technical achievememt could have been done within the same time frame? I don't wanna pretend i know anything about Atari development, but it's hard to not be suspicious.

I believe a game this complex graphically could not have existed in '83, and i refuse to see it as anything but the result of 2 decades of hindsight in programming design and creation tools. If i was the developer allegedly tasked to create Aquaventure back in the day and they told me the game was getting cancelled i would have been bitter about it for the rest of my life, and the fact that no one came out to take full credit for it according to the documentary section is frankly preposterous.

The marketing campaign behind the Atari Flashback 2, a 2600 replica which included plenty of homebrew projects alongside the licensed games, was the first time the general public has been made aware of Aquaventure, and the emulation box came out at a time in which presenting this kind of information as fact was a lot easier than nowadays, but was it actually something described at face value or was such premise more tongue 'n cheek? It would have been weird if the latter was the case, because prototype cartridges of unreleased games from the market crash were an actual thing that people were excited to get their hands on, but none of them had this little information about their development available. The Atari 50 Collection itself keeps things vague, which i believe is an attempt at upholding kayfabe.

All this secrecy almost makes one wanna investigate outside the confines of the Collection... but i won't. I like the idea of keeping this small mistery alive. What if i was wrong all along and this is indeed an authentic prototype? Wouldn't that be something? The premise itself may not have been one with lots of mainstream appeal, even back in those simpler times, but its impressive graphics would have turned quite a few heads.

[Ho molte recensioni inglesi in arretrato abbiate pazienza]

Fascinating console, the Atari 7800.
I was expecting it to be a beefed up version of the 2600 without much else to make it stand out, like it's 5200 predecessor, turns out instead that the console's capabilities are a lot closer to that of the NES. Knowing the 7800 was ready to be shipped a whole year before Nintendo's machine would make its debut in the west makes you wonder if Atari's system would have had a better chance to find its place on the market, despite the weaker hardware.
Of course, mere pixel count is far from all there is to consider when it comes to such old consoles. Developing for each of them had its own unique set of challenges and opportunities, and ports for games that might look somewhat similar to each others had to be remade nearly from scratch. In short, the 7800 wasn't strictly just a worse version of the NES on a technical level, games do feel smoother on average for example, and i haven't noticed anything like those graphical artifacts that appear so often in NES games. I imagine programming something as complex as Metroid or Zelda on such an underperforming console might prove unviable, if attempted, but this is just me spitballing.
There's also the fact that the original controller was ass, as Atari still didn't take the hint that joysticks were a thing of the past. No theory-crafting as crazy as the Cosmos supplanting the Game Boy would make much sense in this scenario... how sad.

So. Scrapyard Dog.

This is the one with the famously bad cover, the one with the crudely drawn big nosed fuck. You've probably seen the AVGN video about it.
With its floaty physics and nonsensical placement of enemies and platforms you'd think Scrapyard Dog was released in the mid 80's, right after Mario became the hottest ticket in town and every company was scrambling to put together their own personal interpretation, yet unclear as to what the cardinal rules of a 2D platformer even are. It came out in 1990. Super Mario World was already out in Japan, for reference. There's a shop, you can spend money bags to buy empty tin cans you can throw at rats and other such scounderls. Super Mario World didn't have that.
There exists a Lynx version that adds an intro cinematic, replaces the middle school scribble this game is most famous for with a lovely early 90's cover, features a much better manual with lots of color and illustrations and in general plays a lot better. Unfortunately it's one of those games in which you have no idea what part of the scenery is interactable or not and even when you do the collisions are fucked up. Those animals in trenchoats that shoot at you are infuriating.