The look and feel of old school video games.

May 24 22:09 UTC 2003

Sometimes I get the feeling that they just don't make video games the 
way they used to.

I thought of it when I bought the Atari Anniversay collection of 
games.  Some of them just don't handle as well without the old 
controls.  For example, I really miss Tempest with the old knob 
control-- much better handling.  Crystal Castles featured a track 
ball, and I have yet to see if it will handle well with a track ball 
mouse.

I also have been to the Midway site to play their old classics and 
their games aren't the same, either.  Robotron (and a couple of other 
old games lost to the past) featured dual joysticks to move and fire.  
Spy Hunter had a great airplane yoke steering wheel that was easier to 
use than the keyboard controls I am stuck with on the site.

There was an old video game called Time Explorer.. no, I forget the 
name, that was a scrolling overhead view game that featured a joystick 
with a turning knob on the top that allowed your 360 degree angle of 
fire.

There are interesting controls out there, still-- but I would say not 
much for standing video coin-op games and not many for home PCs and 
game consoles.  Maybe it's a matter of economics; the Neo-Geo could be 
a very expensive game console except it's probably a money saver for 
business that use arcade machines.  As far as PC games and consoles, I 
see game pads, joysticks, force-feed steering wheels, and keypads (for 
Quake engine-driven games), but I don't think it's quite the same.
(Although with the new emulator technologies, I think Atari's Ataxx is 
much better played with a mouse rather than a joystick.)

The simplicity isn't quite out there anymore, as Nolan Bushnell 
(formerly of Atari) has noted.  But maybe it's because these kinds of 
games have found new life in a new niche.  There is a plethora of 
these kinds of games on the Internet-- quite a few of them arcade 
knockoffs or improvements on old favorites.  For example, Atari's 
Asteroids has been realized in a new 3D version (very, very cool) and 
there are new variants on what was Atari's old Breakout and slightly 
later Namco's Arkanoid-- 3D Blasterball from Wild Tangent.

More on that in another item.