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Setting Up You The Bomb

Kaboom! is an Atari 2600 game made by Activision.  Its box and cartridge are one of the few known examples of an acceptable use of the color magenta.

The premise of the game is simple:  The Mad Bomber is on the loose and you have to catch his bombs in buckets of water before they hit the ground and explode.  The Mad Bomber darts across the top of the screen, dropping bombs, and you control up to three buckets with the paddle.  The game starts off slow and simple.  Ten bombs are dropped in the first round, and it’s easy to catch them all.  The second round drops 20 bombs at a faster rate.  Subsequent rounds drop more bombs at a faster rate, topping out at the eighth round where 150 bombs are dropped blazingly fast.  If you miss a bomb, all of the bombs on screen explode, you lose a bucket and drop down a round to an easier difficulty, and the Mad Bomber smiles at the chaos he’s caused.

The graphics are outstanding for an Atari 2600 game.  The bombs look like bombs, the Mad Bomber looks like a Mad Bomber and the buckets of water, well, they sort of look like buckets of water.  The Mad Bomber has different facial expressions, as well.  He’s sad when you catch the bombs, happy when you miss, and apparently gets “surprised” if you get a score over 10000, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen that.

I said the rounds get progressively faster, but I didn’t indicate just how fast they get.  The speed gets insane in the upper levels.   It’s probably the fastest game on the Atari 2600.  You’ll probably think it can’t get any faster than round 5, but it will.  In the higher levels, the game gets so fast that you literally cannot watch the action.  If you try to move your eyes to track the falling bombs, you’ll probably get dizzy and end up with a massive headache.  You basically have to play this game with your peripheral vision.  Stare at the center of the screen, loosen up your focus, and play out of the corner of your eye.

That’s why I want to try to tackle this game.  It runs fast.  Very fast.  To be successful, it will have to be able to move the paddles with both speed and precision, as opposed to Pong, where the robot did neither.  If I can get the robot to play Kaboom! well, then it shouldn’t have any problem with movement in any paddle-based game.

Here’s a sample of the game, in case you haven’t seen it before:

[mediaplayer src=’/log/wp-content/uploads/Kaboom1.wmv’ ]

February 25, 2010   No Comments

Pong Non Sufficit

Pong is not enough.

The Atari Robot is bored.  Pong is undeniably a classic game, but it’s classic in the same way Shakespeare is.  Everyone looks at it and praises it, but they really want nothing to do with it because it’s so old and dull.  Back and forth, back and forth.  For hours.  Even to lose a game takes twenty minutes sometimes.  And it’s not really pushing anything to the limit.

The Atari Robot wanted more out of life.

At first, it talked at great length about a kitten object that it had fallen in love with and wanted to search the world for.  For a time, this plan was compelling, however, my apartment is strictly full of non-kitten objects, and acquiring a kitten-object for this endeavor would not have been wise.

Atari Robot was sad.

It looked around at other famous robots.  There’s the robots that build cars, but there’s no romance or excitement in that.  Then it found what it wanted to be.  One of the most well known uses of robots in the world today is in bomb disposal.  Excitement and adventure, becoming a bomb disposal robot would be sure to make all the female Atari Robots fall for him.  However, my apartment is strictly full of non-explosive objects, and acquiring an explosive object for this endeavor would not have been wise.

Atari Robot was sad.

Then I realized that there was a way for Atari Robot to live its dream and keep all my fingers and not get arrested.  I have a bomb disposal simulator that Atari Robot could use.  Atari Robot could join the Bucket Brigade to stop the Mad Bomber!

Atari Robot was happy.

February 25, 2010   No Comments

Tidbits

I seem to have been neglecting this lately.  I’m a week overdue on a programming/testing post, and it’s almost getting to the point where I’m late on a video game history lesson.  So, to prove I’m not dead, here’s a few bits of here and there.

First, if you’re in Washington, you have less than a week left to Approve Refererendum 71.  I already have.  Have you?

Now, back to games and things.  Here’s a few of my latest acquisitions.

 TengenTetris

This one should require no introduction or explanation.  Tengen Tetris.  I spoke about this game several times in previous entries, alluding to the legal fight between Atari and Nintendo, but always in passing.  Now that I actually have a copy, I’ll have to devote an entire article about it.  That’ll be in the future, but for now, to illustrate its awesomeness:  Two-Player Cooperative Mode.

MetafightFamicom

The second notable acquisition is a Japanese Famicom game called Metafight.  Well, it’s actually “Something-Something Metafight”, but I don’t know Japanese.  The cover has some generic anime characters, one of which looks angry.  None of that really matters.  I’m not really into Japanese things and I’m not really into anime or stuff like that.  And I don’t have a Famicom system.  So, then, you ask, why would I go out of my way to buy a Japanese anime game for the Famicom?

MetafightIntro

This screenshot might help you figure it out.  It at least might look a bit familiar to you.  Maybe.  Can’t quite place it?  This’ll do it:

MetafightFirstLevel

Metafight is the Japanese version of Blaster Master. ((And if you don’t know what Blaster Master is, well, you just need to play more NES games.))  There is no opening story sequence in Metafight, which automatically means that the plot for Metafight makes far, far more sense than the “My pet frog jumped on a box of radioactive waste in my backyard and went down a hole and I followed it and found this bad-ass hyper-agile tank in the underworld and I proceeded to fight lots of nasty creatures in my bad-ass hyper-agile tank in order to rescue my radioactive mutant pet frog and save the world from the radioactive mutants that live under the Earth’s crust” plot that Blaster Master tried to have.  Of course, since Blaster Master changed the story from whatever angry anime guy was doing to something stupid about a mutated frog, they had to change the tank ignition sequence to be in a cave, instead of Metafight’s futuristic tank garage.

But enough about that for today.  It’s time for robots.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited the land of the video game playing robots, but I assure you, I have been thinking about them.  I think the next time I get back into them, assuming I ever do, the first thing I’ll do is organize the codebase.  It was built to get it to market, but not built for future expansion.  If I want to keep going with this, I’ll need to rewrite large sections of it and separate the movement interface and screen capture plumbing from the game specific recognition and logic code.  Although it won’t be quick, that should hopefully be reasonably straightforward to do.  From there, I’d like to work on improving the control of the paddle.  A few weeks ago, I think I may have improved the precision of the controls, but I still haven’t tested it out.

At any rate, I think Pong is the wrong game to try to develop precision controls.  The trajectory projection gets in the way of making sure the paddle is moving exactly where I want it to go as fast as I can get it there.  The paddle might very well be going where I want it, but by the time it gets there, that’s no longer where I want it.  So, I think I’m going to have to try another game to tune the paddle controls.  Right now, I’m leaning toward Kaboom! as the game of choice.  It should have easy to program recognition and logic (Bomb drops straight down, move to catch bomb, repeat), and it will absolutely require precision, accuracy, and speed.  Runner up is Indy 500, but I think the pathfinding and collision avoidance knock that one out at this point, not to mention the 360 degree driving paddle.  An interesting side-note is that pretty much whatever paddle game I choose, I’ll have to deal with something I didn’t care about in Pong:  The button.

Beyond the paddle, to really get things done on the Atari 2600, I’m going to need to be able to control a joystick.  I have several options, of course.  I can try some alternative controller, like the button operated Starplex or the gravity operated LeStick, but really, or maybe try to build my own controller, but really, to claim that I built a robot that can play an Atari 2600, I have to build something to handle a good old CX40 Atari Joystick.  That’s probably not going to be easy.  The controls won’t have to be as precise as the paddle, since there’s only nine options, however, it’s going to involve control on two axes that are somewhat dependent on one another.  I’ve had thoughts involving double arms that push or pull, a swing arm with a piston, a gantry crane like setup, and something that rotates and can push the stick, and none of those ideas seem any good at all.  I’m sure I’ll think of something.

October 27, 2009   1 Comment