RoadBlasters was one of my favorite arcade games.  I never was any good at it, but I loved playing it.  It’s a cross between OutRun and Spy Hunter.  You race against the clock and try to shoot everything on the road.

This is an excellent port of the arcade version.  The graphics and sound effects and gameplay area an almost perfect translation.  There are, however, a few things missing.

1. No promise of a T-Shirt if you get to level 50.
2. No notice that “Winners don’t use drugs”.
3. And, worst of all, no speech.  Now I don’t know that I’m approaching the Rally Point!

Now…  All I need to do is figure out how to replace my car’s steering wheel with one from a RoadBlasters arcade machine…

Kid Chameleon is a bit of a cross between Super Mario Bros 3, Little Nemo: The Dream Master, and the “Moriarty takes control over the Enterprise” episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The boss of a holographic VR game has taken control of the game and is kidnapping the players.  It’s up to you to enter the game and defeat the boss.

No, that doesn’t look anything like the Holodeck at all.  This is orange, not yellow.  No similarity whatsoever.

You play Generic Tough Punk Kid, with sunglasses, plain white tee, and blue jeans, ready to kick ass.  Scattered throughout the levels are P blocks, which contain generic pick me ups, or chameleon helmets.  The helmets turn you into something else, with some kind of special power that you’ll probably need to pass the level.  There’s the Ninja that can jump fifty feet and has a sword, there’s the Knight that can climb walls, there’s the Thick Headed Monster that can break walls, and, of course, there’s the Axe Murderer in a Hockey Mask.

 

Overall, it seems like a prety decent game.  I would’ve kept playing, if I hadn’t blown through a couple of continues when I got stuck in the Lava World From Hell.

Blaster Master was a classic on the NES.  It was a bit like Metroid in a tank.  Exploration, power-ups, amazing graphics, and catchy songs.

Its sequel, Blaster Master 2 for the Genesis is like Metroid with a tank and without any of the fun or awesomeness.  Honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to play it long enough to really understand what it is.  It appears to be far more linear than its predecessor.  It also stole Rygar’s sunset.

I couldn’t get the hang of the controls, and there were far too many things that wanted to shoot me or jump on me or fall on my head.  There’s also inclines, which change your firing angle when you drive on them, making it very difficult to shoot what you want to shoot.

You can get out and walk around, just like in the original, however, in this one, some of the caves you end up in have large-sized side-scrolling regions.  In these regions, your character Jason handles like a lobotomized monkey.  You can kneel or shoot straight down, but you never do the one you want to do.  Not that it matters.  Shooting down shoots your feet, and kneeling shoots over the top of ground dwelling creatures.  You can’t shoot at an angle, and you can’t shoot down while jumping.  That means that you can’t actually shoot the space slug you meet up with early on until it stands up.  And did I mention that once you’re shooting, if you stop moving, you can’t start moving until you stop shooting?  That part is especially awesome in an action game where you have to both shoot and get out of the way…

Collision detection is awful, as well.  Many times, I stood and fired at an enemy, then got hurt several seconds later, even though neither me nor the enemy had moved a pixel.

There’s a pause screen that I’m sure would be useful, if I understood it at all.  Unfortunately, it’s not mentioned in the manual.

That’s an easy choice to make.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention what I’m doing…

I just finished the video game room in my house, so I’ve decided to celebrate by taking a lost weekend and going on a four day video game bender.

I have no set plan, I’m just going to play what I feel like playing, when I feel like playing it, for as long as I feel like playing it.

There will be eternal classics and there will be total crap, and I plan to post screenshots and short descriptions of whatever I play.

I’ve got a lot of different gaming consoles, and I plan to give many of them a workout over the next few days.

The Genesis came out in the early 90’s ((Okay, technically the late 80’s, but that doesn’t really count.)) and was a rival in both ability and popularity to the Super Nintendo. The standard controller has three face buttons, a start button, and a D-Pad.  It did not have any shoulder buttons.

It’s also got Blast Processing.  No one knows what Blast Processing is, except that it makes things totally awesome.

Genesis controllers are compatible with the Atari 2600, so if you want to play Space Invaders or Pitfall with a gamepad instead of a joystick, this is a good way to do it.

As you may have noticed, I have a bit of a collection of video game items.  Carts, discs, consoles, controllers, even the occasional odd bit of merchandise like the Tetris Home Game and a Mario Kart Phone.

No, really. I'm not making that up.

As part of my video game obsession, I also collect books about video games.  These days, guide books for games are pretty much exclusively single title books from a big house like Brady or Prima.  It wasn’t always so.  Back in the days of the NES, when games were less complicated, there were a wide range of guide books that contained tips for multiple games.  One of the more popular and well written series were the “How to Win at” by Jeff Rovin.  Of course, I’m only saying that because he thanked me by name in “How to Win at Super Mario Bros. Games”, but that’s besides the point.  ((He misspelled “Koopa” as “Kuppa” in HTWANG#3, so I wrote him and corrected him.  Had the tester gene at age 10, apparently.))

No, really. I'm not making that up, either.

One book I stumbled upon recently has the most awesome cover ever.  Most game guides from that age were unauthorized, so they stuck to plain text covers.  Those that had images tended to have generic game images (Like a cyborg fighting a dragon), because if they used a picture of Mario, Nintendo would sue them back into the Atari Age.  But this book took a different path.  A staggeringly awesome path.

Where to begin…?

I know!  How about we start with the flying green thing in the upper left corner?

HE SLIMED ME BECAUSE I STOLE HIS BUKKIT!

It’s Slimer from Ghostbusters…  Crossed with a walrus.  Because obviously a gluttonous blob of ectoplasm needs tusks.

If there’s something weird and it don’t look good, who ya gonna call?

MASTER CHIEF!  Eh doesn’t afraid of no ghosts.

The best part is that this book doesn’t even talk about Ghostbusters.  That’s not one of the covered games.

Moving to the lower left corner, we find a happy jumping dwarf.

Apparently after the princess was kidnapped and subsequently rescued, Mario went into the Witness Protection Program, where he was given the ingenious disguise of frilly purple overalls, a yellow hard-hat, and facial hair.

In other words…  WARIO.  However, since this book was published before Wario came to town, I think the artist for this cover has a valid case for a lawsuit against Nintendo, since it was obviously their idea to subtly alter Mario to produce a different character first.

Now to the four characters on the right side of the cover.  This is why I bought the book.

It’s the Middle-aged Mutant Ninja Alligators!  Little did you know, before he took to turtles, Splinter trained a group of overweight alligators to be a ninja fighting force.  Unfortunately, they were captured by Shredder, who used them for his “Heroes in a Handbag” line of fine ladies wallets.

No wonder that kid in the middle of all looks like he’s about to wretch.

The inside of the book isn’t much better.  From references to “Mario the carpenter” in SMB2 and the “Toe Clan” in TMNT, to helpful tidbits like advising you to “Use the pogo stick” in DuckTales or “Read the manual extra carefully” for SMB3, there’s not much in this book that will actually help you improve your game playing skills.  However, there is one really useful piece of information that this book mentions:  There is a companion book about Role-Playing Games.

Pardon me, I have to go to eBay now…

Obviously, for this experiment, I need a Twitter account.  I’ve never done The Twitter before, so it’s all new to me.  And of course, there’s no way in hell I’m going to want to use a name that’s even remotely connected to a name I’d want to use, should I join the ranks of Twits myself in the future.

I needed a name that was right for the game.

I started tossing around names in my head.  First were the overly patriotic ones, like “AmericaFan1776” or “RedWhiteAndBlueBlooded”.  They were way over the top, so I threw them out.  Then came names from the cult of personality, like “ReaganRocks”, but those seemed too cliche and transparently false.  I thought about picking some obscure conservative philosophy and twisting it into a name, but I thankfully don’t know much about obscure conservative philosophy.

I needed something simple and subtle.  Something appropriate.

Something like “EchoChamber”.

It’s perfect.

It’s relevant to the space.

It could be considered a knowingly sarcastic jab at The Liberal Mediaâ„¢, who derides the targeted community with that name.

It’s exactly what I’m writing the program to do.

It’s… taken.

Crap.

“TheEchoChamber”?  That has more authority.

Nope.  Taken.

Damn.

Hmmm…  “EccoChamber”?  Now it’s a relevant knowingly sarcastic jab AND a video game reference, all in one.

Even better, that dolphin is so frickin’ patriotic that he’s got STARS TATTOOED ON HIS FOREHEAD.  ((Or is Ecco a she?  I don’t know.  I’ve never actually played the game…))  And look at how badass he is in that picture.  I hear he tore up a boatful of Godless unwashed hippies from Greenpeace last Tuesday.  Oh hell yeah, that’s REAL AMERICA for you!

And the name is free.  Or rather was.  It’s mine now.

Here’s the link, in case you want to follow the fun:  http://twitter.com/EccoChamber

(Of course, be warned:  There will likely be some testing spam to start…)

Once the account was set up, I had to follow every right-wing lunatic that was presented to me on the sign-up page.  It’s following Glenn Beck, John Boehner, Jan Brewer, among others.  And, of course, the Mama Grizzly herself.  These accounts will be used for seed data for the system.  Depending on how advanced I feel like getting, the system may also start following whoever they retweet or people who retweet them, as well as following their posted links and scraping those pages for content.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go take a long shower to wash off the shame of “following” Sarah Palin.

This is a Neo-Geo AES cartridge:

What this picture fails to show is the scale of this cartridge.  Just looking at it, you might think that the cartridge is roughly the size of a Super Nintendo cart.

You’d be wrong.

It is, in fact, roughly the size of TWO Super Nintendo cartridge stacked together and placed next to TWO NES cartridges.  Seriously.  They’re that massive.

And I thought that the Fairchild Channel F carts were bulky…

That’s it.  I’m calling it.  This Crazy Project Weekend is over.

And it’s a big truck of fail.

The biggest problems are the motors.  They just don’t do what I tell them to do.  If they did, this would be a different story.  But I’ve spent over three days tweaking the motors and the robotics and I just can’t get it working.  Maybe I can get a Stelladaptor and try tweaking it with direct feedback.  Maybe I’d be able to do continuous smooth motion if I could have tracked all the bombs properly.  Maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing.

At least I was able to identify the playfield elements and get the computer to tell what the next move should be, even if I couldn’t actually get it to make that move.  The basic recognition and logic was a lot easier than it was for Pong, mainly because trajectories didn’t really matter.  However, I wasn’t quite able to get the bomb tracking/prediction logic working, which would have reduced the tendency for the robot to get distracted temporarily and miss a bomb.  The full tracking also would have made it possible to detect patterns and move smarter.  I also get the feeling that there’s something already in OpenCV that would have taken care of the object detection and motion tracking for me.  That library is so big and I’m not a computer vision expert, so I don’t really know what’s there or how to use it all.  The book and the documentation aren’t always enough.

And then that virus.  Stupid virus.  Make me waste half a day because the bloody computer stops working.  THAT WAS AWESOME.

The segmented auto-calibration thing did work.  I was able to adjust the robot power and swap out gears and the calibration generally figured out the new pixel/degree ratio.  If the motors were more consistent, then it probably would have worked better.  At any rate, that’s a decent technique that I’ll have to remember for the future.  And I’ll have to clean up the code for it, right now it’s kinda messy.

In the end, I did not accomplish what I set out to do.  The best score the robot ever got was 63, and that was a fluke.  And I didn’t even get close to trying to get it to play on a real TV.

It made it through Round 1 and got a score of 56 points.  Time to take a step back and analyze what I’ve observed.

• The biggest problem is losing track of the bomb.  It will be on track to catch the lowest bomb, when suddenly the detection will skip a beat and it’ll take off across the screen for something else and can’t get back fast enough to catch the bomb.  I have to fix this first.  I’m pretty sure I have outlier detection from the Pong game that I can reuse here.
• The segmented calibration that I described back on the first day seems to be working fairly well.  That’s where the robot moves the paddle knob a known number of degrees, then the program sees how far that moved the buckets on screen, and calculates how many pixels a degree is.  This lets the program know that to catch the bomb that’s 70 pixels away, it will have to rotate the paddle 30 degrees.  I suspect that I will have to tweak the algorithm a bit, though.  Mainly, I think it will need to do several calibration turns to refine the numbers.
• The response time is going to be a killer.  I have little doubt that the motor itself can move the paddle into position fast enough.  When it moves, it zips across the screen.  The problem is that it doesn’t get moving as fast as it needs to and there’s an unacceptable lag between commands.  I think I might still be seeing an echo of the waggle.  It’s not as visible, due to the weight on the spinner assembly now, but I think that delay is still there.  If I can fix some of the other issues, I suspect that the response time is going to prevent the robot from getting past around level 3.
• The NXT has an inactivity timer.  The robot turned itself off in the middle of a game.  Gotta take care of that…
• I don’t want to keep hitting the button to start a round.  I’m going to have to implement the button press.  Unfortunately, implementing the button press means I’ll have to change around how the PaddleController class works.  It’s a dirty hack right now, I gotta clean that up.
• I like that Kaboom! is a much faster game cycle than Pong.  With Pong, I couldn’t always tell what was wrong right away.  Sometimes it took a minute or two to get the ball in a situation where something went wrong.  I’d implement a fix and try again, and again, it would take a minute or two.  Kaboom! doesn’t last that long.  The games at this point are less than a minute long, sometimes much less.  If the robot is going to lose, it’s going to lose fast.  It’s not going to end up in a cycle where the ball keeps bouncing around between the same two points over and over and over for five minutes.  If a game in Kaboom! lasts five minutes, then it’s an amazing success.