Fortunately, there are video clips of Choplifter III to make up for the loss. Check one of them out here:

It’s a little more complicated than the original Choplifter but is essentially the same in terms of gameplay and mechanics.

Post from: EveryJoe

What? Choplifter III? Where?

For those who are totally unfamiliar with what seems like a Rorschach inkblot test, it is a screenshot from Choplifter, a 1982 Apple II game developed by Dan Gorlin and published by Broderbund. Yes, this image triggered a memory, of playing Choplifter almost 16 hours a day on my old Apple IIc back in the early 80s, and enjoying every minute of it.

In my mind, it belongs up there with other classics like Karateka, Lode Runner, Taipan, and Hard Hat Mack.

Here’s a short overview of Choplifter’s gameplay:

In Choplifter, the player takes on the role of a combat helicopter pilot (yes, that blob of green in the middle of the image above is actually a helicopter). The player attempts to save hostages being held as prisoners of war in territories ruled by the evil Bungeling Empire. The player must collect these hostages and transport them to his base. Of course, the player needs to do these while battling tanks and other enemies.

Not as exciting as today’s collection of air rescue sims, I know, but in the 80s it was the best. It’s really not because of the graphics, but the challenge … now, that was something. Going into enemy territory, busting out the hostages and transporting them to safety aren’t easy, I tell you. Well, actually, that’s the easy part. Getting your chopper to move the way you want to, that’s the real challenge.

Haha! Sorry, sorry. Just a little snippet of memory triggered by Choplifter again. What’s it about? Well, it’s about a ten-year-old boy trying his darned best to keep a virtual helicopter aloft using a two-pound joystick while dodging rockets and machine gun fire.

Sigh. There must be an online version of the game somewhere. Methinks it’s time to look for one. Meantime, why don’t you guys take a gander at Choplifter in all its Apple II glory in this video:

Post from: EveryJoe

Choplifter: Hey, hostages, need a lift?

Of course, compared with today’s generation of pinball simulation games, Raster Blaster looks crude, with only a handful of bumpers, slingshots, and targets. We have to hand it to Bill Budge, writer and designer of Raster Blaster and its successors, though. He, and not Raster Blaster, paved the way for more elaborate and accurate pinball simulations.

So what made Raster Blaster such an accomplishment for Bill Budge? Well, for its time, the 1981 game featured full-screen high-resolution display of a real pinball game table. It actually resembles the classic Firepower table. The Apple II also wasn’t designed to support fast graphics, but Budge found a way to go around this such that Raster Blaster ran at such speed that it overshadowed other arcade-style video games in its generation.

So whatever happened to ol’ Bill Budge? Here’s the lowdown from Wikipedia:

Electronic Arts was formed in 1982 even as Bill Budge had been having problems running the business of writing video games and marketing them. Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins was so impressed by Budge’s titles that he invited Budge to join the initial group of EA developers. The rest, as they say, is history.

Too bad I wasn’t able to get my grubby hands on EA and Budge’s Pinball Construction Set. Now that would’ve been a blast (pun intended).

Image downloaded from Wikipedia and modified by Joel. The copyright to Raster Blaster and images pertaining to it belong to Bill Budge and BudgeCo.

Post from: EveryJoe

Mindless fun with my first pinball sim

Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator, or simply Conflict, is a turn-based government simulation game designed by David Eastman and published by Virgin Interactive in 1990. Although available for DOS, Atari ST, and Amiga, I played it only on DOS on (yes, you guessed it) the 386.

The game is set in fictional 1997, when the prime minister of Israel has just been assassinated, leaving the player to run the country as the new head honcho. The player’s objective is to cause the defeat of the neighboring four states, either by invasion or political destabilization. What, no options for peace? Haha.

For those who have forgotten how to play the game, and those who have no idea whatsoever about what I’m talking about, here’s a little gamplay backgrounder, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Each game turn represents one month in real time. Each turn the player decides what diplomatic, espionage and military actions to take with regard to the other countries in the game, and then ends the turn. The game engine then runs and the results of the turn occur (each turn begins in fact with some information about what has occurred in the previous turn being presented as a screen of newspaper headlines). The actions available to the player are broken up into two phases: diplomatic/espionage and military.

Diplomacy

Each country in the game has a diplomatic relationship with every other country in the game, with that relationship varying from military pact (best) to war (worst), through a number of stages: Excellent (military pact), Profitable, Beneficial, Favorable, Satisfactory, Workable, Indifferent, Lamentable, Deplorable, No relations, At War.

Each turn the player directly sets Israeli diplomatic policy with regard to the other countries in the game. Diplomatic policy is very simple: Israel is either trying to improve the diplomatic relationship, keep it as it is, or make it worse. The action change in the relationship for a turn depends upon Israeli policy set against the policy of the other country; if both are trying to improve, the relationship will improve by one step. If either tries to make the relationship worse, it will deteriorate by one step. Otherwise, it remains steady.

When a relationship is Indifferent and Israel decides to reduce the relationship in the diplomatic phase, or if the relationship is at Lamentable or Deplorable, Israel can declare war and invade.

When a relationship is at Profitable, the player can choose to request a military pact. If this is given, then if Israel goes to war with a country which also has a border with the allied country, that country will in turn reduce its relationship to Lamentable and then declare war. (Note however there is no such obligation placed upon the player, who can simply ignore wars his pact partner enters into).

Espionage

Each country’s government has a stability rating. If that rating falls to the lowest value, the government collapses and the country is out of the game. Each turn, for each country in the game, Israel can choose to work to reduce the stability of the Government, keep it as it is, or increase the stability of the government. Stability ratings are: Very solid, Firm, Moderately solid, Good, Fair, Fragile, Weak, Very weak, Dangerously weak, Close to revolution.

Also, each country has a level of insurgency, which represents how well-organized the insurgent forces are. Insurgency ratings are: Ready for action!, Guerilla Force, Strengthening, Ineffective, Disorganised Rabble, and Non-existent.

If a country’s stability rating is Weak or below or if the insurgency the country is at Guerilla Force or better, Israel can opt to consider extreme measures, which are to attempt assassination of the country’s leader or start a coup. If this attempt succeeds, the country collapses and is out of the game.

However, if the assassination attempt fails, Israel is detected and relations with that country and with the West sour. Also, if an attempted coup fails, the insurgent forces are usually destroyed. A coup is very unlikely to succeed unless the insurgents are very strong and the government is very weak, so a premature coup which destroys the insurgency can be a useful strategy for helping a government (often much more effective than disrupting a fast-growing insurgency).

Once diplomatic and espionage policy is set, the player moves on to the military actions. It is not possible to come back to diplomacy and espionage once the player has completed diplomacy and espionage and moved to military actions.

Military

The player has two tasks to perform: the first is to spend the defense budget, the second is to set military actions with regard to the other countries in the game.

Each turn, the player receives a budget to spend on weaponry. The size of the budget seems to depend on the level of hostility in the surrounding countries; if Israel is at war, or if another country is in the process of reducing diplomatic relations to declare war, the budget is large (300 million plus, per turn). If the level of hostility is low, and life is peaceful, the budget is small (100 million).

As such, the defense budget awarded by the game is an indicator of the policy intent of neighboring countries; if they’re peaceful, the budget will be small, if one or more countries is bent on war, the budget will be large.

Weapons are bought from the USA, United Kingdom, France or a private arms dealer. (Each country sells weapons that it itself produces, except the private dealer, who is a South African providing access to Russian weaponry.) Each source offers a different range of weapons with different prices and most countries will only offer better weapons once a reasonable number of purchases have already been made (which establishes that a relationship has been built up). Not all countries offer all weapons; for example, anti-SAM helicopters are only available from the USA and the private dealer.

Whew! Information overload! Let’s talk about Conflict again in a later post. In the meantime, let’s see if Conflict will work on my Pentium IV Core2Duo.

Post from: EveryJoe

Conflict: Master diplomacy and warmongering in this classic

Like all things in the corporate world, Strategic Simulations Inc., or SSI, was acquired by a bigger video games development firm. Join me in a virtual tour of the history of SSI, which is, for me, one of the most unforgettable video game developers and publishers.

Strategic Simulations Inc. was founded by war games enthusiast Joel Billings. He hired two notable computer programmers to start the company’s reign in video gamedom: John Lyons, who wrote Computer Bismarck for the Apple II and later the TRS-80 in 1980, and Ed Williger, who wrote Computer Ambush. Both games, Bismarck and Ambush were written in the Basic language. Come to think of it, almost all games in that era were written in Basic.

With its founder being a war games fanatic, SSI naturally launched mostly strategy games in its first two years of operations, from Computer Bismarck to Southern Command. Interestingly, SSI also developed and published sports video games, such Computer Quarterback, a football simulation game for the Apple II and the Commodore 64, and Computer Baseball.

No, not all SSI titles had the word “Computer.” In 1982, SSI launched the RapidFire line of video games, which included Cytron Masters, Cosmic Balance, and Galactic Gladiators. Don’t ring a bell? How about Epidemic!, a real-time strategy game dealing with a global plague?

SSI’s more memorable games, however, came only in 1987 with its acquisition of rights to develop and publish Advanced Dungeons & Dragons video games from TSR. The first such game, Pool of Radiance, came out in 1988. Oooh, Alias and Dragonbait! Oh, wait, that’s Curse of the Azure Bonds, another SSI title.

Of course, who can forget SSI’s powerhouse of strategy games, Panzer General, which spawned a host of other “General” games, like Allied General and Pacific General.

So what happened to SSI after all these successful titles? It was acquired in 1994 by Mindscape. Later, it became part of Mattel, and later still, a division of Ubisoft. Unfortunately, Ubisoft retired the brand name, and thus the world had been robbed of the legacy of SSI.

Post from: EveryJoe

Whatever happened to Strategic Simulations Inc.?

I remember a time when we never ran out of video games set in space—from simulations to epic dogfights, from futuristic mechanized combat to daring rescues of princesses in galaxies far, far away. Yes, the space simulation genre and its sub-genres, which include our topic, have once upon a time dominated the video gaming scene.

But where are they now? Some say they’ve died, others cling to hope that they’ll soon come out from those little nooks and crannies of asteroids strewn across the universe.

Here’s a very simple explanation for those seeking answers to this question:

Why did the space sim genre die? This remains a topic of hot contention among genre enthusiasts.

The first, and most obvious reason, is the rise of the first-person shooter and real-time strategy genres, which led to a boom in the popularity of PC gaming. Previous attempts by PC game developers to compete in console-style games had failed, but with the succewss of the FPS and RTS, computer game developers finally had homegrown hits in their hands. Casual gamers flocked in droves to games like Quake and Starcraft, ignoring other traditional PC genres such as space sims, adventure games, flight simulators, and wargames. It is worth noting that all four genres collapsed at roughly the same time, the late 1990s to early 2000s.

First-person shooters were an ideal technological showcase for the quantum leaps in computer graphics and processing power at the turn of the century. Graphic accelerators and multi-gigahertz processing speeds meant that, for the first time, terrestrial environments could be realistically rendered. In FPS, detail was lavished on lush green scenery and eleborate architecture which advanced in each incarnation. In contrast, space offered little eyecandy other than the stars. The vast emptiness of space, a boon in the early days of gaming when graphics power came at a premium, had finally become a liability.

Too true, too true. Even the Star Wars titles, which were heavily laden with space combat simulation, are now shadows of their former selves. They’ve evolved into adventure-role playing games, substituting a simulacrum of the epic’s characters for the empty cockpit of an X-Wing fighter.

So what does the future have in store for the space sim genre? Little, if they don’t evolve. Fortunately, we are already seeing some space sims adapt. For example, the Homeworld series that have evolved into the MMORPG known as EVE Online. May the Force be with them.

Take a gander at the next generation space simulation video game: EVE Online.

Post from: EveryJoe

We want to know: What happened to the space fighter genre?

Flight simulators fall under the category of video games I want to play but can’t.

I remember the first flight simulator I played—or at least TRIED to play. It was the first generation flight simulator developed by subLOGIC that had black and white wireframe graphics (amber on my Apple IIc monitor) and featured, according to wikipedia, a very limited scenery consisting of 36 tiles in a six by six pattern.

The most frustrating part about playing this version of the flight simulator on the Apple II was the lack of joystick controls—it was all keyboard, baby. Not that I would have played the damn game with the primitive joystick I had (a box with a small lever and two buttons).

Despite the crappy graphics (by crappy, I am, of course, comparing it to today’s generation of video games), the flight simulator became one of the most popular video game titles for the Apple II.

The funny thing was I still played the freakin’ flight simulator at least 16 hours a day. I didn’t get far, but it gave my brain a lot of exercise by trying to figure out not only the controls but which way was up and what dot on the map represented the airport.

For a more detailed history of the flight simulator, click this.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to fly crash my plane again.

Post from: EveryJoe

Arrrgh! I hate flight simulators!