h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Those of you who have been reading my stuff, (a) get a life, and (b) you will know that my ankle is knackered right now.

So I haven't been my normal, roving-reportery self. In fact, I've seen three rooms in the last 48hrs. My bedroom, a room with a computer in it, and a river bed. There is a small brick building nearby. The river trickles along the bed, and down into a small grating.
The grating is open.
You have:
Staff.
Cage with bird in it.
Gold.
Dwarfish axe.

What now?XYZZY

Fight the troll!

Oh, dear. Now I'm getting my early problem solving games mixed up.

Go North! Fight the dragon with your bare hands!

Man, those were days. I remember being a teenager. It sucked.

Do you also remember a classic game known as the Ring of Darkness, and it's sequel, Return of the Ring? They were available on the *gasp* Dragon 32 during the eighties.

I've just thought of something!!!

All those companies what released games in the '80s for microcomputers are almost all bust now (with the possible exceptions of Sega, Microdeal and Microsoft), but even the ones that aren't won't have been bothered messing around with their old stuff, when the internet revolution came in.

The eighties were twenty years ago.

Take those two facts into account, we find that over the next six or seven years, THE COPYRIGHT on virtually every game you ever played as a kid will have expired. Now, can we make a killing releasing "Cuthbert goes Digging" for the Dreamcast, PS2 and PC? I think we can...

Actually, I don't remember that one. I moved from the Atari to my own Commodore 64, and from there to an IBM PC. I missed the whole Dragon 32 business.

I do, however, miss Infocom more than anything. They were bought out -- I believe by Activision. There has been a huge hole in the problem-solving games arena ever since they gave up the ghost, IMO. I usually have to wait at least a year between games that I want to play. I get so envious of the young boys who can stand games like Quake, SimCity, and Everquest. They seem so horribly pointless to me most of the time. I don't want my brain on autopilot!

Actually, the copyright in America lasts about 100 years for everything produced in the 80s. We probably won't be alive when the copyright expires. Trust me on this. I took a college class last quarter on the legal issues for software design and the internet.

Who cares? I'm British. Copyright here expires after twenty years, and I'm pretty sure it's 25 for the rest of Europe.

I vaguely remember some of the Infogrames thigies, but my best recollection of the whole Spectrum era is a freeware thing called The Quest for the Holy Snail.

Anyways, there are some pretty good budget Atari emulators around, with bagloads of old games. I've seen one I want locally, it's £4.99 (works out to around $6.50 I think). Perhaps, if it's any good, you might want me to mail it? You'd have to send me a whopping cheque ($6.50ish plus about $500.00 for postage), in GBP of course!

Yeah. but you're still stuck if the copyright was registered in America. The UK, America, and most other UN nations signed a treaty to respect each other's copyight laws. In other words, an ugly American could come and prosecute you in a UK court of law. Theoretically.

I'll skip on the old Atari games. You can PC versions of them readily in America. Thanks, though.

Us stop legalspeaking as doubleplus boring.

Instead, let's reminisce some more about things like Pacman and Donkey Kong!

I get the doublespeak, but I'd rather skip with thePacMan and Donkey Kong.

Now Ms. PacMan.... That's another story.

Mrs. Pacman suffered from Minnie Mouse Disorder.

Same person, but with a ribbon on the head....if you took Mrs. Pacman's ribbon off, you got Pacman.
Minnie->Mickey
Daisy->Donald
Lara Croft->The man whose job it is to keep footballs warm.

I beg to differ. Ms. PacMan had those disgustingly cute cut scenes every few levels where the two Pacs meet, fall in love, get married, have children, and so on. It was a right good narrative, and I had never seen anything like it at the time. I remember thinking this was the first game that motivated me enough to play it to the end.

I know what you mean - although things like Donkey Kong and Caverns of Chaos only had a few screens (four and twenty respectively), and each level was JUST one screen (which in 192x256 isn't too big anyway), the fact that they were virtually identical meant that even if you enjoyed the game, there was just no staying power.

PS speaking of sickly cutscenes, nothing beats the late 80s early 90s Manga-style games that graced the Amiga, Master System and Nintendo.

Or of course (the venerated) Donkey Kong, with that little bit where Mario would tell Daisy he loves her, and then she would be whisked (or at least mildly stirred) away by the gorilla again.

Or any of the Dizzy games.

Of course, the problem with most micros was finding space to PUT the cutscenes!!! Not so with today's computers, where a crappy game (not mentioning any names, Wing Commander I II III IV V) can have two half-minute levels, connected by three days of high quality MPEG-II video!

I think The Legend of Zelda was way before it's time.

A very interesting update to this whole cut-scene phenomenon is The Last Express. There are animated scenes where you can change the camera position while you watch. Even more odd, the scenes you get depend on where are along the train at any given time. Since time really passes while you play, many people play more than once to catch it all.

It sounds - is daft the word? What's the game itself like?

Anyway, cutscenes should never have progressed past the good old spectrum games - Five minutes of watching "Turn to side 2 and press play. Now press any key..." or the Dragon's very own "It is illegal to copy, hire, or offer this tape for rental!" sat there for half a decade while the next level chugged its weary way from the electromagnetic spool to the transistor collection.

The game itself is a pretty interesting foray into the modern problem-solving genre. For instance, many of these cut scenes involve one of the characters dropping a clue that will aid your quest. An absolutely vital clue can be found in more than one way, but less obvious hints can easily be missed. It's interesting, because hardcore problem solvers can sometimes complete the game in one try, while even 8-year-old children will get it after several passes.

I dunno. You still see cut scenes being used to good effect. You see them the most often in problem solving games, usually as a reward for completing a major puzzle. You also see them in games like WarCraft. In strategy games, this is partly a reward but mostly a method of explaining your goals on the next level. And you see them in Dungeons and Dragons type games also when progressing from one major part of the story to another.

I don't think they're necessary for shoot-em-up games, but then most shoot-em-ups don't include them anymore.

Apart from: Aforementioned Wing Commander, every Star Wars game that's ever been created, most of the Star Trek ones too, and any other game that's got two and a half megabytes of code but was released on CD.

I think it's okay for Star Wars and Star Trek, because some people bought the game for the "movie" experience. It's easier to do movie-like plot advancement with cut scenes.

I have always hated the Wing Commander stuff. But since I'm not much into space flying games, it doesn't bother me. My boyfriend plays them a lot, and he likes the cut scenes in WC for some reason.

Because, probably, they've got that bloke from Star Wars ((the reasonably tasty - more so in his advanced years than his youth for some reason) Mark Hamill) AND that bloke from Star Trek (the evil doctor who nearly destroyed that star in Generations). I'm not being insulting, but does your boyfriend wear a t-shirt saying "My other car's a Constitution Class" over a slight beergut, have comics stuck to every available space on the bedroom wall, and have to spend five minutes in the morning combing Wheat-Os out of his beard?

P.S. Speaking of Generations (and this is where anyone who doesn't believe that I'm a physics student must repent), that evil doctor bloke sent a rocket (and it looked just like a normal rocket) from the surface of a planet to its sun, and within less than five seconds the sun started to dim.
Now, if we assume that the rocket was launched at just under c, and travelled at this speed until it reached the star, the planet must be less than 2.5 light seconds away from the star, or about one million kilometres. That's not very far, is it?

Yes, my boyfriend Joe is a geek boy. We are moving to a new apartment in two weeks, and I have been on a campaign lately trying to get him to dispense with the Star Wars posters and posters of scantily clad comic book females.

PS You're so right. But Star Trek has always had an element of B-movie to it, and so you certainly can't call it 'hard' science fiction. For instance, any problem including an inability to brush your own teeth can be solved by making up a fancy word without explaining what it is. I like B-movies, so I get a laugh out of it. Anyway, you thought *our* scientists complain about global warming...

One would expect that you require a haven for all of these posters of scantily clad persons. Well, although it would be a great hardship to me to find somewhere to put them, and I would have absolutely no use for them whatsoever , I am sure that, as a gesture to a friend, I could take them off your hands....

PS I'm not entirely sure what you mean about Star Trek's B-Movie quality. OK, sure, it's the only Universe where everyone who isn't human looks like a human (even Doctor Who found a way out of that one), you can circumvent a problem by "realigning the warp flux density compensators with a level three re-router", but there's nowhere NEAR enough pornography for a satisfactory B-Movie.
Perhaps the latest film: "Star Trek IX: Attack of the fifty foot bikini-clad Borg babes" will redress this.