I Was An Atomic Mutant

(Originally posted 2006)

I bought this PC game a few years ago at a Wal-Mart in Lee's Summit, Missouri for $3. The gameplay is repetitive and the in-game graphics are unimpressive - but it hooks me. It's a ValuSoft title developed on a shoe-string. A single developer is credited for the engine. Its redeeming strength is that its atmosphere totally captures the 50's and 60's era sci-fi and monster movies it imitates.

Thematically the game resembles Destroy All Humans! and Destroy All Humans! 2, which are far better games but don't quite nail the atmosphere of old sci-fi flicks like this does. The Destroy All Humans! are too self aware to fully capture those movies. Another game with a similar feel is Godzilla: Save the Earth which, while clearly much more polished, scores one point below Atomic Mutant on Metacritic (64 vs. 63). And I Was An Atomic Mutant scores a full thirteen points above our own vastly ambitious but ultimately underwheming Superman Returns.

So what does this mean? It would be irresponsible to draw any conclusions from this example, but it is interesting.

Times of Lore (maps)

A few years ago I wrote a program to spit out the maps from the PC version of the 1988 game Times of Lore, which I loved as a youngster.  This is the first game I ever cracked (with my handy Turbo Debugger) so that I could play it from my hard drive.

Where there were cities mostly show up in the dumped map as bright green grassy areas. Thanks to Andrew Schultz and his site for inspiring me to dig up and post these images. Oh, and check out Kenn Rice's site too.  Check out this walkthrough by David Eaton as well.  Dave added the buildings and other areas where dynamic tiles were overlaid on to those grassy spots, and added labels as well.  Dave did a great job cleaning up the map.  I couldn't quite figure out how the buildings were encoded.  If anyone can tell me that, that would be awesome.  Someday maybe I'll return to it.  

The world from Times of Lore was huge -- 16384x16384 pixels.  The game screen itself was 320x200 pixels on PC and, of that, the actual window into the world itself was probably 256x128 pixels or less.  That would yield 64x128 or 8192 screens of the world.  They fit this whole world onto a single 360kb floppy.  Unbelievable.

The encoding was genius.  It was hierarchical.  Tiles were 8x8 pixels.  Those were grouped into 4x4 (32x32 pixel) meta-tiles, and those were then grouped into 4x4 (128x128 pixel) super-meta-tiles.  The world was then composed of those.  Everything then was LZW compressed.

The PC version of the game:

and the original C-64 version:

The paper map that came in the box.  Sadly not a cloth map like the Ultima games.  I got this from Times of Lore on the C64-wiki:

The world (scaled down):

Dave Eaton's annotated map (including buildings, names and paths through the forest labyrinths):

The full, 16384x16384 pixel, edited world map as a 16mb PNG on github

The full, 16384x16384 pixel, unedited, raw world map as a 16mb PNG on github.  This includes the dungeon as part of the overworld and other possible easter eggs. 

Note that as you zoom in to the full 16384x16384 map, you can see the full pixel detail that was in the game.  A small section looks like this:

The dungeons, full resolution 2048x2048.  If you zoom into this you can also see the full pixel detail:

Here's a zoomed in view of the Wizard's Tower from the lower-right of the above image:

The base tile set, scaled up by a factor of 2

The 4x4 "meta-tiles"

The 16x16 "super-meta-tiles" composed of 4x4 "meta-tiles."  Note that these don't include building tiles other that city walls and dungeons

Fun, Fun, Fun

..until her daddy takes her GTA away?
One of the things that have become even more abundantly clear in the transition to next-generation consoles is how the concept of fun is quite divorced from what we consider a quality game. Quality games must be fun, of course, to a point. They don't have to be too fun, though, and originality in this arena carries an enormous and intolerable financial risk. High-end games must be beautiful to look at, slick, contain vast quantities of content. Frequently, they require online experiences. These types of games must sell millions to recoup development costs. Because risk is so enormous, there is a lot of copycating of successful models.

Let me provide an example. I loved GTA III, liked GTA Vice City, found GTA San Andreas boring and True Crime, Saint's Row and even Crackdown dull, dull, dull. Fun usually requires novelty (or nostalgia), and there's no more novelty left in stealing cars and ramming them into other cars and pedestrians until they explode (the cars and the pedestrians).

Of course, this is something that everyone involved with games knows. But sometimes it's useful to state what's already widely understood.

(Updated 7/10/07)

Grand Theft Auto IV

Ok, I know what I said about GTA-type games getting boring. Still, GTA IV looks awesome. And of course I'll have to play it.

If I get bored by it I guess I'll only have myself to blame..

Experimental Gameplay

I met Kyle Gray yesterday who sits a couple of rows away from me at work and runs a fascinating site called the Experimental Gameplay Project. If you are at all interested in game play, check it out.

Some of my favorites so far are Hovercrafty, Pluto Strikes Back and Big Vine. Maybe around Christmas when I've got a little time off, I'll make a game or two.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

This weekend I sprung for an Xbox 360. Finally. Then I rented The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I'll have to take it back to Blockbuster Thursday, so I'm gonna have to buy it. $60, damn. Graphically it is, without a doubt, the most beautiful game I have ever seen. Its gameplay is utterly consuming. I may not be sleeping much these next few weeks.

On coming to the surface (the game starts underground), an incredible panorama opens. The trees, the normal/gloss mapping of the rocks, the water. Everything looks amazing. The world is massive beyond belief. A profound sense of freedom - you can do anything. Playing Oblivion for the first time was very much like opening up the exquisite world of Ultima V as a kid. Few games appeal to me that much.

For me, it is essential that a game inspire a sense of freedom with Ultima V, Times of Lore, GTA III, Spider-Man 2 being representative examples.