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Asteroids, Battlezone, Tempest, Star Wars, Gravitar.

Started by darby o chill, October 04, 2018, 12:09:12 AM

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darby o chill

You've seen them. The vector games.



QuoteTank, a new short film from Stu Maschwitz is a visual homage to vector arcade games of the 80's. Tank tells the story of a team of pilots that must take on a weapon of mass destruction in a battle to save their world.

Putting aside current 3D modeling techniques, Stu looked to the past and built the world of Tank entirely in Adobe After Effects, using math, code, and hundreds of hours of painstaking animation work.

Tank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEdQ3mwyrQ4

The making of Tank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRkYP7wnD40

madhair60

Asteroids on an actual vintage cabinet is fucking beautiful.

darby o chill

Quote from: madhair60 on October 04, 2018, 04:20:49 PM
Asteroids on an actual vintage cabinet is fucking beautiful.

It really is, those little phosphor trails are gorgeous. Impossible to replicate without an actual vector monitor but some dude made this emulator which when tweaked looks very close. I couldn't get it to work on my old pc and there's no mac version.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/196782-insanely-great-vector-game-emulator-aae/

Arcade Club in Bury is your fuckin boy for this shit. Sit down Star Wars cab. OG Asteroids with the fucking lights. Amazing. All the other shite you mentioned. Glory days of gaming.

darby o chill

I'll visit Bury next time I'm in Manchester.
Was reading the bgmnts 'reality in books/movies' thread earlier and I have the same thoughts about video games. The less realistic they are, the more I like 'em.
Spacewar from 1962 is visually more appealing to me than anything from the last 20 years.

https://youtu.be/bN7TiIZBc7g?t=4s

I should just buy an oscilloscope.

Consignia

Nothing to say about vector graphics, but just chipping in to say the Bury arcade club is ace. Everyone should go.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Watching the making of video, it's a real Mount Everest "Because it's there" sort of endeavour. He could have made the same film in a couple of days on a proper 3D animation program.

Dex Sawash

Battlezone cabinet is greatest cabinet game. 100% immersion, beyond vr. Blown out audio, perfect from the 2 bar musical intro to the various background blips and urgent warnings. Go stick your head in one now if you`ve not done it before.

Norton Canes

And of course the medium of jagged, hyper-vivid vector graphics is ideal for simulations of global thermonuclear war

MojoJojo

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on October 05, 2018, 11:57:11 AM
Watching the making of video, it's a real Mount Everest "Because it's there" sort of endeavour. He could have made the same film in a couple of days on a proper 3D animation program.

Yeah... I've only watched the video, not the making of, and I'm not really sure of the point. It's obviously not of the time, and it's not really entertaining.

Did he make it with a vectrex or something?

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

It was done in After Effects through an extremely complicated process of animation layers and custom scripting. I applaud the ingenuity and sheer bloody mindedness involved and I liked the end result well enough on an aesthetic level, but at the same time, I also wonder what the point is.

It's a bit like making the Mona Lisa on an Etch-a-sketch.

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: Dex Sawash on October 05, 2018, 12:56:53 PM
Battlezone cabinet is greatest cabinet game. 100% immersion, beyond vr. Blown out audio, perfect from the 2 bar musical intro to the various background blips and urgent warnings. Go stick your head in one now if you`ve not done it before.

It's great but Tempest is my all time favourite. It's not rose-tinted specs either. Since my times playing it in arcades as a youth, I have had a couple of sessions at history of computer games exhibitions and it's every bit as adrenaline-inducing as I remember. At the second one, there was a fault with the spinner. I mentioned it to one of the assistants and they admitted that the organisers had been wondering if it was working properly, but they couldn't be sure. It seemed obvious to me, but I guess a decades old point of reference is better than none at all. The young 'uns, eh?

I bought a version for the Playstation some years back and it was fun, but there's no replacing the original controls. A great deal of thought must have gone into the spinner, which has exactly the right weight to it give a satisfying inertia while still being precise.

kngen

Quote from: darby o chill on October 04, 2018, 07:50:14 PM
It really is, those little phosphor trails are gorgeous. Impossible to replicate without an actual vector monitor but some dude made this emulator which when tweaked looks very close. I couldn't get it to work on my old pc and there's no mac version.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/196782-insanely-great-vector-game-emulator-aae/

I don't remember the Punjab State Teacher Eligibility Test bit of Asteroids. Must have been one of the later stages.

Cold Meat Platter

The flight yoke-style controller on the Star Wars arcade game is a thing of beauty and no joystick I have tried with emulation even comes close. The controller really is a huge part of the experience in these games and is difficult to replicate outside of the 8 way stick and buttons. Spy Hunter is another that relies heavily on the controls for fun.


NoSleep

Another Tempest fan here, from playing the actual game every lunchtime at the pub for the duration the cabinet was there, then playing it on MAME and various platforms that featured "Atari's Greatest Hits" (which I still do) and culminating in my purchase of an Atari Jaguar to play Tempest 2000 (which I still do).

Norton Canes

Quote from: Cold Meat Platter on October 08, 2018, 02:39:59 PM
The flight yoke-style controller on the Star Wars arcade game is a thing of beauty and no joystick I have tried with emulation even comes close. The controller really is a huge part of the experience in these games and is difficult to replicate outside of the 8 way stick and buttons. Spy Hunter is another that relies heavily on the controls for fun

Lunar Lander's BIG THRUST LEVER

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: NoSleep on October 08, 2018, 03:09:46 PM
Another Tempest fan here, from playing the actual game every lunchtime at the pub for the duration the cabinet was there, then playing it on MAME and various platforms that featured "Atari's Greatest Hits" (which I still do) and culminating in my purchase of an Atari Jaguar to play Tempest 2000 (which I still do).

We must have a match ever. I'm sure you'd kick my arse but I wouldn't care. It's just such a great game.

Dex Sawash

Tempest knob is a brilliant thing. I think I may have played the playstation Tempest 30 minutes in total.

NoSleep

Quote from: Johnny Yesno on October 08, 2018, 10:38:44 PM
We must have a match ever. I'm sure you'd kick my arse but I wouldn't care. It's just such a great game.

I'm not that good, I just enjoy playing it. My high score on Tempest 2000 (428,000 or so) would make it into the Twin Galaxies top 5 (last time I checked), but that has more to do with nobody giving a fuck about Twin Galaxies.

buzby

Quote from: Cold Meat Platter on October 08, 2018, 02:39:59 PM
The flight yoke-style controller on the Star Wars arcade game is a thing of beauty and no joystick I have tried with emulation even comes close. The controller really is a huge part of the experience in these games and is difficult to replicate outside of the 8 way stick and buttons. Spy Hunter is another that relies heavily on the controls for fun.
And it's a relatively primitive mechanical system affair too - an arrangement of gears, springs and potentiometers:

Part of what makes it feel right and nice to use is that the inward angle of the grips helps to turn your wrist, which allows greater up/down travel without discomfort. Used ones go for around $500-600 nowadays, though there have been a couple of attempts at reproducing them - RAM Controls was selling them back in 2010 (though it's been speculated he actually was selling a cache of NOS parts), but that collapsed in acrimony with undelivered preorders and oweing a lot of people money. There's a Utah dentist (who also runs a retro arcade) who is currently making repro units with aluminium gears instead of the standard nylon ones.

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: NoSleep on October 09, 2018, 07:58:21 AM
I'm not that good, I just enjoy playing it.

Same here. Sign of a good game that, innit?

QuoteMy high score on Tempest 2000 (428,000 or so) would make it into the Twin Galaxies top 5 (last time I checked), but that has more to do with nobody giving a fuck about Twin Galaxies.

I'm not sure what my score was on the PS1(?) version. I doubt it would have troubled any hiscore tables, though.

NoSleep

Yeah, there was a PSX version but I don't think it was exactly the same as the Jaguar version, and it doesn't have the same legendary status.

Johnny Yesno

Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2yTRGBOMUU

I remember now that one of the things that irked me a little about it was that you couldn't spin the claw round and round as the tube came into view.

darby o chill

In Retrogamer's 'The Atari Book', developer Dave Theurer says the prototype Tempest machine was called Vortex, but colleagues said it sounded like the feminine hygiene product Tampax, so they decided to change it. He also says the initial concept was for a 'first-person Space Invaders'.

It's an enjoyable little book with loads of triva.
Jed Margolin Star Wars' main programmer: "The control yoke for Star Wars was a downsized version of the control from Army Battlezone which came directly from an actual Bradley Fighting Vehicle"  "I wanted it to be based on every child's experience with riding a bike".

Atari's unfinished vector game Tomcat looked cool as fuck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRAVJpS6UA0
http://jmargolin.com/tomcat/tomcat.htm

I just found out there's a Battlezone clone for Vectrex called Stramash Zone. Pretty cool but like Dex Sawash said, nothing beats the o.g. cabinet with the periscope. I remember reading somewhere that there were hygiene concerns about it, which probably led to the ghastly smaller cabinet with no periscope.

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: darby o chill on October 09, 2018, 09:02:14 PM
In Retrogamer's 'The Atari Book', developer Dave Theurer says the prototype Tempest machine was called Vortex, but colleagues said it sounded like the feminine hygiene product Tampax, so they decided to change it. He also says the initial concept was for a 'first-person Space Invaders'.

It's an enjoyable little book with loads of triva.
Jed Margolin Star Wars' main programmer: "The control yoke for Star Wars was a downsized version of the control from Army Battlezone which came directly from an actual Bradley Fighting Vehicle"  "I wanted it to be based on every child's experience with riding a bike".

Atari's unfinished vector game Tomcat looked cool as fuck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRAVJpS6UA0
http://jmargolin.com/tomcat/tomcat.htm

I just found out there's a Battlezone clone for Vectrex called Stramash Zone. Pretty cool but like Dex Sawash said, nothing beats the o.g. cabinet with the periscope. I remember reading somewhere that there were hygiene concerns about it, which probably led to the ghastly smaller cabinet with no periscope.

That's interesting. Those colleagues of Dave Theurer were idiots. Take the 'Temp-' from Tempest and the '-ex' from Vortex and what have you got? Extemp, that's right.