When I was in third grade, my family moved to a new city and I started going to a new school. I missed my old town. And I missed my old friends. But I made fast friends with a kid named Thomas, or "Tom The Bomb" as he'd later be affectionately known in our circle. I remained really close to Thomas from third grade all the way until we entered high school at which point we invariably were swallowed up by the large pond and got swept up in different crowds. But I always thought that dude was great. I remember running into him once when we were both on Summer break from college. We were off to different schools by that point, but it was awesome to see him and catch up. That was over twenty years ago now. Yikes.
Thomas was the only other kid I knew who had a Commodore 64. His dad worked for Kodak back then, and their family was always on the cutting edge of technology it felt like. Thomas and his siblings were all big Sega fans, and often introduced me to new games that I hadn't had a chance to play yet. Ecco The Dolphin, The Lion King, Sonic & Knuckles - these were all games I first witnessed in person at his house. Actually, I think his younger brother, Patrick, was the bigger gamer. But Thomas was really into computers. While I did own a Commodore 64, I treated mine like a console. It was plugged into the same TV as my NES and Genesis, and I only had cartridges for it. Thomas had his hooked up to a monitor and a printer and he even had a disk drive. I bring all this up because it was in his basement where he one day introduced me to his favorite C64 game, Dig Dug. Years later I'd discover that Dig Dug was a pretty big hit in the arcades, and was created by Namco - the same company known for Pac-Man. I had no idea. In my mind, Dig Dug was some obscure computer game on a nondescript 5.25" floppy disk. Dig Dug is a pretty weird game, especially given its 1982 release. While it retains the single screen playfield of arcade games of its time, there are no predetermined paths like in Pac-Man or similar games. Instead, you're digging paths through the dirt to get around which seems pretty forward thinking for the time. It means that the screen is almost a blank canvas, and it's up to the player to create a route to maneuver around. Beyond that mechanic, the actual gameplay is fairly simple. The goal of each level is just to get rid of all enemies on the screen. You do this by pumping them up with air until they explode. Which in hindsight, is actually sort of hideous. There's basically just two enemies: the ever-present Pookahs (a Namco mainstay) and some harder to kill dragons. As to be expected from an arcade game of this vintage, levels don't really differ much from stage to stage, but the difficulty ramps up by continually adding more enemies to each new stage. A nice touch is the changing color scheme as levels progress. This does nothing beyond switching up cosmetics, but it does make the game feel a little less samey. Compare this concept to a game like Pac-Man where everything looks the same no matter how many stages you complete. Again, there's some forward thinking here as far as game design goes. Like many old single-screen arcade games from this era, I tend to get bored after a while. I mean, it's ultimately just doing the same thing over and over again with the difficulty constantly ramping up. But I must say I find myself enjoying this one a lot more than I figured I would. As iconic as Pac-Man or Space Invaders are, I do find them to lose my interest fairly rapidly. Instead, I'd put Dig Dug in the same camp as something like Galaga or Mappy - old games that are actually weird and interesting enough to hold my interest for much longer lengths of time. To that end, I'd actually throw a fair heap of praise at Dig Dug.
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When I was a kid, I was pretty scared of horror movies. And yet, I was always intrigued by them. I remember studying the backs of VHS tapes in the 80s whenever we'd go to the local rental place. Maybe I was attempting to empower myself. To take my fears into my own hands. I can't really say for sure, but as scared as I was to sit through those movies, I loved looking at the little pictures on the back of the boxes.
And yet, for whatever reason spooky games always appealed to me. To this day I'll still gladly go to bat for defending the honor of LJN's Friday The 13th and A Nightmare On Elm Street games on NES. I honestly believe that both are severely misunderstood games, that get unfairly maligned. Of course the NES wasn't my first console. That honor goes to the Atari 2600. Unless you count the Commodore 64 as a console instead of a computer. Either way, I have a pretty hefty soft spot for the old VCS. Thanks to a gigantic hand-me-down box and some yard sales in the late 80s, the 2600 was my first real foray into gaming. Space Invaders, Missile Command, Moon Patrol, Superman, Combat... the list goes on and on. I spent hours in a literally centipede infested basement playing these seminal classics and infamous messes. And so the look and sound and feel of the 2600 means a lot to me. It was many years later before I appreciated the 2600 on a deeper level, though. It was probably around 2010 or so that I read Racing The Beam and really dived in to the console from a historical standpoint. It was then that I spent actual time with Adventure, which is to my mind the predecessor to the Legend Of Zelda. Around this time I also played Halo 2600, which really impressed me. How could a modern series like Halo be adapted to such primitive hardware successfully? Well, the proof was in the pudding. In 2012 my wife and I bought our first house. It came equipped with a finished basement with built in seating, a fireplace, and a bar. At the time we were childless, so we thought it fitting to deck the basement out like a 70s hangout. The bar was augmented with a record player and an Atari 2600 for good measure. One night we had some friends over to break the basement in and me and Jenn fired up the 2600. I had never played Haunted House, but everyone present was into horror movies so it seemed fitting. We had no instruction manual, so we fumbled around making no sense of the game for ten minutes before playing something else instead. Hardcore Gaming 101 published its Retro Horror book in 2018. In it, Rob Strangman (the Atari evangelist that he is) praised Haunted House. So I added it to my constantly growing To Play List once again. Of course that meant I didn't finally fire it up until 2023 when I did so on Antstream Arcade. If you're not familiar, Antstream is a streaming gaming service not unlike Xbox Game Pass. The difference is that it's available on basically every device you can access the internet from, and focuses on retro games. I'm a fan. My first reintroduction to Haunted House felt just like that night in the basement with Jenn. The game made no sense. You just walked around in an empty space until ghosts killed you. Why did people like this game? But then I read the effing manual. You are nothing but eyeballs in the dark. Your goal is to traverse the titular haunted house and finding some pieces of an artifact before making your way back to the entrance. Not unlike Adventure. But the difference is that you need to use your matches to light up the blackness in order to see anything. I missed this minor but major detail. Suddenly I was able to blast through the game's default difficulty in minutes. The biggest standout to me is that even in 2023, Haunted House is surprisingly scary. With so much of the house vacant, it's genuinely startling when something shows up to kill you barely any notice. Keep in mind that you're spending most of your time in pitch black here. And add to things that the 2600's limited sound chip means that getting killed results in some pretty jarring grinding noises. Somehow it legitimately works as a horror game on some extremely archaic hardware, and by using some very abstract audio and visuals. Like most Atari 2600 games, this one features successively more difficult modes accessed through the little dipswitch thing on the console. And I'm interested in exploring all of those more. But the time being, I guess I'm just pleased to finally see what the hype was about here. Haunted House is a simple game on paper, but ultimately so is horror as a genre. It's all about stripping things down to a very base human emotion and letting your imagination run wild. Maybe that works really well on such limited hardware because you're forced to fill in so many blanks. |
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