December Days 02: Baby's First Rollover.
Dec. 2nd, 2019 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[This is Part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
Score, as a concept, used to matter a lot more in games than it does now. Some part of that is because games designed for an arcade or a pinball parlor were intended to get people to put in a quarter and play for a while before hitting a game over and needing to apply another quarter to keep going, or to start again and try to get farther than they did before. Many fondly remembered arcade games have a loop that is essentially "here is a task, here are the impediments. If you succeed, repeat the task, but with more impediments, or faster-moving ones, or ones that move in different patterns, until you fail."
(There's also a fascinating history involving pinball machines and organized crime that's not being discussed here. "Games of chance," which pinball would have been classified as, were it not for some wizards who demonstrated that pinball was, instead, a game of skill, had to deal with gambling authorities and their regulations. And were often a fruitful way for syndicates and other groups to earn money that could be used to fuel other operations.)
The way of determining how well you were doing at the game, then, was the score counter. Since there wasn't a win condition as such, the accumulated score was a way of keeping track of how well someone was doing at the game. Borrowing from pinball machines, successful actions by players were rewarded with points, and many games had a high score table where the best plays on the machine were recorded, usually with a small space available for the player that achieved the score to input characters to identify the players. This was usually three characters, and there are probably more than enough stories around of players who either encountered or preferred to use as vulgar of three-letter combinations as they could when they achieved the high score. ("ASS" is the most common of those combinations that I remember.)
Specific, harder-to-achieve actions were often rewarded with more points and eventually, might result in bonuses or bonus stages where a lot of points (or the extremely precious extra lives) could be obtained in a hurry. All scores, however, eventually had an upper bound, because only so much memory had been allocated to the score display. In some games, like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, other issues involving perfect play develop before the score runs out of space to display, leading to "kill screens" or other situations where it is physically impossible to complete a round and continue playing. In other games, like in pinball machines, it's possibly to obtain enough points to exceed the counter's ability to keep track of them, and the counter rolls back over to zero to keep playing. Rollovers, in the scorekeeping days, are prized things (or, in some cases, possibly not-prized things - after all, if you've played well enough that you turned the counter all the way back to zeroes, it's entirely possible the game will think that the score you've achieved is lower than it actually is, and not give you a deserved space on the leaderboard for your skill.) One of my earliest video gaming memories involves a rollover on the venerable system the Atari 2600. I did not achieve this rollover, as I was all of six years old at the time.
In the department of "repeat this loop pattern until it becomes too fast"-style games was a brick-breaker style game called Circus Atari. Instead of solid lines of bricks to brea with a paddle and ball, like Breakout and its variations, Circus Atari posited that you were a trampoline-style act, where two clowns would take turns bouncing up and down on the see-saw and then breaking balloons that were moving in rows across the screen. Instead of a ball that traveled at a specific speed and angle, the circus acrobats traveled in arcs subject to gravity, they would bounce off the balloons, either sending them back down toward the see-saw with more force, or sending them further into the air to possibly pop and bounce off other balloons in the row. To keep the acrobats going, and the player had to make sure that the acrobat came down on the open side of the see-saw, so they would launch their partner into the air, instead of coming to an ignominious splat. The single button on the Atari paddle controller would switch the orientation of the see-saw so that an acrobat coming in hot, but on the wrong side, could instead find the open side and send their partner sailing into the air. Every time the acrobats bounced on the see-saw, they flew further into the air, but they also flew faster through the air, so the gameplay tempo would gradually speed up until it reached the maximum speed.
In the standard mode of the game, once all the balloons had been popped in a row, the character player would receive a bonus to the score, and a new row of those balloons would appear to be popped. Removing the topmost row of balloons would provide the largest bonus, but most crucially, would provide an extra life. Only one extra life could be stored at any given time, like in pinball, but it meant a player with sufficient skill could play the game nearly-indefinitely. Five acrobats were alloted for the game, and there were several different variations that could be played. Some of the variations added a fourth row containing three non-breakable but bouncable items for extra difficulty (or ease, depending on which side of them you were on at the time), or changing the rules of the game so that, for example, instead of reappearing with a new row, a row would stay popped, and a complete new set would appear once all the balloons had been popped (achieving this feat granted the extra life and a bonus consisting of the bonuses from all three lines together), or that the clowns would continue through the balloons, instead of bouncing off of them. A difficulty switch could be set on the console to control the initial speed of the acrobats, in case extra challenge was desired.
You can play Circus Atari in many places on the Internet, or as part of an emulation scheme, if you have the correct files.
In any case, while scores of the hundreds and thousands are easy to do, rolling the score over completely was not nearly as easy to achieve, and while I liked the game, it wasn't necessarily something I had a whole lot of skil at, being, y'know, six. So one morning, my dad lets me come over to the television, where the score in question is at 9998 and there are enough acrobats left that even though I won't be able to score more than the single point that comes from setting an acrobat in motion, I'm going to get to be able to roll the score over. Which is awesome for me, because I was curious about what happened when the score went past 9999. And so, I rolled it over, and that was the sort of thing that mde me want to get good enough with the game to be able to roll it over myself. I don't remember actually doing it on the machine itself, but I have done it in emulation, without resorting to save-states. I would go on to roll over the score in the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders multiple times, because 2600 Space Invaders has a pattern that works really well in getting the most dangerous row of invaders out quickly and them methodically getting all the others out with minimal exposure to counterattack. But it takes a certain amount of finesse that came from playing with the joysticks of the console, and so I'd have to relearn the technique and skill for more modern controllers or emulation to achieve it again.
I've also done some rollovers in other, older games as well, because after a certain point in time, there's always enough memory allocated to keeping count of the score that there's never any danger of it rolling over through normal gameplay, even if it is skilled gameplay. And eventually, as games stop being about loops meant for quarters and start being about narrative experiences from start to end, or the achievements for them become about performing specific actions in the game, rather than collecting points, scores and score displays start to fade out of games. (Unless they're games where the score is important, like sport simulations or kill counts or more pedestrian things like that.) The era where everything you do nets points, usually in hundreds, exists for a while, but even as soon as Super Mario Brothers, the score is not the focus of the game - defeating all the stages is, and the score is just a convenient way of keeping track of how quickly and efficiently one is achieving that goal.
But there was definitely a thrill involved in the rollover, even if I hadn't actually done the work to get there. And that probably helped set me on the path toward wanting to play more games and try to do well at them.
Score, as a concept, used to matter a lot more in games than it does now. Some part of that is because games designed for an arcade or a pinball parlor were intended to get people to put in a quarter and play for a while before hitting a game over and needing to apply another quarter to keep going, or to start again and try to get farther than they did before. Many fondly remembered arcade games have a loop that is essentially "here is a task, here are the impediments. If you succeed, repeat the task, but with more impediments, or faster-moving ones, or ones that move in different patterns, until you fail."
(There's also a fascinating history involving pinball machines and organized crime that's not being discussed here. "Games of chance," which pinball would have been classified as, were it not for some wizards who demonstrated that pinball was, instead, a game of skill, had to deal with gambling authorities and their regulations. And were often a fruitful way for syndicates and other groups to earn money that could be used to fuel other operations.)
The way of determining how well you were doing at the game, then, was the score counter. Since there wasn't a win condition as such, the accumulated score was a way of keeping track of how well someone was doing at the game. Borrowing from pinball machines, successful actions by players were rewarded with points, and many games had a high score table where the best plays on the machine were recorded, usually with a small space available for the player that achieved the score to input characters to identify the players. This was usually three characters, and there are probably more than enough stories around of players who either encountered or preferred to use as vulgar of three-letter combinations as they could when they achieved the high score. ("ASS" is the most common of those combinations that I remember.)
Specific, harder-to-achieve actions were often rewarded with more points and eventually, might result in bonuses or bonus stages where a lot of points (or the extremely precious extra lives) could be obtained in a hurry. All scores, however, eventually had an upper bound, because only so much memory had been allocated to the score display. In some games, like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, other issues involving perfect play develop before the score runs out of space to display, leading to "kill screens" or other situations where it is physically impossible to complete a round and continue playing. In other games, like in pinball machines, it's possibly to obtain enough points to exceed the counter's ability to keep track of them, and the counter rolls back over to zero to keep playing. Rollovers, in the scorekeeping days, are prized things (or, in some cases, possibly not-prized things - after all, if you've played well enough that you turned the counter all the way back to zeroes, it's entirely possible the game will think that the score you've achieved is lower than it actually is, and not give you a deserved space on the leaderboard for your skill.) One of my earliest video gaming memories involves a rollover on the venerable system the Atari 2600. I did not achieve this rollover, as I was all of six years old at the time.
In the department of "repeat this loop pattern until it becomes too fast"-style games was a brick-breaker style game called Circus Atari. Instead of solid lines of bricks to brea with a paddle and ball, like Breakout and its variations, Circus Atari posited that you were a trampoline-style act, where two clowns would take turns bouncing up and down on the see-saw and then breaking balloons that were moving in rows across the screen. Instead of a ball that traveled at a specific speed and angle, the circus acrobats traveled in arcs subject to gravity, they would bounce off the balloons, either sending them back down toward the see-saw with more force, or sending them further into the air to possibly pop and bounce off other balloons in the row. To keep the acrobats going, and the player had to make sure that the acrobat came down on the open side of the see-saw, so they would launch their partner into the air, instead of coming to an ignominious splat. The single button on the Atari paddle controller would switch the orientation of the see-saw so that an acrobat coming in hot, but on the wrong side, could instead find the open side and send their partner sailing into the air. Every time the acrobats bounced on the see-saw, they flew further into the air, but they also flew faster through the air, so the gameplay tempo would gradually speed up until it reached the maximum speed.
In the standard mode of the game, once all the balloons had been popped in a row, the character player would receive a bonus to the score, and a new row of those balloons would appear to be popped. Removing the topmost row of balloons would provide the largest bonus, but most crucially, would provide an extra life. Only one extra life could be stored at any given time, like in pinball, but it meant a player with sufficient skill could play the game nearly-indefinitely. Five acrobats were alloted for the game, and there were several different variations that could be played. Some of the variations added a fourth row containing three non-breakable but bouncable items for extra difficulty (or ease, depending on which side of them you were on at the time), or changing the rules of the game so that, for example, instead of reappearing with a new row, a row would stay popped, and a complete new set would appear once all the balloons had been popped (achieving this feat granted the extra life and a bonus consisting of the bonuses from all three lines together), or that the clowns would continue through the balloons, instead of bouncing off of them. A difficulty switch could be set on the console to control the initial speed of the acrobats, in case extra challenge was desired.
You can play Circus Atari in many places on the Internet, or as part of an emulation scheme, if you have the correct files.
In any case, while scores of the hundreds and thousands are easy to do, rolling the score over completely was not nearly as easy to achieve, and while I liked the game, it wasn't necessarily something I had a whole lot of skil at, being, y'know, six. So one morning, my dad lets me come over to the television, where the score in question is at 9998 and there are enough acrobats left that even though I won't be able to score more than the single point that comes from setting an acrobat in motion, I'm going to get to be able to roll the score over. Which is awesome for me, because I was curious about what happened when the score went past 9999. And so, I rolled it over, and that was the sort of thing that mde me want to get good enough with the game to be able to roll it over myself. I don't remember actually doing it on the machine itself, but I have done it in emulation, without resorting to save-states. I would go on to roll over the score in the Atari 2600 version of Space Invaders multiple times, because 2600 Space Invaders has a pattern that works really well in getting the most dangerous row of invaders out quickly and them methodically getting all the others out with minimal exposure to counterattack. But it takes a certain amount of finesse that came from playing with the joysticks of the console, and so I'd have to relearn the technique and skill for more modern controllers or emulation to achieve it again.
I've also done some rollovers in other, older games as well, because after a certain point in time, there's always enough memory allocated to keeping count of the score that there's never any danger of it rolling over through normal gameplay, even if it is skilled gameplay. And eventually, as games stop being about loops meant for quarters and start being about narrative experiences from start to end, or the achievements for them become about performing specific actions in the game, rather than collecting points, scores and score displays start to fade out of games. (Unless they're games where the score is important, like sport simulations or kill counts or more pedestrian things like that.) The era where everything you do nets points, usually in hundreds, exists for a while, but even as soon as Super Mario Brothers, the score is not the focus of the game - defeating all the stages is, and the score is just a convenient way of keeping track of how quickly and efficiently one is achieving that goal.
But there was definitely a thrill involved in the rollover, even if I hadn't actually done the work to get there. And that probably helped set me on the path toward wanting to play more games and try to do well at them.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-03 05:05 am (UTC)also: guess my earworm 😛
no subject
Date: 2019-12-03 05:27 am (UTC)