Stumbling through Winter Games

[davidn]

Continuing my one-video-long tradition of playing Olympic-themed games when the real thing is going on in some part of the world outside my basement, here is Winter Games on the Commodore 64, which kjorteo wrote about some centuries ago. Oddly, despite being four years older, this one looks rather better than the PC sequel I had that came out in 1988. Does it play any better? I'll find out, but the answer may not surprise you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bfJWdXoxXI&hd=1

Comments

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

Okay, this was amusing, right from the start. A bluescreen that we WANT to see. :D

Was this a European thing, or was Z$ usually the first String input that you would use, or is that a quirk of yours? I was always given A$ as the example and so I would always work forwards.

I always loved the loading screens -- especially because it MEANT it was loading. I could never tell if a game was actually loading (on disc, at least) because I had a few games where the loading would crash the system, but the disc drive just kept on chugging away...

The soundtrack suddenly reminded me that I have played this one before...

Now I'm curious if you ever played Caveman Games, because the opening "lighting ceremony" was parodied there...

Oh wow, white on light blue.

"Our country reeks of trees..." I wonder what the Epyx National Anthem is.

That is a LOT of loading for what it essentially choosing a few options! Tape Loading is way too slow...

Why did all the games on the Commodore use Control Port 2 as Player 1? That never made any sense to me. Was it easier to program for the second port or something?

I wish there was better controls than just Left-Right-Left-Right. I realize that's emulating legs, but that's just so boring.

I love that figure skating is "falling over, the game".

"To the appreciation of a nearby sea monster!" Ahh, C64 had a wonderful sound system, but just was horrid with voices, despite many botched attempts.

The second figure skating music was actually pretty energetic!

You were SO BORED that you were playing Christmas tunes. Wow. XD

I was pretty good at the Bobsled myself, but I do recall the sled tipping over just as much. :P

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

Heh, the examples we were always given involved G$, and I was too young to get the 'g-string' pun... :P

D.F.

[davidn]

Wow, who wrote your BASIC books - Julian Clary? :)

[davidn]

I can't imagine the choice of variable name being a European thing, but these things have surprised me before. I vaguely remember that in the books I used to read, Z$ was typically used as the input variable, I for loops, and I can't remember any of the rest. (Mostly single-character variable names and no concept of scope - how was this ever considered an easy language!)

Notably, this video was approximately twice as long before I cut out the loading times. I couldn't believe that it took three separate loading times to even reach the first event!

I was curious about the genius behind using joystick port 2 as the first port as well - I read somewhere that it was done that way because port 1 was wired to double up for certain keyboard presses, for some equally opaque reason.

I really wanted to try the Bobsled again, but I would have had to go through the entire sodding game again to retry it! Even with emulator fast-forward, that was more than I was prepared to do at the time, even though I was disappointed in my unimpressive performance. But in the real Olympics, you have to wait four years before you try it again!

[premchaia_pre4]

Things I have been tempted to tell people, as an exaggeration with a truthy center:

“So, you know how programs on the C64 and similar generations of computer would sometimes dump garbage to the display while doing non-interactive operations, due to using the video RAM as extra memory to enhance whatever it was they were doing?

“So, you know how human neurosystems have cortexes with a bunch of specialized-ish processing to deal with reconstructing and modeling geometry and three-dimensional color and shape and occlusion and lighting, not to mention spatialization and impulse response of other sorts? You know what you can do if you're not using those to actually process light fields and environmental sounds? Extra memory!

“Kinesthetic senses and the like can tell what each of your joints and muscles are doing. That's state—and the motor neurons have a delay, which makes a lovely set of delay lines, which is even more state. Guess what? Extra memory. Those regions of the brain for utterances that you're about to speak, or utterances that you're hearing? More nice long delay lines in there too; extra memory. Even—if you're really careful with the mapping—the parts that recognize presence and emotional and social information, if you're not using them for interactions at the time? Extra memory.

“So the upshot of this is if you see me in the corner with my eyes rolled back, babbling frantically to myself under my breath about invisible people while twitching all of my limbs into weird oscillating shapes, it probably just means I'm thinking about something really, really complicated…”