Combat: The Good Pwn Days and Nostalgia on Game Evolution Not to Mention the World's Longest Title for a Blog Entry!

I remember Combat, the Atari 2600 pack-in (picture found via digg--even though I think Spacewar was the first Spawncamp. I remember thinking that it was a boring game, and I hated it. Yet, I played it so much I learned all sorts of tricks. Like, if your tank tread was flush to a barrier pixel-a-pixel, you could turn your tank and make it do a quick orbit to the other side of the barrier. In the corners, your tank would either teleport to another corner, like Clue(do), or orbit indefinitely. Now, combine this with guided bullets and you have some funky trajectories!

The bi-plane dogfight, though difficult to control, was probably the best other game. I never did figure out the point of the 3-planes vs. the bomber, except as a handicap to the bomber player. Though I remember always being the poor schmuck playing the bomber. Did you know the Atari was intended to play Combat and Pong/Breakout games? I guess back then, all games were a sort of variant of that theme.

My take on games was you had your combat games: Space War, Tank Battle, Gunfighter (the first Murder SimulatorTM); you had your race games: Sprint, Deathrace 2000 (the second Murder SimulatorTM); and you had Breakout variants. I considered breakout to be Pong-for-One. Then I considered Space Invaders to be Pong-That-Shoots-Back. Head-on seemed like Breakout, except you drove over the dots. Finally, Pac Man seemed like a Head-on variant (same object: eat the dots), except there was a police siren sound, and creatures under sheets. I just assumed the theme of Pac Man was cops-and-robbers because of the Siren, the chase, Inky, Binky, Pinky, and Clyde. They were gangstas.

Still, Pac Man seemed very much the thief and the "ghosts" were the cops. I mean, Pac man seemed to be hell bent on taking all these dots away from them. I think my interpretation, cops-and-robbers, was much saner than the colloquial understanding. To me, those guys weren't ghosts (and the game doesn't call them that), because there was a leg beneath the sheet from the third (?) intermission. The dots were dots. The big dot was the "flashing dot." "Power pill" was invented by the news media. It was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. And then they had the nerve to imply Pac Man suggested drug use. No, the news media suggested it.

And, even though I rambled on with spotty game history as I remember it, the whole Deathrace 2000 sparked quite the controversy. Again, no one was horrified or appalled at it. You see, it was a car version of Road Runner vs. the Coyote. It looked like a cartoon. It played like a cartoon. We enjoyed it like a cartoon. My point is that these people who are "shocked" by the content of a video game are made up to sensationalize an otherwise boring story.

And all that while, Gunfighter was considered a wholesome video game, though it clearly depicted one man murdering another.