{"id":2311,"date":"2013-06-14T11:45:58","date_gmt":"2013-06-14T17:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=2311"},"modified":"2014-09-07T21:40:58","modified_gmt":"2014-09-08T03:40:58","slug":"golfyssey-1-atari-2600","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=2311","title":{"rendered":"Golfyssey 01 – Atari 2600"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ah, the Atari 2600<\/a>.\u00a0 The video game system from 1977.\u00a0 Even though I have plenty of games for the Atari, I never play any of them regularly.\u00a0 The graphics and especially the sound are just too primitive for me to enjoy anything on this thing.\u00a0 In fact, some of the games that were released for the system are infamous for being very bad versions of their arcade counterparts<\/a>.\u00a0 And there is of course the colossal fuck-up that was E.T.<\/a>\u00a0 I’ve heard that there are some real gems for the 2600 (also known as the Atari VCS, or simply Atari) but I’ve never really gotten into them.\u00a0 Now on with the golf games!<\/p>\n

The first up is a game from 1980 called simply “Golf”.<\/p>\n

\"b_Golf_Color_front\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So far so good.\u00a0 Nothing that screams “abandon ship” just yet.\u00a0 And remembering that this is the Atari 2600 we’re talking about, we’re keeping the bar pretty low right now.\u00a0 Here’s what you see when you load the game:<\/p>\n

\"Atari<\/a><\/p>\n

Again, this is about what you’d expect.\u00a0 Par for the course (dur-hur-hur).<\/p>\n

So let’s give the game a go and… OH DEAR GOD NO!\u00a0 MAKE IT STOP!!!<\/p>\n

Okay, this game fucking stinks.\u00a0 The controls make it play more like baseball.\u00a0 Holding down the button (the Atari joystick had one button) makes the golf club swing.\u00a0 The longer you hold the button, the further back you swing, and the more distance your ball will madly fly away from the hole.\u00a0 That’s not much different from how modern golf video games operate, but this game is fucked because of the view.\u00a0 Look at it.\u00a0 It’s top down except for the player.\u00a0 The player is viewed from the side.<\/p>\n

So as he swings his baseball bat<\/del> golf club, he doesn’t have much control over where that ball is going to end up.\u00a0 Most maddeningly, the player has to position this blocky orange half-wit between the ball and the hole to get the ball closer to the hole.\u00a0 And forget about swinging all the way.\u00a0 You have to make a great number of very small swings to move the blocky ball incrementally along a path that will move it closer to the hole and away from the edges of the “map” and away from obstacles.<\/p>\n

And those trees are impenetrable.\u00a0 They can not be passed by this ball.\u00a0 I got 28 swings in before I realized that I would have to flip this fucking golfer upside fucking down to get him to swing that god damned baseball bat<\/del> golf club the right way to get it past the first fucking tree in my way.<\/p>\n

And then I gave up.\u00a0 This game made me mad.\u00a0 And games are supposed to be fun, they’re not supposed to give you the angries.<\/p>\n

So I can consider 1980’s “Golf” for the Atari 2600 to be a total, complete, unmitigated failure.<\/p>\n

But wait… what’s this?\u00a0 Another golf game for the Atari 2600?<\/p>\n

\"584922_172439_front\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This game is called “My Golf” and it came out in 1990 – a full decade after the release of “Golf”.\u00a0 This was already when the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo were duking it out for dominance of the video game console market, so I’m willing to bet that only about 200 people actually bought this game.\u00a0 My Atari emulator displays data on each game, and it lists “Golf” as common and “My Golf” as extremely rare.<\/p>\n

Now this is a shame indeed.\u00a0 “My Golf” is not just a better game than “Golf”, it is one of the best games I have ever seen or played for the Atari 2600.\u00a0 It works extremely well within the severe limitations of the 2600’s hardware and is still challenging enough to return to again and again in a fun way.\u00a0 Here is a screenshot:<\/p>\n

\"s_MyGolf_HES_2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now, I don’t know why the grass appears purple and the water appears green.\u00a0 Maybe this is some kind of golf course as it appears in a song by Jimi Hendrix, you know, on the shores of a dazzling beach on Jupiter.<\/p>\n

Some notes about that screenshot – the putting green isn’t visible.\u00a0 The putting green (or is it a putting mauve?) appears once you drive the ball past the first and often the second screen up.\u00a0 The green appears like a wide oval with a hole in the middle, and once you get the ball onto the green, you get to see a zoomed-in view.\u00a0 But it’s still all purple.<\/p>\n

But by 1990, lots and lots of golf games had come out for various arcade and video game console systems, so HES<\/a> knew what features to copy and which to leave out when designing a good golf game for the Atari 2600.\u00a0 And this one is good.\u00a0 As much as people rag on the blocky graphics and shitty tuneless sound the system has, it can still be very fast when programmed right.\u00a0 “My Golf” uses a swing meter that requires 3 button presses, and you have to react fast.\u00a0 You also need to properly aim your shot and select your club, and you need to make sure you give your swing the right amount of power.<\/p>\n

This game I can see myself playing again.\u00a0 It’s just a shame that more people haven’t ever heard of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ah, the Atari 2600.\u00a0 The video game system from 1977.\u00a0 Even though I have plenty of games for the Atari, I never play any of them regularly.\u00a0 The graphics and especially the sound are just too primitive for me to enjoy anything on this thing.\u00a0 In fact, some of the games that were released for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[510,474,38],"tags":[478,476,314],"class_list":["post-2311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-video-game-consoles","category-video-games","tag-atari","tag-golf","tag-jimi-hendrix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2311"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7484,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2311\/revisions\/7484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}