{"id":3571,"date":"2013-08-08T14:40:41","date_gmt":"2013-08-08T20:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=3571"},"modified":"2013-08-09T18:53:16","modified_gmt":"2013-08-10T00:53:16","slug":"video-carnage-05-odyssey%c2%b2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/?p=3571","title":{"rendered":"Video Carnage 05 \u2014 Odyssey\u00b2"},"content":{"rendered":"

The racing games for the Odyssey\u00b2<\/a> were both pack-in games on the same cartridge.\u00a0 I mentioned them before, and there really isn’t a whole lot to say about them.\u00a0 The Odyssey\u00b2 game library contains some surprisingly good and memorable games, but these to ain’t really among them.<\/p>\n

Speedway! (1978)<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Speedway!<\/a><\/p>\n

The idea behind this game is very simple.\u00a0 Race your car along the track for two minutes and rack up as many points as you can.\u00a0 You must dodge lots of other cars as you drive, because if you hit them you will crash and be momentarily stalled.<\/p>\n

When you boot up the console, you get this familiar screen:<\/p>\n

\"Odyssey\u00b2<\/a><\/p>\n

The Odyssey\u00b2 was one of those oddball home consoles with a full keyboard, so you could select the numbers 1 through 4 in this game.\u00a0 Selecting game #1 got you “Speedway!”.<\/p>\n

\"Odyssey\u00b2<\/a><\/p>\n

And that’s pretty much it.\u00a0 It’s not much to look at, and the sound is just different levels of noise.\u00a0 Pushing the joystick up gets you moving, left and right steer, and joystick back is the brake.\u00a0 There are two difficulty settings.\u00a0 The easier setting isn’t really worth playing at all – it’s much too easy.\u00a0 The cars all come down and move around in the same pattern, and after a while you will have it figured out.<\/p>\n

The second difficulty level is a lot more challenging though.\u00a0 The cars still come in a pattern, but things move a lot faster and you don’t have as much time or room to get out of the way.\u00a0 You’ll have to excuse the lack of screenshots to show you how things progress.\u00a0 My emulator refused to cooperate with its screenshot functionality, so I had to scavenge these few from the interwebs.<\/p>\n

The 2nd level difficulty actually makes this game kind of fun to play, but since I had it as a kid, and since it was one of the only games I had, I can’t really enjoy it myself any more.\u00a0 But it’s not bad for top-down racing – as long as you don’t mind driving an orange car on purple streets.<\/p>\n

Spin-Out! (1978)<\/span><\/p>\n

This one is a two-player game, and it has a top-down view as well.<\/p>\n

\"Odyssey\u00b2<\/a><\/p>\n

Pressing 2 or 3 at the select screen will get you into this game, but they are a little different.\u00a0 Game 2 is a 3-lap race, and game 3 is a 15-lap race.\u00a0 And each of these two versions has four difficulty settings, numbered 1-4.\u00a0 Difficulty 1 is slow speed with the track shown above.\u00a0 Difficulty 2 is fast speed on that same track.\u00a0 Difficulty 3 is slow speed again and puts some barriers on the track, around the top of that screenshot.\u00a0\u00a0Difficulty 4 is the fast version of difficulty 3.<\/p>\n

If you clip an obstacle like a wall or a barrier or the other car while you’re racing, your car will “spin out”… thus the title.\u00a0 And then you get to hear something other than noise coming out of the speakers!\u00a0 If you crash head-on into the wall, your car will crumple up into a blocky primitive 8-bit sprite for a moment.\u00a0 Then you’re good to race again from the same spot.<\/p>\n

The joystick moves the vehicle in the same way as it did in “Speedway!”, only whichever direction the car is facing, that joystick direction will drive.\u00a0 Left and right relative to that direction steer the car left and right.\u00a0 This is a fairly simple driving mechanic that has been used in top-down driving games, and game developers have abandoned it at their own risk, usually with bad results.<\/p>\n

The joystick button speeds up your car, so you’ll want to be pressing that sucker down most of the race.\u00a0 From experience, there can be a bit of strategy involved in the barrier track when there is room for only one car to pass through.\u00a0 You can make a small lead larger by slowing down a bit in order to get your opponent spun-out on the barrier as you slide through, thus giving you a chance to take that bigger lead.<\/p>\n

But of course, since this is a two-player game only, it’s no fun at all with just one person.\u00a0 Unless you want to try to beat your best time.<\/p>\n

Not bad games for 1978, I think.\u00a0 The speed can get quite fast-paced, so they definitely can feel like racing games, even though the choice of that pinkish purple colour is baffling.\u00a0 If you have an Odyssey\u00b2… well you probably have this already.\u00a0 If you want to play just about as primitive a racing game as can be but still have fun doing it, check these games out on the O2EM emulator<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s a DOS emulator, so I don’t know if it works on anything past Windows XP.\u00a0 You should also get the excellent “O2EM launcher”, but I won’t link to it because it’s hosted on SourceForge.\u00a0 SourceForge has gone the CNET route and is packing adware with their downloads now, so fuck SourceForge.\u00a0 May they painfully cramp up and suffocate from the way they’ve jammed their head up their ass.\u00a0 If you want\u00a0“O2EM launcher”, I can email it to you.<\/p>\n

Seriously, fuck SourceForge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The racing games for the Odyssey\u00b2 were both pack-in games on the same cartridge.\u00a0 I mentioned them before, and there really isn’t a whole lot to say about them.\u00a0 The Odyssey\u00b2 game library contains some surprisingly good and memorable games, but these to ain’t really among them. Speedway! (1978) The idea behind this game is […]<\/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":[515,479],"class_list":["post-3571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-video-game-consoles","category-video-games","tag-magnavox","tag-odyssey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3571","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=3571"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3655,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3571\/revisions\/3655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}