OddThinking

A couple of years ago, I discovered VICE, an emulator for the old Commodore 64 computer. For a nostalgic week, I re-discovered a number of classic computer games I used to play, back when I ‘ere a lad.

I came to two key conclusions.

1. Commodore 64 games were not as good as I remember them.
2. They were still better than the rubbish I was being exposed to on the Sony Playstation.

Sure, the graphics and sound are indubitably better on the newer consoles, but the game-play just seems to be severely lacking… but that’s not what I want to talk about today.

I only mention this to set the scene as I nostalge about two games I used to play.

Screenshot from ScreenMania.

Microprose’s Kennedy Approach (1985) is wrongly described by some as a flight simulator; but it doesn’t put you in the cockpit. Instead, it is a management game – it puts you behind the desk of an air-traffic controller, routing flights around the map avoiding crashes, near-misses or flight delays.

The job is simple enough: you just select flight, note the destination, give the orders to the pilot to take off, climb to a desired height, and turn in the direction you want it to go. You are aiming to fly the plane to one of the exits (a marked point on the edge of the screen) at 4000 feet, after which it becomes an SEP.

When the game starts, it is, perhaps, a little dull. Oh, the use of speech-synthesis to emulate the radio response from the pilots was nifty back in 1985, but it certainly didn’t match the hype surrounding the game that suggested the speech-synthesis was, for the first time, a necessary part of the game.

As the game proceeds, however, it becomes a little harder; there are more flights waiting on the tarmac, there are more flights coming in to land; it becomes trickier to ensure that you maintain adequate separation between the planes as one drops from 5000 feet to land, while another is cruising past at 3000 feet.

Then there were those pesky joy-flights – flight-plans that involved taking off and landing at the same airport – they would required constant attention to get them in the air, far enough from the airport, before turning them around twice to line up for landing. Miss the timing and they would need to be sent around for another loop.

Just when it was getting to be a little chaotic, disaster would strike. Through the tinny artificial-voice, a desperate timbre would sound through the awkward cadence on the chopped-and-stitched together sentences: “This is American… eight… seven… five… EMERGENCY!… Four… minutes… fuel!”

Those words signalled chaos; all plans needed to be discarded, because for the next few minutes the focus was clearing the path for the ailing plane to limp home.

Jump forward to 1991 (1993?). Probe Entertainment’s Overlord (a.k.a. Supremacy) is wrongly described by some as “chess in space”. It is nothing like chess; it is much more like air-traffic control – in space!

The plot is that you need to defeat the aliens on the planet at the other end of your solar system, and the best way to do that is to send troops.

To send troops you need ships and, of course, troops. Ships need minerals, fuel, money and time. Troops need people, money and time. Money means taxing people. People need food, energy and not to be taxed too hard. Food, fuel, energy and minerals need production machinery, terraformed planets and time. Terraforming planets needs special equipment, that needs time…. Okay, the idea here is a familiar one now, but back then it was still novel.

What was intriguing about the game was the way it slowly introduced the same levels of tension as Kennedy Approach.

If a planet needed to have a food plant installed, you needed to take a loaded ship (which itself took several steps of planning), order it to take off, order it to fly to the planet, order it to land, unload it, and turn on the device. Each of those steps took (real) time – for example, 10 seconds. There might be a battle occurring on a nearby planet, so you couldn’t wait for it to complete. While your ship full of mining equipment was landing from orbit on one planet, you could be loading troops from another planet to prepare to battle on a third currently under attack. But wait! What’s this? An emergency on a third planet caused all of the power-generators to shut down! There was no speech-synthesis crying out the call sign of American 875, but there may as well have been. While it didn’t take long to select the planet in question and overcome the problem, it meant by the time you returned to the troops, they were too late, and.. oh no! The planet that was lost due to the lack of troops had amassed a fortune in taxes, but you had forgotten to regularly transfer the amount back to base…

Ten minutes later, you come across a forgotten ship in the docking bay of a volcanic planet, full of mining equipment ready to deploy, but sitting idle, while your diminishing population (and hence tax-base) is scraping the bottom of the mineral barrel.

Kennedy Approach and Overlord (and for that matter, Boston Public) have a common element. Each problem they introduced was small… pedestrian… surmountable. But they slowly increased the tension by simultaneously adding the small problems together until they swamped your brain’s ability to cope.

I wonder now if I would still enjoy playing them. I wonder if they would just annoy me, as I am more experienced in handling these types of challenges.

Win at Overlords? Easy! All I need is a team of seven loyal staff. One is in charge of tracking resources and equipment. One is in charge of tracking ships and planets. One is in charge of populations and money. One is in charge of training troops and monitoring the battles. One is a high-level strategist who decides how much priority should be given to each of the others, based on the current game progress and conditions. One is the scheduler who uses the strategists priorities to determine whose orders take priority right now and issues them to the last staff member who just madly types the orders as fast as possible.

Trouble is, it sounds like work. How could that be any fun?