ArticlesI recently found this sitting at the bottom of a box.
It is an original Bandai Electronics “Escape From The Devil’s Doom” solar-powered LCD game, manufactured in 1981/2.
It still works too! (Although the tinny piezzo speaker has bitten the dust.)
Relax; this isn’t some middle-aged geek reminiscing about one of the great bits of electronics from his youth… This is a middle-aged geek remembering how awful this little game was. Repetitive. Brainless. Suspect religious themes. Man, I played this game for hours when I was a bored kid.
But, wait! You don’t need to believe me! It seems that a fellow called Julien Foyard has ported it to Windows!
Foyard’s port misses a tiny detail. The score board on the original is zero-padded to four digits. See the screen-shot below, which shows a score of zero, in demo mode.
Notice the space for four zeros. Notice that there isn’t room on the LCD for an additional digit*.
My ultimate goal was to clock this game – to get a score greater than 9999, which is higher than the display can handle.
The worst case that I ever saw of score inflation was a real-life pinball machine that had an entire motorised mechanism to turn the reel of the least-significant digit, that never actually turned because every point score awarded was a multiple of ten.
For hours I repeated the same brainless activity, ascending to Heaven time and time again, trying not to die three times.
I was tense as I got closer and closer to the magic score of 10,000, and ultimate mastery of this little machine.
My tension turned to elation and then very quickly to profuse swearing when I actually reached the 10,000 point mark.
For you see, there was no room to add another 8-segment digit to the start of the score. There was, however, room to slip in the number “1”. The score read 10,000 – and a score of 20,000 was required to truly clock it. The bastards had fooled me.
I did beat that score eventually, and clock the system. The game was put in the bottom of a box and forgotten for 25 years, but my feelings for the game are still tainted by this cruel trick by the nasty developers.
Comment by Chris on July 30, 2008
The score representation reminds me of the reason geeks buy Toyota Prius’s – to beat the fuel economy top score which dominates the dashboard UI. You pushed straight past the immersive gameplay, the gritty realism of the storyline and the green cred from owning a solar powered game… you wanted to test the edge conditions.
Apropos LCD games… I remember being able to play the first few levels of my Donkey Kong Game and Watch blindfolded. So much for the watch part. What a misspent youth.
Comment by Alastair on July 30, 2008
Hey you got to see the previously-hidden “1” which very few people (I’m assuming) have actually seen. IMHO simply clocking back round to 0000 would have been more of an anti-climax, at least compared with the unadulterated joy of lighting (I know it’s not really lighting) up an LCD segment for the very first time. And if that’s not akin to religious revelation, I don’t know what is. (OK, so I don’t know what is.)
BTW What *did* happen when you clocked it? Roll back around to 0000? How did you feel? Did you write a blog post about it? My point exactly!
Comment by Julian on July 31, 2008
Alastair,
Seems dubious to me. “But at least being involved in a car accident made your commute to work interesting.”
To answer your question, IIRC, it simply rolled around to 0000… and I felt triumphant over the evil machine. Triumph over evil seems more like a religious revelation than boredom and despair.
Comment by Dave on December 23, 2009
G1 & G2 did not select 1 or 2 player, it was a mode select for easy or hard.
Comment by Julian on December 23, 2009
WHAT!?
NOOOOOOOOOOO!
Dave is right! There were two levels of difficulties. I don’t remember that at all.
Now I need to beg for the toy back from my friend so I can defeat it in hard mode. There goes my Summer…
Comment by John Y. on December 23, 2009
Regarding the display rolling back to 0000 when the score exceeded 19,999:
What would have been kind of funny is for the leading 1 to not disappear, but rather lose its lower half. Then, after exhausting the rightmost four digits again, rolling back to 10000! And then rolling back to 10000 again, followed by the leading one losing its upper half, etc.
Naturally, I think this is exceedingly unlikely, as you surely would have noticed it if it really were the case. But it would have been kind of funny. And perhaps homicidally frustrating.
(And I would have loved to see it “roll” from (6)5530 to 0004, or something similar.)
Comment by chokocat on June 17, 2010
Thanks for the tip. I will take this into account for the next update of my simulator!
Comment by peri on April 15, 2013
i was holding the exact same 30 year old game in my hand as i read this. my age is 10