Video Games. Look around today and gaze in astonishment at ray traced super high resolution characters swiveling around in a virtual landscape as they battle to rip each other's organs out. Some people say that video games have gotten better over the years, but I beg to differ.

Gameplay

You see, there was once something called gameplay. Roughly explained, it means a video game's ability to keep one's interest doing what appears to be a simple or redundant task, say shooting asteroids. This used to be the key factor when game designers would construct their programs, because if the game wasn't fun and wouldn't hold your interest past one quarter, then it would fail.

Today, game designers have almost all but abandoned the old tricks of making good FUN games, and they resort to things such as blood, infinate ammo, 30 punch and kick buttons, and other ad nauseum. What are the games out there today? They are either one of three things:

• Street Fighter clones (evolved into Mortal Kombat and HUNDREDS of others)
• Driving games (nice, but I'd like more than 30 seconds for my 50 cents)
• 'Tetris Wannabes' (games that require thought, but are not quite what tetris was)

Speaking of which, currently there is an exhibit on classic videogames called Videotopia being helt in Philadelphia at the Franklin Institute. The web page claims that its exhibit of over 30 games from the past will be open to the public until late September. Check out their site for more information.

Back in 1983, I got one of these crazy things for the holidays. With "arcade quality graphics" (at least at the time) this was probably the hottest system out there and giving the Atari 2600 and Intellivision systems a run for their money. Many years later and many cartridge aquisitions later, I still have this piece of video game history sitting in a box in my attic. I used to have it connected to my television in college for the random fix, but now with such programs as ColEm, I don't need to lug around the console and cartridges anymore as I've got it all on my PC. If you enjoy these old systems, I highly recommend finding an emulator. There are quite a few systems with emulators out there nowdays, and if you look hard enough you can even find images for more cartridges than you probably ever owned. Click here for one page that is a good starting point for finding an emulator.

Over the years, I've collected several machines which I keep stored away until one day when I might feel a bit nostalgic for the actual machine. The systems that I have are:

• Atari 2600 (woodgrain 3 button)
• ColecoVision
• Atari 2600 adapter for ColecoVision (counts, doesn't it?)
• Coleco Gemini (2600 clone - had the controllers with a joystick and paddle in one)
• Intellivision (original)
• Intellivision II (small grey version)
• Nintendo NES (the original. not REALLY a classic, but with the Robot? ehh?)
• Odyssey2 (remember K.C. Munchkin?)
• Sears TeleArcade (2600 clone - looks just like a woodgrain 3-button)
• Sears Super TeleArcade (Intellivision clone - looks like original, but cream colored)
• Wizard's Bulls Eye (old Pong device. my first video game)

Well I suppose there are three machines battling it out nowadays for the high-end market. Here's my two cents on the matter

Nintendo 64 sounds like a nice machine, and I've had the opportunity to play with one on a few occasions. The graphics seem better than the Playstation, but the fact that they are still using cartridges as their media bugs me a little. Cartridges are more expensive to produce, thus the cost of the games is always going to be a little higher. Additionally, while carts may be much faster than CDs, they simply just don't have the capacity that a CD has, and a cartridge of equivalent storage size would cost far too much for most people to buy. The only advantage a cartridge has over a CD is that they can build in extra circuitry which would allow them to either enhance the game somehow (via a custom chip) or that they could put some nonvolitaile memory into the package so you could save the game in the cartridge. However, all these systems have 'memory cards' which defeats that advantage anyway.

Sony Playstation is currently my favorite, but I am not completely satisfied with it regardless. The CD player that is in the Playstation is much too slow; must be a 2x speed, or maybe even worse. I was very impressed by the machine when I first saw it around Winter 1995, but I had a chance to play one recently with some kind of off-road game. Good graphics hardware, but between games you would have to wait about 15 seconds for the same level to be loaded again off the CD. I guess the price drop in fast CD-ROMs has only come about in the last two years (they're up to 24x now?!) so I'm sure the next wave of CD systems will solve this problem.

Sega Saturn is still a mystery to me unfortunately. I've never seen one, although I can only speculate that the machine competes well with the aforementioned consoles. I know that this one is a CD-ROM system, and I also have had conversations with one of their programmers, Kevin Kralian (author of the emulator 'Apple 2000' for the Amiga) and have been told that the hardware of the Saturn is not too far off the mark from being an Amiga. Although Commodore's own CD-ROM console (the Amiga CD-32) failed miserably, it seems that the 1985 architecture is the most efficient for this kind of multimedia delivery.

"Hey, is that Gorf over there?"

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