Atari 50: Pong & Breakout

We're going back to some old games now: I picked up the Atari 50th anniversary collection.

This will presumably be a LOT of Atari games so I'm going to play through a couple at a time and then probably come back to it every so often. This is cool, looks like they've grouped the games into historical categories?

The menu sections put you into a historical timeline where there's historical videos, photos and quotes.

This might qualify as a documentary in addition to being a games collection.

Man just look at this thing!

I didn't know Pong wasn't actually the first arcade game, it was 'Computer Space'. Pong was #2, but stole the spotlight because it was much more successful and launched the industry. Also the documentary narrator for the bit in the above screenshot mentions that the 'chips are combined to form a PC - a Printed Circuit board'. Did she make a mistake or was that actually the original meaning of the acronym? Naturally today we know PC as 'Personal Computer'. It's pretty cool that we live in a time where many of the creators of the earliest video games are still alive today. I wonder if they filmed this interview for this anthology.

One inexplicable choice they made (to me) was to not also put the actual games on this cool timeline - you need to go to the game library and find them here. It wouldn't have been hard! Later Edit: They do let you, I couldn't figure out the UI here because I was dumb.

Yeah I won't stop at one entry per game.

Pong is Pong, there's not much to say about it.

I think that putting this original arcade-y border was a good choice for keeping the original aspect ratio (It might look hilarious on a widescreen monitor). I will note that they did a nice job adapting it since I don't happen to have a 'wheel' controller lying around, I can either move both paddles up and down using either joystick on a single controller, or when turning on a second controller it seamlessly switched to a 2-player mode.

Actually I should mention a solid options screen which lets you turn off the TV scanlines and make it widescreen if you want.

There are 'Dip Switch settings', what are those?

Huh, Dip Switches were hardware switches inside the arcade machines that operators could tweak to change things like (for Pong) how many points it took to win a game - essentially an options menu inaccessible to arcade customers.

'Realistic sounds of ball bouncing, striking paddle' is some real marketing bullshit bordering on fraud. 'BIP..... BIP.... BOOOOOP'

I retract my earlier criticism, I missed the option to 'play' on the timeline here, the games are indeed linked from it.

I apparently didn't see the word 'Play' right there under the picture.

Ok, let's fire this up. Man, original Breakout didn't have sideways collision detection with the bricks - it's fine vertically but I've seen the ball pass through bricks horizontally without bouncing off them. My goal is to clear one screen. It's hard! Not sure if it would be easier with the original controls, but I think I've only played later clones - the ball tends to bounce off your extremely small paddle at a severe angle, and my nemesis so far is that when the ball comes down and hits a wall it can adjust its angle off the bounce in an unexpected way.

This is harder than it looks!

I think the ball has a possibility to just randomly adjust its angle after every bounce. There's still a degree of aiming depending on whether your paddle hits it on the left or right side but it's almost impossible to intentionally aim at something. The lack of horizontal detection means that so far I've only ever hit one brick per trip up. I've hit the orange brick layer and that feels like a big accomplishment. I used the dip switch settings to give myself 5 lives instead of 3. Check out this example of the no-horizontal hits thing.

The ball slipped into the corner of the green and hit a brick on its lower-left corner while passing through and leaving the brick underneath intact.

Also the ball speed ramps up pretty quickly. Oh, the speed of the ball is based on the level of the highest brick you hit. At the first orange layer it sets the ball speed to 'unreasonably fast'. The second orange layer sets it to 'apeshit'. I haven't survived long enough to hit a red brick yet, I don't know if I can clear a full screen of this. I am revising my goal to something that still feels plausible - to break just one of the top row of red bricks. I don't think I stand a chance of clearing the whole screen.

Best score so far, still have yet to kill a red brick.

Finally hit a red brick. Ludicrous speed, dead.

YESSSS. Switching to the mouse helped a lot.

I don't mind the game going to ludicrous speeds but I'm definitely missing horizontal and vertical-down collision, being that one of the best strategies in breakout-type games is to make a hole in the top and get the ball through it so it bounces around up there and takes out a bunch of blocks on its own - it's not actually possible in the original game!