ZX Open World, Part 4

Sorry for the delay...

Excuses: had a birthday, which was all pretty cool, pissed about doing other stuff, then thought "ah shit", need to finish this thing, or at least reach some sort of (probably unsatisfactory) conclusion.

But anyway, excuses out of the way, my favourite open world game on the Spectrum - not to say the best, I lost touch with commercial Spectrum games in 1988 or so - was by quite a distance, Mercenary:

Crash-landing on Targ is imminent...

I didn't care that it was a port from an MSX game, nor that the Commodore 64 version was better in many ways, nor even that when the Amiga version came along, it knocked them all into a cocked hat. Mercenary for the Spectrum was - I think - as close to my ideal open world could be at the time. Basically, you crash-land on a planet (Targ - or was the city called Targ? - I forget) which is currently experiencing some sort of civil war (between the Palyars - the goods ones - and the Mechanoids - the baddies - but this isn't immediately apparent). When you land, you're pretty much on your own to do as you please (it definitely helps that you crash-land there's a flying craft nearby - walking around this place takes a long, long time).

The City of Targ becomes visible as
you plummet helplessly...

Handily, a craft is immediately
available on landing

The logical thing to do is to buy the craft that's available when you crash-land. That way you can get yourself exploring from the air, which is far faster than walking around. But you can walk around if you want. You might come across a land-based craft that'll get you around a lot faster, but your line of sight is far more limited than it would be from the air.

Point is, anything went, pretty much.

As can be seen above, the city was broadly laid out in a grid format, although not all co-ordinates contained anything of interest (not on the ground, anyway, although there might be something hovering up above...)

It's Milton Keynes...
in bizarro world

This is a view flying over the city. It's difficult to describe how amazingly well all the flying craft were (once you'd got the hang of them). There was a real feeling of weight and momentum and speed; there was a genuine physics engine working in there.

Of course, this was a 48K Spectrum game (41.5K usable blah blah blah) so by necessity, it was sparse. Boy, was it sparse. Vector graphics to the max.

But that added to the atmosphere if you ask me. Mercenary had an atmosphere all of its own.

Here's a bridge (pictured left). It's a bit like the Humber Bridge, but it only spans a road. Or does it?

Here's a...actually I can't remember what the fuck that was (pictured right). I'm sure it added to the mystery, though.

And there was plenty of mystery, for sure. Mysterious satellite installations! Mysterious forests!

Mysterious circus big tops which were something else but nevertheless looked like circus big tops!

And you could of course blow all this shit up if you wanted (given a suitably-equipped craft). What more is there to like?

The hangar at 09-06. Some nice stuff in there.

Well...here's something. It's a hangar from the outside, but it has an elevator to a subterranean level.

There's a good few of these dotted around the city. Some of them contain useful stuff but some of them just do their best to kill you.

'Course, there's no way of winning without going into the subterranean complexes, as they contain all the stuff you might need to finish the game (plus all the cool stuff).

For a start, you'll find new flying craft with far better capabilities than the one you start with. And you will ultimately need one, as the starting craft is nowhere near capable of getting to the places you need to get to, as it simply can't make the altitude.

Let's take a trip...

This is descending into a hangar and not knowing what the fuck is going on, incidentally. Not that that's a bad thing; in fact, in this game, it was the only way to figure out - gradually - how best to play.

Turns out the triangular doors seen here need a triangular key to get through, but that's not obvious from the outset.

Course, there's all kinds of weird shit down there, it's not all enormous blue rooms with triangular doors.

No, quite the contrary, the area to explore underground was - in terms of mapping data - probably bigger than the above-surface stuff; there were quite a few of these underground complexes, each with different things in them, f'rinstance:

Yellow corridors!

Red rooms!

Blue corridors with lethal
spider webs in them!

Mysterious purple doors!

  

It all looks so basic and primitive now, but the simplicity of the graphics added to it all somehow...as I mentioned before, the atmosphere generated within Mercenary was unique.  I genuinely loved this game. I felt that this was the future of gaming; the basis being that game landscapes could become increasingly vast whilst the detail could be generated depending on the player's point of view.

There's an interesting interview with David Aubrey-Jones (from Crash edition 44, possibly more on which anon) here and sometimes I wonder what people like him are doing these days.

I bet whatever it is, it's not as exciting as what he was doing in 1987.

ZX Open World, Part 3(a)

Before embarking...

...on what looks like it's going to turn into a very long post about another game, I just wanted to drop in the brief story of the Game That Never Was (except for later, when it was overhauled and was released, but let's not dwell on that for now), The Last Ninja.

It did well on other platforms and spawned sequels, but the Spectrum version was doomed to failure; it seemed to be imminent all the way through 1987 and 1988 but never actually appeared, which was a shame, as when it did eventually appear for the superannuated Spectrum (as Last Ninja 2, some two and a half years late) it looked damn good:

These screens are from Last Ninja 2, I think, or maybe another of the versions that was eventually completed for the Spectrum. It doesn't exactly look state of the art now, but back in 1987, when I still believed this thing was going to appear, I was pretty excited.

It looked like a proper cross between Saboteur and Turbo Esprit, with proper solid-looking graphics, fighting, exploring, etc. which was pretty much my dream game in 1987. But by the time it eventually appeared, I'd long moved on.

ZX Open World Part 3

Isometric 3D wasn't the only game in town, of course.

There were a number of other games that came out on the Spectrum during the "isometric wars" that can't be ignored, either because they were direct attempts at open world games, or contained elements or ideas that would later prove essential for future advances. Funnily enough, the programmers or teams writing games with non-isometric 3D views tended to produce very unusual, individualistic (and sometimes downright odd) projects.

Gyron: DANGER - GIGANTIC
BALLS ON THE LOOSE

Gyron: IMMINENT LARGE BALL
ENGULFMENT DANGER

One that came out in late 1985 was Gyron. I can't say I ever really fully understood what the hell was going on in this one. You were in a series of mazes, which had giant balls rolling around in them, and towers that kept shooting at you.

It was apparently a great game once you understood what was happening, but I never got that far, I'm afraid, so I can't report in any detail, and I'm not prepared to play through it on an emulator to find out. Life, I fear, is too short.

Tau Ceti: Four views of the game, there

The other game I always group with Gyron is Tau Ceti (and as it turns out, the latter was directly inspired by the former, so there's a nice thing). Tau Ceti was actually a great game and given the excessive delays that were affecting the Spectrum port of Elite (as mentioned in part 1), it sort of stole its thunder. Elite appeared on the Spectrum at much the same time, but Tau Ceti was more immediate, had better graphics, was faster, etc.

Elite had its fans but the Spectrum version could never hope to replicate the massive success of the versions on other platforms; it had simply been beaten to the market and no longer really had a USP. In fact, there was a comparitively vast space-based exploring/ collecting game with vector graphics that had been out over six months already, in (Z80 programming pioneer) David Webb's Starion.

The Sentinel: Absorb energy and ascend, or something

The next obvious game to mention is The Sentinel (early 1987). It was the first that I can recall to attempt full-screen "solid" (OK, solid/shaded) graphics to create a game world and it still managed to be vast, with ten thousand large landscapes (the screens shown here each show only a tiny part of a landscape) to get through.

Also I'm pretty sure that it must have been one of the first tries at procedural generation for its 3D landscapes - if I remember correctly, which I probably don't - the graphics were all generated from algorithms depending on your position and direction of view. As I understand it, the program could render the view of any point on a landscape from any other point, i.e. as close to the way modern procedural games are done.

I think.



All that said, it was more of a puzzle or strategy game than an arcade explorer and as your character teleported, there wasn't the freedom of movement that a true open world game would allow. To be honest, it's just as well; whilst the game could render the graphics at a reasonable speed, jump-cuts for character movement were essential to keep the pace up.

Driller: all singing, all dancing, but
unfortunately verr-r-r-rry sloo-o-o-ow

The final game I think fits into this section is Driller, shown here at something like five times normal speed in a clever animated GIF wot I made and then forgot to take the logo off.

You can imagine what it was like at the regular Spectrum speed, but if you've no imagination then I can tell you - it was fucking slow.

That wasn't really all that important; although complete freedom of movement was allowed, this was another game that leaned towards the strategic, so its being slow was often quite useful in allowing you more time to work out what on earth to do.

This was autumn 1987, which was pretty late on in the Spectrum's lifetime, and Driller (plus its sequels) probably best represented the limits of what the machine could do with an solid 3D, arcade style open world game. However, it isn't (in my opinion) the best 48K Spectrum open world game that was produced during its normal lifespan, another game that appeared in that autumn takes that title for me.

But before going on to that, there are two other games that really have to be mentioned - given the excessive length of this never-ending piece, it would be rude not to - as they encapsulated the essential elements that would prove to be so influential in one particular genre of future open world game. I'm talking GTA and its clones, so you know what's coming - FIGHTING and DRIVING.

Saboteur: killing had never been so much fun

Turbo Esprit: this is the real proto-GTA 3, trust me

Coincidentally, both Turbo Esprit and Saboteur appeared at much the same time, around Xmas of 1986. I say coincidentally, because they ended up being two of the handful of games that I would regularly play long after I'd moved on from the Spectrum and had got fancy computers like the Amiga and PC (I had a Spectrum set up until the mid-1990s for programming anyway, so it wasn't a totally weird thing to do).

I mention these two in particular because the similarities to GTA and its successors are so obvious. Saboteur introduced the tone of amoral violence and Turbo Esprit the drive-anywhere freedom - including the freedom to run pedestrians over - that are essential parts of any modern urban open world game.

And in part 4, I'll finally get round to saying what I think was the best effort at fitting an open world game onto the Spectrum. It was a game that first appeared for the Commodore 64, but the Spectrum port was just as good. I still think it's an all-time classic that plays well today.

ZX Open World Part 2

March of the Clones...

Alien 8: Knight Lore in space

So, we're into 1985 and the era of the Knight Lore clones (as opposed to the Marble Madness clones). Ultimate's next game was the space-based Alien 8, which was really just Knight Lore with different graphics and a few gameplay tweaks, but at least they were ripping themselves off with the concept.

Everyone was getting in on the act and some of the quickest off the mark were the budget software houses (Knight Lore and Alien 8 were sold at £9.95, whereas the budget houses tended to be £1.99 or £2.50). There were two that stand out for me (even though both were obviously plagiaristic, they were sufficiently odd to remember: Firebird's Cylu and Chimera.

Chimera: more solid, more weird

Cylu: alarming play area shrinkage

To be fair, I don't recall much about the gameplay of either of these; both were just large maze games with collecting tasks, really. Neither set the world alight, but it was quite impressive and novel that the then state-of-the-art in Spectrum gaming could be ripped off and repackaged so cheaply and quickly.

Molecule Man: £1.99 bought quite
a lot back in the summer of  1986

And probably the best of the cheapo ripoffs was Mastertronic's £1.99 Molecule Man, which, if a bit late to the party (there were genuinely better ripoff isometric 3D games by this point) it was quite unbelievable value for money.

Not only was the game itself pretty good, the map was vast and it also included a level designer program along with the main game, so you could write your own versions, and that in itself was very much a novelty for this sort of game, never mind one selling at a quarter of the price of most games at the time.

Head Over Heels: packed a lot
 of format into 48K

Sweevo's World: The Monty
Python of the isometric 3D world

The fixed-view isometric 3D games probably reached their peak with games such as Head Over Heels and Sweevo's World, which added new elements to the template (for instance, in Head Over Heels, you had two controllable characters with unique abilities and often both were needed to get past a room; Sweevo's World deserves a mention for simply being the clone that was simply the most fun to play).

Quazatron: Paradroid, Spectrum-style

Oh, and not quite finally (as I've got a bit bogged down in the whole isometric thing) I must mention one of my all-time favourite Spectrum games, Quazatron, which was basically a port of the Commodore 64 game Paradroid (itself one of my favourite C64 games).

It was a great example of what each machine was good at; Paradroid couldn't have been reproduced on the Spectrum and been as good as the 64 version (no hardware sprites, for a start), so it was done in a style the Spectrum did well.

Using an open-view 3D perspective actually made the game feel quite different - less tension, but more scope for action. Both are classics even now, I think.

Fairlight: atmospheric, detailed, great graphics
and loads of stuff to play with

Another I should mention is Fairlight, which whilst obviously borrowing liberally from Ultimate's ideas and template, took a different approach to the look of the graphics, at least. Plus it allowed more interaction with non-player characters than had been seen before, but most of all you could move pretty much any object in the game, stack things up to ridiculous degrees of wobbliness, and so on. More freedom, in other words; this was as close as a graphical adventure had come to emulating the open world aspects of the text adventure in terms of scope.

It's a shame that the programmer got ripped off, he could've done more great things, I'm sure. It was a bit of a Wild West world back then though, there was a lot of that going on.

Part 3 follows, at some point...

ZX Open World Part 1 (revised)

More retro-memories.

I was reading about No Man's Sky and Outerra Anteworld the other day and - apart from being blown away by the sheer audacity of scale - it brought home to me how out of touch I've got with gaming. This thing looks absolutely incredible. It looks like it could be the game that I've been dreaming of since about 1985, but vastly larger and more complex than I ever thought could be done.

Outerra Anteworld: one view from one angle of
one tiny part of a planet, all apparently procedurally-generated

Basically, the concept behind my dream game, as I envisaged it in 1985, was the creation of a virtual world which could be explored and examined at every level. It would have lots of objects in it, with different sizes, weights and properties, so a proper physics engine would be essential for it all to interact logically. So, if you were on foot, outside a house, you would be able to go into the house (assuming an unlocked door) and explore its rooms. If the living room had a TV in it, you would be able to turn it on and change channels; you would be able to open all the drawers in the kitchen and examine things found inside the drawers, and so on.

You'd be able to pick things up and carry them around, but again it would all have to be logical - you could conceivably carry one or two televisions, but not ten; however, you would be able to load ten televisions into a car, or onto a cart, and move them that way.

That was about it really, there wouldn't necessarily be any objective beyond exploring and finding things (actually the way I describe it above, "stealing things" would probably be more apt). The point wasn't about making a specific type of game anyway, it was about simulating a world in which any and all games could then subsequently take place, possibly at the same time.

Probably because I was young and technology seemed to be moving so fast, and because there were games already in existence that contained the basic elements of my dream game, I was convinced that it would happen...oh, definitely within ten years. I wasn't daft enough to think it could be done on a Spectrum, but I was daft enough to think that I'd be playing some sort of version of it on whatever future super-Spectrums we'd be using in 1995 (ahem).

OK, that didn't quite turn out the way I'd envisaged, but there were some really interesting games released for the Spectrum that can be seen as moving towards this grand concept I had - either by making programming advances that would be necessary, or by containing some of the elements required - even if they inevitably would fall short of the concept in my head...how could they not? A world in 48K was only ever going to be a very limited world.

This post might end up being very long; I was going to try to do a brief history of open world games on the ZX Spectrum, but when I came to think about it, there are too many strands to include and still keep it relatively brief, so I'm just going to concentrate on the style of arcade-style controlled open world game that we're familiar with now (the real open world games in early computing were all text adventures and that's a whole other subject).

In 1983, when I got my ZX Spectrum, the closest thing to an open world game was probably something like Ant Attack. Although being set in a walled city - so more of a closed world game, really - it had the ethos of an open world game, in that you could follow the objectives of the game if you wanted, but crucially you could just run around and explore and have fun if you wanted to.

Hey honey, bet you're glad we came to Giant Crazy
Killer Ant World on our honeymoon, huh?

It was actually a great game too, primitive though it looks now (once you were used to the finicky rotate-move forward control system).

Plus - in an era when it was assumed that girls just didn't play games - you could play as either a male or female character. That was really going against the grain in those days - it was unusual to be given a choice of character at all - and on the odd occasion a game offered it, the choices were generally things like warrior, knight, warlock, wizard, serf, that sort of thing, i.e. all male.

That said, it was only a gimmick here, it didn't actually change the gameplay. The only change was cosmetic - a few judiciously-placed pixels on the character you controlled - but the principle was novel.

Hot zombie on zombie action amidst the colour clash

There was a follow-up the following year called Zombie Zombie, based on the same game engine (by Sandy White, a real pioneer of this sort of thing), but it could never hope to have the same impact as Ant Attack. After all, it was 1984 now and callow youths were not so easily impressed. It did have a helicopter in it though, which you could get into and fly in order to lead zombies off tall buildings and so on, thus introducing another key open world concept - modes of transport - you could run around on foot, then get in the helicopter, fly it, and crucially, leave it anywhere to come back to and fly again.

Elite for the Spectrum - too little, too late

If Ant Attack was a distant predecessor of the GTA-style format, then its analogue in space was Elite. But Elite was a Commodore 64 and BBC Micro (of all things) game! I only had a Spectrum so I never really played it (by the time it eventually appeared for the Spectrum, it was late 1985 and things had moved on apace).

Again though, it was important in that - as far as I can recall - it was one of the first games to use the concept of procedurally generating a large reproducible 3D game space with defined objects and characters to explore and interact with; a standard now, but hard to do in 48K.

Lords of Midnight - over 31,000 distinct views from any
 angle...all of them the same (joking, it was great)

Though it doesn't really fit with my theme, I should really mention Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge here, as he was the king of the vast procedurally-generated landscape game on the Spectrum.

I can't go into this in much more detail because I always found his stuff a bit impenetrable, but others swore by it. For me, I could never get over the impression that most of the locations were so similar as to be impossible to tell apart, so I never really got the sensation of exploration which I think is key to this sort of game. There was to be a final part of the trilogy called Eye Of The Moon, but I don't think it ever appeared (possibly it ended up becoming Midwinter).



So that was pretty much the scale of it towards the end of 1984.

Then Ultimate released Knight Lore.

There were other, bigger games, and isometric 3D games weren't new, but it was the feel of solidity to the graphics that was the breakthrough here. The addition of (very rudimentary) physics made it feel like a real world, with movable and immovable objects, which was pretty good for the end of 1984. And while not huge (128 rooms rings a bell) it was large enough to get lost in. We were getting there, or so it seemed, but then everything got a bit confused.

The huge success of Knight Lore meant that seemingly every software house then went on a mad rush to get their own clone of it out. Coincidentally, Marble Madness was big in the arcades at the time, and a lot of software houses were also working on their own ripoffs of that. Cue an absolute slew of isometric 3D games, some good, some bad, some bloody awful.

Spindizzy: not at all like
Marble Madness, honest guv

Gyroscope: even less like that
 Marble Madness game, honest guv

It didn't help that - as it turned out (although not revealed until years later) - Ultimate had actually had Knight Lore ready to go a full year earlier, but held it back to sell more of their other games. Well, you could hardly blame them. They were so far ahead of the opposition that it would have been madness to put Knight Lore out ahead of Sabre Wulf.

In fact, Knight Lore was pretty much the extent of what Ultimate's two main programmers (Chris and Tim Stamper) thought they could get out of the Spectrum and they were already planning to move on (which they did, forming Rare Ltd. and making shitloads of money). Ultimate did continue to put out games for the Spectrum, but other programmers were responsible and the quality definitely dipped.


Part 2 soon, with any luck...

Fear of automation

I don't really mean in the Luddite way, though.

Although there is an element of that; I've never used one of those self-scan things at the supermarket for instance. I'm sure they're great for some people, but each one gets rid of a checkout operator's job. It's logical for the supermarket - once the capital outlay of the self-scan machine is paid for, it's an ongoing saving of thousands of pounds each year - but I just don't think it's right. I think I do realise that it's here now and it's largely inevitable that it will proliferate, though, whether I like it or not.

There's been a couple of high-profile (Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk) folk warning about artificial intelligence lately and its threat to humanity. I can see their point; although genuine machine intelligence isn't really anywhere near yet, it probably will be some day (maybe when we understand more about how the human brain works) and there's definitely potential for evil there.

I'm thinking more about automated processes following algorithms that for one reason or another go wrong. There was a news story about this a few months back about a lot of Amazon sellers losing a lot of money. Most of the big Amazon marketplace sellers use an add-on program to monitor the sales, stock levels, prices, etc. of all their items; these programs also compare your price to everyone else's. If you wish, you can set the program to reduce your price to a penny below the cheapest available, or just to match the best price, or whatever, but crucially you would set a minimum price for each item (so as not to sell at a loss). Now I can't remember the name of the program used, but it went wrong for a couple of hours and during this period effectively reduced the price of every item to a penny (well, everyone selling on Amazon that was using this program, anyway).

The error was noticed pretty quickly by the sellers, but not before the damage was done. I'm not fully up on the consumer laws, but I'm sure most of the sellers that were affected were able to mitigate the loss in some way, i.e. those in control of their own stock, because they could come to some arrangement with the customers. The real problem was for the people that had signed up for the "Fulfilled by Amazon" service, which is effectively the next layer of automation. You sell your stock on the marketplace in the usual way, but the difference is that you've send the actual physical product to Amazon for them to pick, pack and despatch. Under this system, the processing of an order can be done in minutes, which is how one machine parts manufacturer lost something like a quarter of a million pounds, all his stock of £50, £100, £200, whatever items had sold at a penny each and Amazon had already automatically despatched the stock.

I dunno what happened with that in the end - I know Amazon argued that it wasn't their fault, rather a fault with an add-on program not within their control - but I'm getting off the point anyway,

So, along these lines, I am fascinated by the idea of self-replicating machines, which to an extent already exist, but can only operate under specific controlled conditions (most crucially, the availability to them of the appropriate building materials). But what if you could get a self-replicating machine that was able to successfully forage for the materials it needs to replicate itself?

I've a feeling that's all a bit muddled up. Maybe I'll come back to it later (unless the machines have taken over by then, of course).