Wow, I haven’t been this disappointed about an arcade game since… I dunno… Thundercross 2?

Sega Racing Classic is the new driving game coming from Sega, and as the flyer suggested, it’s an update of the famous Daytona USA. Yes, the 1995 title that still keeps it’s value; still keeps on earning at locations around the world.

SRC had the potential to be the most amazing/successful arcade update since Outrun 2. All Sega needed to do was…

1. Keep the Daytona name
2. Keep the Daytona song
3. Upgrade the graphics using the Sega Rally 3 engine

And according to the location test (& gameplay videos) at 1UP.com, Sega have managed a Failsational™ 0/3.

Point 1. THE LICENSE. They’ve failed to retain “Daytona” license, so they had to change the name. So far, I’ve found nothing on why they lost the license. After famously signing up with Ferrari for Outrun 2 (& its updates) I find this pretty strange. Having a generic name like “Sega Racing Classic” is a pity, and it wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker, except for point 2.

Point 2. THE SONG. “DaytonnAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH… let’s fly away….” Oh no you don’t – you don’t have the license, so you can’t say that word.
Bugger. Sure it had more cheese than a Dominos Cheeserama Cheesybites pizza with Extra Cheese, but it just needs to be there. The song NEEDS to be there!

Point 3. THE GRAPHICS. According to Wikipedia, the game uses Sega’s new “Ringwide” hardware. Judging by the graphics, it’s not the Sega Rally 3 engine. (More like Thomas the Tank engine…)

1995 - Daytona USA

2009 - Sega Racing Classic

Yes, my grab of Daytona USA has a fair bit of ugly Youtube compression – but you know what the game looks like, and the “update” below it.. is so close to the original, I fail to see any point in its existance. OK, so it’s widescreen instead of a 4:3 display. But no-one’s refusing to play Daytona USA due to its old school aspect ratio.

Can you imagine your local pub/bar/arcade owner saying “Oooh, I should get SRC, to replace my Daytona USA! Sure, the lack of the original branding makes it look like a cheap clone, but I have all this useless money just clogging up my bank account”

Yes, I’m basing my opinion on footage of a location test. But the kind of tweaks/improvements that follow testing will never scale the mountain of hope that players/operators had for a new Daytona.

#fail Sega, #fail.

*Thanks to Arcade Heroes for the headsup.
*Volvo photo by Flickr user TJ&Kim

2009 seems to be the year of “2D classic gaming sprites turned into 3D”.

A few months ago, we brought to your attention some great golden-era arcade-themed artwork (resin castings) by Melissa Jones.

Sevens Heaven also produces some similar 2D-to-3D transformation artwork, except their medium is raytraced posters on canvas.

A selection of Seventh Heaven posters

Sure the usual arcade suspects are there (DK, Pacman, Galaga) but they’ve also gone a little bit more obscure (Amidar, Ladybug) and even branched into C64 titles (Impossible Mission, Monty on the Run)

Sevens Heaven is a Dutch company, and currently only ships their canvases to the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Pity.

Credit: I can’t find the link now, but I’m pretty sure I saw this a while ago on Arcade Heroes.

You may remember JOMG’s exclusive interview with the creators of the upcoming PC version of Armalyte.

This remake of the classic Commodore 64 shmup has been sanctioned by the original rights holders AND it’ll come out in a proper CDROM box.

We must be edging closer to a release date now, with publisher Psytronik releasing a big batch of screenshots. Here’s a few of them…

If you haven’t tried it already, there’s a single-level demo available on the Psytronik downloads page.

Oh, and there’s plenty more great new Armalyte screenshots on the Psytronik site.

I’ve been enjoying a great week off in Melbourne, showing off “player 3″ to the relatives, enjoying the coffee, but sadly not having much time for gaming.

Don’t worry, I’ll be back home next week, so your irregular JOMGy goodness will continue!

Now, as promised, here’s some closeup shots of my baby Galaga cabinet, unwrapped last week, and built by modelmaker Justin Whitlock.

Closeup: control panel & bezel (screen surround)

Looks great, doesn’t it? The joystick and raised firebuttons are quite superb. Some of Justin’s other cabs are even more ambitious, such as his Terminator 2 gun game with miniature guns and a perspex “monitor window”.

Closeup: Kick plate & side artwork

The attention to detail is awesome, and Justin’s just added even more cabinets to his lineup. If you can’t be tempted by at least a few of his classic cab models, then you need to hand in your retrogaming license immediately.

Top view & comparing size to a keyboard

Finally, here’s a picture of me playing my Galaga cab. Well, a guy can dream, can’t he? (If only I lived in the USA, where real “Galaga cabs” seem to be in every second bar or Craigslist ad…)

Just needed my 'Duke Nukem shrinkray' to play it...

Hope you enjoy this very rough, debut video..
…on the JustOneMoreGameTV Youtube channel!

Here’s a nice looking box, just arrived from America.
It doesn’t weigh much, and yet… I’ve really been looking forward to its arrival.

Things to ponder…

• Why’s the package so light?
• Are there bugs in the box?
• Will the contents capture my attention?

These are just a few of the mysteries I’ll be solving on the weekend.

Welcome to part 2 of JOMG’s ASCIIpOrtal launch-day interview with programmer Joe Larson. We’ve still got lots of things to cover, including Slashdotting, level editing, ASCIIpOrtal Online & more…

(If you haven’t already read part 1, you’d better do that first.)

ASCIIpOrtal - just as disorientating as that other game.

Joe, the big “discovery” of ASCIIpOrtal came via a tweet from Erin Robinson on July 7…

The day after my birthday…

Well, it’s one birthday you won’t forget. Now, if JOMG readers don’t know Erin, could you tell us a bit about her, her games & how you discovered her?

I discovered her when she was featured on an episode of Bytejacker. She’s big in the adventure game community and produced the excellent game Nanobots among others. When she was featured on Bytejacker she was just starting to make money doing these games.

Oh, and speaking of Offworld, the editor helped with beta testing the Mac build and discovered the last bug I fixed… before the release of the game.

The Slashdot story that broke the server's back

Now, it’s time for a bit of “THIS IS YOUR LIFE”. (Cue the music) Joe’s friend Devin Watson was online when the Slashdot post (about ASCIIpOrtal) went up. I asked Devin about the events of that night…

Devin: I’ve been reading Slashdot since around 1999. During that time I had seen many a site fold under the heavy traffic load. When I saw the article on the main page I knew what was coming. Traffic would be low at that moment (as “America was asleep”) but in a few hours it would hit the roof.

Once he was awake and aware of what was going on we got on IRC and apologized for killing the RR server. The RR guys were really cool about the whole thing once we told them where all of the traffic was coming from. In-between spikes in traffic we managed to get into the system and turn caching on to help take some of the load off.

Devin, what else can you tell me about ASCIIpOrtal, or about Joe himself?

I remember when Joe first asked me about working on ASCIIpOrtal about a year ago. At the time I was writing a book and couldn’t help out on it, but I did find some time to make a small contribution to Cymon’s Games. When he explained ASCIIpOrtal to me, though, I grokked the concept. He has that ‘teacher gene’ in him.

Other ideas we tossed around were… more about what we’d like to see in Portal 2. Things that would really screw with player’s heads like using graviton beams to bend things around corners or through portals to trigger other things, variable-sized portals, time-delay closing/opening portals on enemies, and so on. The kind of things that would be either very difficult or impossible to represent in text but would perfect for 3D.

Thanks very much Devin.

A counting machine - on a usemade map

Now, back to you Joe. What was the nicest thing you read, that was written about the project?

Joe: Mostly I’m just overwhelmed by the response. I mean, I thought this was cool, and I was hoping that other people would like it. I think my favorite comment was Anthony on Bytejacker who wiped a tear from his eye as he said “He always said he’d make a text game work… I didn’t believe him.” Second favorite is you, Gabe. Even before you saw the portal mechanic in action you were impressed simply because of my use of the heart character as a companion cube. That’s vision.

Thanks Joe. Now, after the initial publicity, you had lots of people offering to be beta testers. Can you tell us about that?

That first 24 hours was pretty intense. I’ve kept about a dozen people in the loop at any given time. But I’ve dropped people if they were just mooching, because they wanted to play the game early. There were a lot of those. It was tempting to just do it all myself, but then there were a lot of things that I wouldn’t have found on my own. I just had to trust people and there were many disappointments, but then… there were many successes too.

Mad Lund's unofficial map editor

You were going to get people to make their own levels via “text files” but then Mads Lund made a level designer for the game. What impact has – and will – this have on the project?

I want to see lots of people making their own levels for this game. Easy levels, hard levels, funny levels, amazing levels. Some of the best innovations in the game didn’t come from me. But the thing is, I’ve only made levels using text files, I’m totally used to looking at the maps that way, and I’m probably the only one who is. My plan… was if ASCIIpOrtal took off after release I was going to make an updated version with a map editor built in. Hopefully, Mads’ editor will give that effort a jump start.

What are your plans in terms of user-made maps? Will there be some way to find/vote on/download the more popular creations?

That’s an excellent idea. At the moment it’ll just have to be feedback in the forums, but I think a system of storing levels online and voting on them would be an excellent idea for the future.

The map editor in action

Peter Nitch is making an online version of the game. How will it differ from the standard one?

Alchemy, Adobe’s way of turning C/C++ into a flash program, has some major bug related to strings that’s preventing the port from working. So the online version will have to wait for now. However, this gives me an opportunity to make the online version a big update. When I finally get ASCIIpOrtal online working, I may implement what you suggested with the finding/voting system, as well as a built in map editor. Maybe I’ll take a page from Fantastic Contraption and setup a pay model for special content. I’m still experimenting with ideas.

What's the collective noun for many companion cubes?

You’ve said you’re doing your best to make ASCIIpOrtal cross-platform compatible. What’s the latest regarding Linux & Mac builds?

Mac and Linux 64 builds are compiled and will be available for download. Linux 32 build… I need someone to provide me binaries, but it should be possible as-is.

You’re including the source code with your release. What is your thought behind this, and what do you hope becomes of it?

I want to have access to other people’s work so I can learn from it and make my own stuff, so it’d be ungrateful and wrong of me not to release my source code. Every time someone keeps their code a secret they limit the life of what they write. In 10 years when “whatever they have then” stops working with “whatever we’ve got now” that’s *IT* for your project. Think of the back library of great games that would be awesome to see running on modern systems and we can’t… because someone decided they didn’t want anyone to know “how they did what they did”. It’s a crying shame.

The closing screen - on a recent Youtube trailer

You’ve said previously that you wanted to make an “ASCII” game first, and a portal game second. Do you feel you’ve achieved that?

I pretty much feel I’m achieved everything I set out to do and way more. Well, except for making it small enough to be a type-in.

Let’s say the original Portal developers (& other Valve staffers) are reading this interview. What would you like to say to them?

Call me!

No, seriously, I’d say to the folks who made Narbacular Drop and Portal.. Great job… making something so awesome seem blatantly obvious and “why-didn’t-anyone-do-this-before”. And to the Valve folks… I’d say great work… spotting great talent and giving them health benefits. I assume working at Valve has health benefits, I don’t know.

The Borealis - concept art from the Half Life game series

Finally, you’re a fan of the Portal/Half Life universe, and I read recently your interesting prediction of what might be unveiled in Half Life: Episode 3. Could you please share it with us?

My theory goes like this. Chell, the person you’re playing in Portal, isn’t testing the portal gun at all. It’s complete and works pretty good. Maybe Chell is just a part of the machine, a clone that is produced and ran through a set of constantly changing test chambers, and her responses to the changes are monitored, recorded, sorted, and stored in GlaDOS’ AI components. Then the aggressive ones are plugged into combat androids so they can fight better.
When I played the map pack on the PC based on the flash version called TFV map pack they also seemed to think Chell was a clone and there was a bit where you load a bunch of AI units on the Borealis, so maybe I’m not the only one thinking along those lines. Maybe the Borealis has a whole portal wielding android army with passive aggressive voices to help fight back the combine.

Mostly – I just want to see the game come out. Been hanging on this cliff for a while now!

Joe, thanks so much – and good luck with your future projects.

Thanks for spotting this a mile away and being impressed with it.

ASCIIpOrtal is now available to download.

It seems a long time ago, that I first spotted a thread about ASCIIpOrtal, and broke the news. A few months later, an early video triggerred an internet stampede, and now, we’re less than 90 minutes from the release of ASCIIpOrtal.

(EDITORS NOTE: It’s now available to download. The link is at the end of Part 2)

Welcome, to JOMG’s ASCIIpOrtal launch-day interview, with its creator, Joe Larson.

Joe, we’re just hours away from the release of ASCIIpOrtal. But I’d like to spend a few minutes getting to know the guy who created it. You started programming in the late 70’s/early 80’s. What was it like back then?

Oh, man, those were the days of great computers. The PET came in a big box that included the monitor, the keyboard, and hid the CPU in there. The C64 hid everything in just the keyboard unit and you hooked it up to a TV, which was brilliant marketing. If anything went wrong with your C64, the manual told you to “remove the keyboard unit from all its wires, hold the unit 10 to 14 inches above a soft surface like a bed or pillow, and release”. Seriously! That was C64 tech support! I used the Apple IIe at school and it was okay – but the C64 seemed much more colorful.

A Commodore 64: One of Joe's first computers.

You talk about typing in programs from magazines. Can you recall a program you typed in, or wrote yourself, from those days?

Oh goodness, yes. I remember pouring over lines and lines of indecipherable data blocks trying to find that one zero I mistyped as an “O”. I also remember a couple where I actually deduced that there was a typo and fixing them.
One game I made was on the Apple IIe. It was based on the old “Doctor Who” game. You used two paddles, one for X and one for Y to navigate the screen. If you flicked the paddle fast enough, your guy could jump over the blocks that were trying to kill you. The game lives on, as “Robot Escape” on my site, Cymon’s Games.

You’re a former teacher, who’s now doing IT work for an educational software company.
Cymon’s Games is also an “educational” website, isn’t it?

It is. It absolutely is. And I’m not trying to shy away from that. Funny, the word “educational” was never used around “type-ins” back in the 80’s. Instead, they were promoted as “free games” and consequently abandoned, when disks and then CDs became throw-away cheap.

I’ve read that you use the name “Cymon”, as “Joe Larson” is too common. Where’d the name come from?

Cymon is the character with the monitor for a head. [He’s like the site mascot –JOMG] It’s a doodle I did; starting with the idea of a desktop machine reconfigured as a robot. I named him “Cyber-mon”, which was shortened to “Cy-mon”. When I made the site I decided to drop the hyphen, and because it sounds like Simon, I just went with it.

You started programming using BASIC, but your website teaches C/C++. What led you to this choice?

Well, BASIC, as I used it, is pretty much dead at this point. So I had to choose something else I was doing C at the time. I like C. It’s been around for a while and it’ll likely be around for a while more so Cymon’s Games can perhaps remain relevant for years to come. C/C++ has a huge stock library of programs already written for it that I can draw from when I find them.

You publish a program a week. Are there any in particular that you’ve been particularly proud of?
Or ones that got more feedback than others?

Which ones am I proud of? Oh, I start at “Hello” and tell you why I love each one! I don’t know if you want to open that particular can of worms. For the most part I don’t get many public comments on the site. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing this thing in a vacuum, that I don’t have any fans, but then something…. happens and I realize that there are people checking out the site, they’re just doing so quietly.

RPS - not the website, the downloadable game

You’re working on a book, with programs from the site, illustrated with your cartoons. And you’re raising funds for a “graphics tablet” to speed up the process. How’s that going?

Slowly.. about half way now to the point that I want to get it. Any donations and T-Shirt sales are probably going to go towards the tablet fund first.

OK Joe, the internet is a restless beast. So let’s talk ASCIIpOrtal. You’ve attributed your inspiration to a few other titles, including Portal: The Flash Version, Portile & Super Serif Bros. Do you remember the moment when you thought “Hey, I might have a go at this”?

It was Increpare Portile that really got me going. I think because it was incomplete… which is what got my juices flowing. The look-through mechanic on ASCIIpOrtal was my solution to Portile’s mirroring mechanic on inside surfaces. The use of text… was because text is also tile based, but allows for characters instead of just colored blocks.

increpare's Portile demo

Did you have any idea at that point… what would be involved?

At the time I wanted to kinda make Portile in text to add it to the site, so “small and simple” was it. But I wanted to fix the “look” mechanic and add pushable boxes, which is the point at which Super Serif Bros enters the equation. I thought, “I could just make SSB with this portal look through”, and “how hard could that be, the original was a javascript game?” Implementing the look through turned out being much more difficult than I thought.. and soon ASCIIpOrtal ballooned out of the proportion for a simple type-in for the site. By then, it had nested in my brain… and I had to see it through.

A very early test version of ASCIIpOrtal

What were the first things you got working in the game?

Fortunately, I wrote this down! After experimenting with the rotation mechanic I started with trying to make a game like SSB: loading from text files, walking around, pushing boxes, advancing when you hit the exit, and something to kill you.

What was the most difficult thing to get right?

I’ve never made a game like this, so every step had its own challenges. I spent so long thinking about things before I even wrote 1 line of code.. that the “getting it right” was done before I started. I think the hardest part, was making a whole framework… so I could add a new thing to the game without having to rewrite everything. I had to rewrite the main movement algorithms twice and I still don’t think I have it’s right.

The first released screenshot

Were there any entertaining bugs that caused weird things to happen?

No, no. No bugs. Just unexpected features. There were a couple of times when things didn’t quite work the way I thought they should and I just left it that way. Like text triggers holding down switches. At first I had meant for them to be intangible to everything but the player, but I discovered accidentally that I forgot to implement that and a text trigger could be used to hold down a switch until it’s triggered, at which point it’s removed from the map. I realized this had some cool possibilities and ended up using it in level 1 in combination with a boulder off screen to time the dropping of a box.

ASCIIpOrtal's blue and yellow portals in action

Steve Fenton has created the sounds for ASCIIpOrtal.
Can you tell us about the “trumpet voice” that is being used for ASCIIpOrtal sarcastic computer?

It’s brilliant. I have no idea how he did it, but I love it.

Did you write the lines for it? Or someone else?

I wrote 95% of the dialog in the original 50 levels that will be in version 1.0. Some was written by beta folks who submitted levels, and some were written by Europe (spoiler).

Beware of the Boulderdash-style 'rock machine'

How important is story/humour vs. level design/challenge in your game?

I didn’t think very much about the story. The game is kinda abstract in visuals, so I didn’t want to be anything but abstract in the story. I think it was more important that I made a game that held your hands for a few levels, got you started, challenged you slowly, then every once in a while threw a stumper your way. I think the game has some serious challenge potential, but I don’t consider myself an excellent level designer or, for that matter, story writer. So I stuck with my strengths, which is working out how to make something happen, and I look forward to what others will come up with.

============================================
Next… Part 2 of JOMG’s ASCIIpOrtal launch-day interview:
Slashdotting, level editing, ASCIIpOrtal Online & the download link.
============================================

OK, the tease is over. Retroaction 3 is out now.

And what a great issue!

Highlights include:

• A cover story, on Blade Runner (PC)… aka “the game my wife bought me INSTEAD of Quake 2″
• A great interview with the executive producer of Blade Runner.
• Tributes to F-Zero, Alien vs. Predator, Defender of the Crown, Robowarrior & more
• An incredibly comprehensive look at the many Ghostbusters games
• A look behind the scenes of the “Mother” fan translation project
• And a whole lot more.

Retroaction issue three is now available from their site.

Oh, and if you’d like to get future Retro Actions before anyone else, just subscribe via email, and you’ll be as happy as an 80’s gamer with a Star Cursor joystick.

If you haven’t seen it before, Retro Action is a quarterly fan-made PDF magazine, with high quality content and excellent visual design.

It makes the most of the PDF format too, treating it not as “a way to make printing easier” but a way to make magazines interactive, by including working WWW links wherever possible.

Issue 3 is out this Monday, and I’ve just had a look through it.
Superb!

Yes, I’ve had to censor the front cover…
but I can give you a few hints as to what’s coming out on Monday…

• A cover story, on “the game my wife bought me INSTEAD of Quake 2″
• The “killer app that span your world around”
• The “best arcade brawler to get ZERO home conversions”
• Plenty more “retro respects”
• And a whole lot more.

In the meantime, if you haven’t read Retro Action issues 1 & 2, visit this link now – and start downloading. While you’re waiting, you can read my previews of RA issues 1 & 2, and read my (rudely interrupted) behind-the-scenes interview with the editor, Nreive.

Oh, and if you’d like to get future Retro Actions before anyone else, just subscribe via email, and you’ll be as happy as an 80’s gamer with a dual cassette deck.