Worth Playing: 04/17/2014

I used to code games on a TI-82. It was awesome back in high school since smart phones didn't exist, and the Game Gear and Gameboy weren't allowed.

Oh yes, totally! One of my favourite N64 games there, this just seems clunky.

Treachery in Beatdown City is a poor copy of Hybrid Heaven.

video stops at 10:53 on my end as well. tried coming back to it a day later, deleted cache and cookies, still no improvement :((((

edit: skipped past 10:53, audio is fine but video starts and stops p often

Elephants have trunks Patrick. That first game looked really cool. Hope their kickstarter goes through.

I'm also not a high score chaser.

My first experience with Snake was probably NIBBLES.BAS, that was included along with QBasic in MS-DOS 5 (or possibly earlier). Triton Productions' (now Starbreeze Studios) FastTracker II also included a port of that you could play while listening to the music you had made.

Chinatown Wars was also ported to the PSP (and is available on PSN for Vita), it was on sale a couple of months ago even.

@patrickklepek One name of that drug trading game you were talking about was Drug Wars, it was available on all kinds of platforms, including Ian's now-defunct Giant Bomb BBS (and all kinds of BBS software) as Pimpwars. Back in the late 90's we had that installed on all the school's computers and edited the names of all locations and goods.

Same here, it just stops randomly at times, and forces me to reload the page.

EDIT: It seems to be broken at 10:53, both at high quality and HD it just stops right there.

Landslide McQueen is awesome

The word you were looking for was trunk.

Absolutely. SoR2 was one of the earliest games I got into, and pretty much every beat 'em up after that felt really lightweight in comparison. I couldn't understand why subsequent games in that genre didn't include clinches and other varied techniques that added a lot of variety to the combat. From what I can see, none of the beat 'em ups released in the last few years have came close to SoR's depth (unless there are some great ones I haven't come across?).

Chinatown Wars is secretly the best GTA game of all time. Had such a great time with that one.

Wait, Patrick's town had a curfew? Did he live in Footloose?

Man, I feel exactly the same way about beat 'em ups. The only game I liked as a kid was the Turtles in Time game (hands down the best beat 'em up ever) but even that doesn't hold up well imo...

Edit: I also feel the same way about score based games (I enjoy Luftrausers but couldn't care less about my highscore) AND my facial hair situation is quite the same...which sucks.

Crazy...

So what you're saying, Patrick, is that your Apple Macbook fell on your old Palm phone, coincidentally only months before the Apple iPhone was announced. Verrrry curious.

Chinatown Wars was awesome! Did seem to be sadly forgotten though. :(

Ah man Ti-83.. We had those back when I was in gymnasiet (Swedish equivalent of like high school). I remember I wrote fractal programs for both the Mandelbrot set and arbitrary Julia sets. It took pretty much a new set of batteries to complete a low res bad quality render but it was sweet.

By the way if you have an Android phone there is a Ti-83 clone called Andy-83 on the Google Play Store. I'm not sure if it runs programs written in assembly tho so Drugwars / Drugwars 2 might not work :P

:o this turns into a jar time - snake time?

The TI-83 had some pretty great games on it... There was a good version of Tetris, and also some sort of text adventure about doing drugs

EDIT: aaaaand he talks about that game on the video. Sorry, I was having some issues running this vid.

Hmm, nothing too great this week.

@patrickklepek About your comments about not enjoying beat 'em ups as much anymore, I'd just like to point out that both the games you named (Turtles in Time and The Simpsons) generally aren't thought of too fondly in hardcore beat 'em up circles... All the Konami-produced beat 'em ups were incredibly shallow and really just relied on their licensed properties to make up for their very simplistic gameplay. If you just don't like the genre anymore, that's fine, but I'd really strongly suggest revisiting stuff like Splatterhouse 3, Streets of Rage 2, or River City Ransom to see examples of great beat 'em up gameplay with deep mechanics that still hold up well today.

Man, Drug Wars. I'm surprised how pervasive that game was. It seems like EVERYBODY had it.

Hacking Drug Wars was my first serious attempt at game development. I reverse-engineered the game using my TI-82 instruction manual that listed what each piece of code did. I heavily modified the game to give it a storyline, a better battle system, and Final Fantasy summons.

Things only escalated from there.

Treachery in Beatdown City strikes me as an example of not blending genres just because it's possible. The ability to move freely between "rounds" seems mostly pointless. The game already has a system for awarding FP based on skillful combat. Regenerating it while walking seems to exist solely to make moving at all meaningful. Unless there are projectile attacks, there's no reason to move other than to regen FP and Combo Points since the enemy will eventually get their "turn" once you attempt to engage them.

Maybe the game's mechanics shine in large group encounters. I can see using knockdowns and stuns to buy regen time being engaging. Just like in a beat-em-up, environmental hazards would also go a long way towards making fighting on two axes more meaningful. Seeing how many times Patrick's inputs were canceled by an enemy's "turn" starting, an ATB gauge for enemies would be nice. (Or for a less intrusive indicator, a change in the enemy's expression/posture.)

Yeah PAX cards!!! :D :D :D

Drug Wars was great. I also spent a lot of time playing Phoenix.

I remember that game on the TI-83, Drug Wars! Classic. It looks like there are versions for iOS and Android.

Treachery in Beatdown City

Landslide McQueen

Kilo Bite

TI-83 calculator games were awesome. That was where I programmed my first game - a piddling little thing where you had to dodge falling asterisks as a little pi character. Damn did I love that thing.

Also TI technology is currently just as expensive and shitty as it was back in the 90's. The fact that you can buy an old iPhone for the same amount as a TI calculator with a 20 year old screen is hilarious.

The TI-83 game that you are thinking of Patrick is Dope Wars,

More power to the creator that he diversified his cast for his game Treachery in Beatdown City, but i really dont like that Creator one bit. he came off as an elitist asshole in patricks interview.

Emails?

[/shoemaker]

ALL CLEAR KYAPTEN

Wait, Treachery in Beatdown City isn't a beat em up?