Why is armagetron the best game ever?

[Lucifer]

Ok, this is obvious a drunk post of mine. Just wanting to point that out. You know, in case anybody wants to get all worked about up about this.

I just watched TRON again, and this time I didn't hold back. I was yelling at the light cycle sequence because they were playing like god-damned open players. They were totally dogfighting when they could have been core dumping. God, it was awful.

Also, I mentioned this in a previous post, but I didn't go into detail. I've been working pretty hard on getting several emulators to work on my computer. Ok, that's not real descriptive. I have a Mythbuntu machine running my TV, but we don't have any sort of live TV signal, but I've got Mythgame setup to run, but it runs like ass. It gets the keybinds wrong. So the xbox360 controllers I have work in one or two emulators, but they don't work in all of them. So I'm trying to figure that out.

In the process, I'm playing a lot of old school games, and playing them with my kids. I kicked my youngest's ass in Archon just the other day. He's learning that I grew up with video games too, and he can't touch me on them. No way, he can't touch me.

Going all the way back to 8 bit games, and a few 16 bit games, I've been looking at how games are played. I've been playing some more "modern" games with my kids, because that's what they play. We have a Wii, and an xbox360, and I've been playing the games on those machines. You know, with my kids. Then there's games that I hope Wine will run, and we play those together. We play games together, is what I'm trying to say.

We've got Mortal Kombat, and a few others. And they're so awesome, my youngest (who is really adopting video games as a valid hobby) wants to play them.....

So here we are, with Armagetron. People complain it doesn't get updated enough, and they're right, we never argue with that part.

It has the same gameplay as the old 8-bit games. It's really simple. You turn left, and you turn right, and you try to avoid hitting someone's walls. The gameplay is really simple. We can argue about double-binding and triple-binding and all of that, but when it comes down to it, the gameplay is really simple (also on my todo list: check the joystick stuff that Luke-Jr wrote, since I have it readily available to test). The minimum the game asks is for you to press left, right, or brake. Or some combination of the three. That's it. Nothing else.

Armagetron stands with the best of the old games, and is better than the new games. I still, for all the games I've played with my kids, I STILL haven't found a better game.

I didn't watch TRON tonight thinking about how you'd play the game if it were an FPS. I watched it knowing that the light cycle sequence was just plain WRONG.

THere are lots of criticisms available for how often the game gets updated. No arguments there.

But what is inarguable is that this is the best game ever made.

Trust me, I've been testing that idea. I still haven't found a better game, old or new. Lots of great games, sure. But better? Hasn't been made.

[blondie]

the skill ceiling is absurd, the mechanics could not be simpler.

[Monkey]

I totally agree with you Lucifer, this is the best computer/video game I've ever played and I've been playing computer/video games for over thirty years. It's the simple gameplay yet incredible skill and tactics required to master it that makes it the best. In my opinion, fortress and sumo are more like virtual sports than games.

[Vitalit]

Just wish it had a more active community

[sinewav]

I just watched TRON again, and this time I didn't hold back. I was yelling at the light cycle sequence because they were playing like god-damned open players. They were totally dogfighting when they could have been core dumping. God, it was awful.

Hey man, it's a lot harder when you're inside the bike. Come play incam with me and make a recording to see how your perspective changes when you watch it back in third person.

[Lucifer]

Just wish it had a more active community

I'm with you on that. I've got a fair amount of stuff on my plate (family drama has spiked to 11, but should fade quickly after tonight), but there's a number of small arma projects I can tackle that would help.

Basically "yes, simple gameplay, nearly infinite possibilities!"

That's what I'm finding so interesting about the whole thing. We've been playing MULE a bit, and it's one of the best games ever made (continually rated on everybody's "best games" list, even). There's lots of flexibility in the game, lots of options, and it can be really difficult to win. Again, basic game mechanics. The simulation is fantastic, and the controls are quite simple. Of my two sons, one read the manual I printed and one didn't. Both are now competitive players with each other.

Other old games we've been playing, Emerald Mine (finally got it working, yay!), Ebonstar, (both of those are Amiga games), the Ultima series, the old ones, a number of fighting games. I got the original two player Karate Champ!, for example. I'm looking at getting Bruce Lee, and maybe the Beach Head series, because those were great fun. Survivor, a space game that has a two player coop mode where one person is the pilot and one is the gunner. Then there's Spy vs Spy, which is the sneakiest fun game around.

Among the newer games, the three kids that play video games and I teamed up in Diablo III and put together a pretty rad party and started kicking all of the ass. Then the spoon-fed plot started getting to me, and it turns out the whole game is a bunch of action sequences chained together by cut scenes. The LEGO Indiana Jones game was really great, but the LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean was the same as Diablo III: a bunch of action sequences strung together by cut scenes. No problem solving required. No thinking really required. We drilled, in Diablo III, on multi-player coop battle tactics, but that was kind of all we got from it. We were playing Urban Terror for awhile where we all teamed up and we had three people covering our flag and one person going after their flag. We walked all over the dumb AIs. (If anybody would like to muster up a team and play against us, we can arrange something)

I think I want to get them versed in team tactics and strategy for armagetron. I think we'd be hell on the grid, even without significant one-on-one skills.

Anyway, if anybody knows any newer games that we can give a try, we'll do that. The Dad here is more or less refusing to play shooters (that's me), but if you can make a solid argument for why we should try one, I'm game. But keep in mind, what I've done so far is a survey of older games, and I'm rediscovering a simpler style of gameplay in some fairly complex games, and I'm astonished, if not downright offended, at how so many "modern" games focus on photorealistic graphics and cut scenes and it's like gameplay is just a side dish. Great looking games, great stories (sometimes), and really hard to control characters.

I laugh when I look at my xbox360 controllers. So many buttons, two joysticks, two triggers, and a D-pad for NES games. So many controls. And then I want to play an old game that has one digital joystick and a button.

For the record, if you run Ebonstar, using one of these fancy controllers, you should pick Relative joystick control. The right trigger is a fire button (just like the A button), but the X button is an accelerator. So you can use the stick to rotate left or right, the X button for acceleration, and the right trigger to fire. That actually is a better control system than the game shipped with.

Hey man, it's a lot harder when you're inside the bike. Come play incam with me and make a recording to see how your perspective changes when you watch it back in third person.

Also, to further validate your challenge here, so far as we know, they didn't have minimaps. They were playing on 0.2.7.0 or earlier (probably a 0.1-series armagetron, to be honest).

[Lucifer]

Continuing this discussion, I have two kids that are pretty much addicted to minecraft. But there's one, my youngest, when I say "Hey, let's play some Emerald Mine", he abandons what he's dong to play with me. Now, there's a bit of son-wants-to-play-with-father invlolved. no Argument there.

But then there's the numerous times we're reduced to tears laughing about how we failed to finish a level. I actually had to explain to the other kids in the room (they're all teenagers) that the old games aren't about winning, they're about having fun. All the games YOU play are about winning, and they hand-feed you until you ultimately win.

Well, here we are with Emerald Mine (Z-man loves this game, too, no surprise), and you can't win. There's no winning involved. That's not how the game is setup.

But my youngest kid and I, we've been having a blast playing it. And we're going to keep doing that. That's how games are supposed to be.

That's how Armagetron is setup.

[Z-Man]

here we are with Emerald Mine (Z-man loves this game, too, no surprise)

I do! But I don't think I really told you, your drunken mind must have correctly extrapolated it from the fact that I had an Amiga and still do have one. Hmm. Z-Girl loves Minecraft (peaceful mode, the monsters are too scary, except creepers, they're funny when they blow ME up) already, maybe I can sell Emerald Mine to her as basically Minecraft, just in 2D, where you can't build but rocks fall on your head and then you explode.

[aP|Nelg]

I've never figured out why so many people play Minecraft...

Speaking of Emerald Mine, has anybody tried Rocks'n'Diamonds?

[Ratchet]

I actually had to explain to the other kids in the room (they're all teenagers) that the old games aren't about winning, they're about having fun. All the games YOU play are about winning, and they hand-feed you until you ultimately win.

I'm not sure what you mean in that regard. Every game has an ultimate goal or objective. Completing that goal or objective is certainly synonymous with "winning."

Some of the oldest and widely known ones (pong and its clones, pac-man, mario, pinball, etc.) all had a form of winning. You didn't just play the game to pass time, you played it to have fun (which you mentioned) in addition to winning.

Perhaps what you were trying to say is that those games focused in winning instead of competition. Of course, I could agree more with that. However, even then, those basic games appeared in arcades everywhere with leaderboards. They kept track of your score for comparison with others.

[ConVicT]

Nintendinitis...
That is all.

[Lucifer]

I actually had to explain to the other kids in the room (they're all teenagers) that the old games aren't about winning, they're about having fun. All the games YOU play are about winning, and they hand-feed you until you ultimately win.

I'm not sure what you mean in that regard. Every game has an ultimate goal or objective. Completing that goal or objective is certainly synonymous with "winning."

Not to get too technical, but a few of the older ones had no ultimate goal, they'd just get faster. I've read that someone *finally* beat the last level of Pac-man a few years back and saw that there is an end, though. But, like Asteroids, Space Invaders, a few others, there was no end, each level was just progressively faster.

But that's not what I'm talking about. The specific comparison was when my older son decided to alculate the percentage of games my younger son and I had actually won, and it came out to 0.07% So he asked why we'd play a game where we lose so badly. It didn't really matter to him that that meant we'd beaten every level we'd played so far except the current one. ANd that's where my point really starts. When we were playing Diablo 3, the four of us (three kids + me, which my wife would simply say "four kids"), there was no real death. A character dying just meant the party was short-handed for a minute while they respawned. There's nothing to figure out, no puzzles, no nothing. Just walk around, fight everything, and if you cover the entire map, you will accomplish all of your objectives. It got to the point where we stopped paying attention to our objectives and simply focused on covering the whole map. The story is spoon-fed to you, and victory is guaranteed. Now, I guess that technically that started with Ultima IV, where Lord British would resurrect your entire party when you died, but he'd also take levels away from you. You can't survive for very long in Britannia with a party of level 1s, but technically death is only temporary. Compare that to something like Emerald Mine, and each level has its own challenges. You have to solve the level, be creative, and work together to get through it. Both players have to survive the level and exit for the level to be complete. That's why you play the level so many times. First you have to solve it, then you have to practice the skills needed to get through it. Finally, you have to both get through it. So it can be quite challenging, and it's always keeping you guessing, while still having a lot of fun "twitch" moments.

Anyway, first-person shooters usually respawn, and you just try to get points faster than anybody else. As I recall, one of the criticisms that CTF got around here was the respawn issue. It encouraged people to do really whacky and disruptive things, knowing they'd respawn. That was why pig added the bit where you have to have someone in the base, and that almost balanced it (and on tiny teams, that balances it perfectly). But compared to a regular ol' fortress game, you lose a teammate during the round, they're gone until the next round starts. A winner will be declared before they're back in the game. That encourages a more conservative style of play where you take calculated risks. Adds extra challenge, or as you were saying, competitiveness. It's not good enough to win, your base has to hold, and your team has to survive long enough to be declared winner, and the only way you can really guarantee that is not to get core dumped. But the shooters I've played, none of that's true. There were some scenarios in one of the Halos we played where if your teammate got killed, they were out for the round. We had more fun with that than we did with the scenarios that had respawn options. But those are getting harder to come by, apparently. Actually, it's probably getting harder to come by a shooter that I'll play, but that's a different story.

We've found some really fun games, though. In the indie market for the xbox360, we paid a dollar for a game called Bad Golf, and it's really fun. It's a weird combination of the 2d artillery genre and golf. We also found a team-oriented bumper car game that's really fun, but you really need to get 4 people together to play it, and that's the problem we have.

About Rocks'n'Diamonds, it's got way many problems. Using the xbox360 controllers, there's so much latency that it's unplayable. Back when I tried to get my ex-wife to play it with me, we used keyboard controls, and because of how they handled events at the time, we couldn't play together. I think they're using pygame, or maybe just sdl, and they were using the event loop for keyboard events instead of polling the keyboard for input, meaning I could be walking, and then when my ex-wife started walking, my walking would stop. It's otherwise a promising game, but it's been around so long with such input problems that it's unplayable as a two player game that I'm thinking it'll probably never be playable as a two player game. Now, Emerald Mine on the fs-uae emulator has some noticeable latency using the controllers, but it's playable. Ebonstar, on the other hand, has very little latency, if any, and is quite fun. The way the controller gets mapped to joystick controls, you actually have a superior controller than the game originally supported.

[ConVicT]

I think you may enjoy this, if you haven't already played it. Its replay value is insane
The synergies alone make it never-ending.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/113200/

[Z-Man]

I think you may enjoy this, if you haven't already played it. Its replay value is insane
The synergies alone make it never-ending.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/113200/

I have heard only good things about it. I own it, but sadly never could get into it. The controls are far too sluggish for my tastes. I had hoped the C(++?) rewrite would fix that, it was originally pure Flash, but nope.

Along similar lines, FTL is pretty great.

I've never figured out why so many people play Minecraft...

The gist, I think, is that it's a game that you make your own. No single thing you can do in the game is particularly good or fun (though they nailed the digging/mining/axing sound, it's 100% relaxing), but there are sooooo many things to do and most of them are your own ideas, not mandated by the designers. Ask ten players what they like about it and you'll likely get ten different answers. And those things generate small stories. Me and Z-Girl travelled to the end of the world (XBox 360 version; it has such a thing and it's depressingly close) to build a tower. Then Z-Girl transformed the bedroom of our house into a bunny rabbit breeding station, the subtext to that being a little lost on her; sadly, two rabbits fell into our garbage disposal system. So now we need a new rabbit-safe waste basket and maybe some proper stables. Yeah, yeah, that does not sound super exiting, I know, but it's our story, not something spoon-fed to us. And there's always one more thing you need to finish really quick.
What sold me personally on the game was that YouTube video where someone wanted to demonstrate a neat exploit, but instead burned his house down. It didn't have 8 million views back then. A game where you accidentally can burn your house down is just my thing.

[Lucifer]

I have heard only good things about it. I own it, but sadly never could get into it. The controls are far too sluggish for my tastes. I had hoped the C(++?) rewrite would fix that, it was originally pure Flash, but nope.

Along similar lines, FTL is pretty great.

The first one looks like a shooter, rogue-like (Rogue was a shooter!). The second looks like a shooter where you have to say things like "Weapons to maximum!".

Alas, both are lacking the critical element I'm looking for in a game these days: coop teams.

(Also, from an idealistic perspective, I'm generally not willing to pay for closed source software, but I've been known to pay as much a $1 for a fun game after a reasonable free trial period)

We're very interested in the bridge simulator genre. The problems we're having there are many. We can't get Empty Epsilon to run at all. We got Space Nerds in Space to run, and then crash repeatedly (the game, not the ship, we haven't figured out how to crash the ship). Quintet was fun, until it turned out not to have much beyond being a shooter. As a result of all this effort just to have fun, we've decided to focus on making our own games, and the bridge simulator is third on the list so far (it'll give us a formal introduction to Panda, which might feed into making an actual Stargate-like RPG).

yeah, that does not sound super exiting, I know, but it's our story, not something spoon-fed to us. And there's always one more thing you need to finish really quick.

COmpared to what I've seen my boys doing with Minecraft, your story actually got me more interested than anything they've been doing.