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What are Retro Reviews? This site was created close to the millennium during Summer of 1999. It was at first decided that a salute to retro gaming was in order, to better show the sort of games that defined those of us who work here over at the PC Game review pages. Yet in time, it was clear that there are specific "old" reviews that pertain to one or more items that have recently been released. For example; when the third X-men movie was released, it might interest some people to know one or more sources of the original "Dark Phoenix" saga in the X-men comics. Such older, pre-web-site reviews are often given a mere blurb in the review archives. In time, The Retro Review will change this, with a thorough review of these "classic" games, TV shows, and films, one product at a time.
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Outlaw
(Atari, 1978, for the Atari 2600)One of Techtite's PREMIERE "Retro Reviews"! 1978 was an age where if you could play something on a TV screen other than "pong," you were a happening guy. As such, Outlaw is sort of a classic in the vernacular of video games; the sort of game that people play when feeling as nostalgic about classic games as a film buff watching old silent short films. Yet in Outlaw we could see the first steps in a new direction in gaming, that up until then had never been viewed possible. After all; the game system at the time did not have much in the way of technology, compared to the systems of today. Furthermore; there couldn't be much in the way of any story, since there would be none to offer: no digital audio, digital video, or even much text! Well, how about two little cowboys in an old western gunfight? The resulting game was in some people's estimations the very first "shooter" game in most respects. Sure it wasn't first person; who cared? You got to play cowboys and duke it out, OK Corral style. You even got to play in multiple game "maps," so to speak. It was actually pretty interesting how much game designers were able to manipulate the singular screen, with either moving, or even some destructible objects.
You may ask how much strategy there could be. This is a fair question when looking at modern DVD-quality games, but think of the era in 1978. It was actually very interesting just to see anything digital on the screen at all that wasn't Walter Cronkite giving the news or the Six Million Dollar Man punching a bad guy in slow-mo. It was pretty fun to take a controller next to a friend or relative and duke it out to see who was, seriously, the faster draw. Add the obstacles like moving walls and you had to actually think about things for a while. Would you sit and break the wall while the opponent waited and shot you, or would you try to ricochet your shots from a distance, break the wall, and then move in for a clear shot? Sure; an anti gaming person might call this the first of violent video games. But come on; these were stick figures. It was all in good fun.
Yet with this game people started thinking outside the box, or more specifically, the box-shaped dots. Sure, the first "humanoid" video game characters in this game looked little more than stick figures with blocky cowboy hats, but it showed how far gaming could go with so little. Games didn't have to be of a little dot bouncing across a video game style ping pong table, or breaking apart a simple wall. Actual "characters" would be able to do things in games; run, walk, dodge, and yes, even fight it out, if need be. The video game world would be moving in a whole new direction forevermore.
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Burnout
Near
Miss
Small
Crater
Large
Crater
Deep
Impact
Among
these destructible objects would be --what else?-- a solid wall, a la Breakout. This is where
this "cowboy" game didn't take itself too
seriously, and its game designers simply had fun with the concept. I
mean; whoever heard of a moving wall?
Yet the idea was fun in that you had a destructible "breakout"
style wall that stood between you and the opponent. What would your strategy
be?
Sure, it sounds simple. That was life back in
1978 homes. This was a day long before CD anything (even audio!), long
before digital video and even long before any actual, decent computer games.
In fact, this was over 2 years before the first Zork text adventure was
attempted, so you can imagine how sparse video gaming really was. It was
stagnant!