#gridrunner

[everygame]

Gridrunner (VIC-20, C64, Atari 8-Bit)

This post, in which I write about the three (original) versions of Gridrunner included in Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is for subscribers only! You can subscribe for just $1 a month at https://ko-fi.com/mathewkumar, but if you don’t fancy that, you can read or re-read my review of the release as a whole. And don’t forget there’s years of articles in our archive, and physical issues of exp. 2601 are still available for pre-order until the end of the month.

[thesplintering]

Interactive Documentary “Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story” Coming To PC, Consoles In March

Interactive Documentary “Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story” Coming To PC, Consoles In March | #RetroGaming #Xbox #PlayStation #NintendoSwitch #RetroGames

Superzapper recharge… Publisher Digital Eclipse recently revealed that Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, the second interactive documentary in the Gold Master Series, will release for PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch on 13 March. This special collection allows players to explore Jeff Minter’s catalogue of groundbreaking games with pixel-perfect recreations of many of them. These also…

[kiwimadegames]

'Gridrunner Pico-8' (2021) By: Paul Hammond (Napier) For: PC A Pico-8 version of Jeff Minter's classic for the Vic 20. Links: - Pico-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=44406

[kanda-franca]

Boat Boys crumbs compilation bc I’m insane normal about them:

1) when Etho first logged in

you whisper to Etho: boat boy, you are going down

Etho whispers to you: the cow was a better partner than you

you whisper to Etho: what the heck man, you didn't have to get personal

Etho whispers to you: xD

2) After the elevator joke

Joel on everyone being ethogirls “well, I teamed with him in the life series, and gah, that guy’s annoying”

3) Joel wins round 1 HITW

Etho whispers to you: impressive!

Joel, screaming and typing in the general chat: THANK YOU ET HO

4) Also after round 1 HITW

Sneeg: Do you still hate (Etho)?

Joel, still screaming: No, I still love him now- again!

5) “*reading chat* ‘is boat boys back?’ i killed etho” <- non-answer

6) On killing Etho in Battle Box

“that’s the dream!”

7) Sneeg: Oh Etho wants Gridrunners

Joel: Wow, screw Etho

(🤨📸)

8) For finale game

Smallishbeans: etho what shall we do

Etho: parkour tag yay!

Smallishbeans: ETHO HAS SAID PARKOUR TAG

Smallishbeans: WE TAKE PARKOUR TAG

(etho did not want parkour tag)

If there are anymore please send my way. I’m actually just very normal about them

[patchesjam]

For SOT, dream was the one to do the vault rush yea? With dodgebolt it was the funneling? PKW he kept beating the course so they kept updating the difficulty. But how did he affect ace race, parkour tag, hole in the wall and gridrunners if you don't mind me asking?

ace race he caused the removal of the skip in space race because he hit it so consistently, parkout tag the strat of diamond patterns, the constant circling and the strat mapping of those old maps were all based off of him, hole in the wall im fairly sure dream was the first to at least popularise the information that a wall can never come from the direction which the last went to, gridrunners was the strat of pausing before the room so everyone is ready because the times of the rooms are from entry to complete, and only the total time counted those bits running between rooms and it was better to wait, as the time difference between rooms were small, so taking longer overall to get quicker room times was more effective

[thirdtimed]

this mcc was soooo much fun omg. i know its kind of just consequence of it being a competitive game but i wish we could have seen less pvp/combat centric games (i miss buildmart.....) if only bc that gridrunners comeback w lime llamas (grian + joel + dan + impulse) was like the most cathartic thing in the world to experience

[genevawrenn]

Elaina only speaking words of truth about Phil's return to MCC via Ender Cup when they showed up and slayed [until Gridrunners RIP]

[emissary-of-stuff]

God Gridrunners was horrible for Cyan Coyotes...they were in first before this!!! Fourth is still good though

[sharptoothed-gaze]

AAAAND PHILZA’S TEAM WAS COOKED BY REDSTONE IN GRIDRUNNERS o7

It’s always redstone.

[jefferythejelly]

why is foolish stress speaking in spanish for no reason the funniest shit he walked into the wrong gridrunners spot and went "ah estoy pendejo!" 😭😭😭

[everygame]

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: Death Star Battle (Atari 2600)

Developed/Published by: James Wickstead Design Associates / Parker Brothers Released: 12/9/1983 Completed: 19/11/2024 Completion: Blew up the Death Star. A bunch of times.

Well, we’ve reached the end of Parker Brothers run with the Star Wars license for video games, and while it hasn’t exactly been diminishing returns (the unreleased Ewok Adventure was better than Jedi Arena, at least) it hasn’t been exactly edifying. If I want to be completely fair here, they weren’t in the best situation: the video games industry in North America was imploding and they were stuck making games for the creaky hardware that was at the center of it. 

You’d hope they’d have made the best of it–and I really do think The Empire Strikes Back is a fully formed piece of work. But if Ewok Adventure was half-baked, we’re talking raw dough here.

In Death Star Battle, you control the Millennium Falcon as it attempts to destroy the Death Star II before it’s fully constructed–first by getting past the Death Star’s shield, and then by, er, shooting bits off it off until you can reach the core and shoot that. And then you do it all again.

It’s a bit weird. There are two screens, which feels… wrong (come on guys, I know memory was at a premium, but rule of three at least) and in both screens you effectively only play in the bottom two-thirds of the screen. On the first screen, the rest is taken up with the shield and the Death Star in the distance, and you have to try and time it to pop through one of the holes (?) that show up in the shield randomly to get to the second screen while avoiding TIE Interceptors and (most dangerously) the shield’s “outermost energy band” which appears and disappears and kills you because… well, it would be too easy to get through the shield otherwise.

Look at that perspective! One nice touch is that you can actually see the Death Star being constructed as you play.

On the second screen the Death Star itself takes up a big chunk of real estate, and it feels like you should be able to move all the way around it–but you can’t. This seems to be because if you could move around it the “death ray” which moves back and forth (hey, a bit like the lasers in Gridrunner!) would have to aim in more than one direction, so you’re still stuck on the bottom two-thirds even if there’s no visual reason why.

Overall this game is simple, but it could be, I don’t know… fine. What stops it reaching the bare minimum is that you have no fine control over the Millennium Falcon at all, as it slides around like Nien Numb is drunk on (checks Wookipedia) "Kowakian Rum" after a night listening to hot jizz [“you couldn’t resist, could you”--Star Wars Ed.] While a touch of inertia isn’t a horrible idea–after all, this is a post-Asteroids space game, we expect a little–this is a game where you need to be able to accurately shoot in all directions to try and pick your way to the Death Star core, and you just… can’t. Instead you end up doing the herky-jerky dancing that represent the very worst kind of control system as you desperately move left a bit and then right a bit overshooting endlessly–and never mind if you want to hold on a diagonal! It’s not so much frustrating–you’d have to care a lot more about this game than I think it’s possible to–but it’s certainly annoying.

To be honest though, if you could move accurately the game would be a piece of piss. The difficulty switches tell the story: the left difficulty switch allows you to set the game so that you either collide with TIE Fighters or not, and the right difficulty switch allows you to set the Death Star’s death ray to either only move to the extent of the Death Star or across the entire screen.

If you set it so that you collide with TIE Fighters, the game is essentially impossible. There’s not enough screen space to avoid them, and you can’t control well enough to anyway! But then this means that the first screen is trivial–you just wait until the first hole in the shield appears and pop through it immediately. And then on the second screen, if you don’t set it so the Death Star’s death ray can reach across the entire screen, you can literally just set the Millennium Falcon up in a corner away from it and shoot your way to the core (well, after the half hour it takes you to get into position.)

It’s actively not possible to get the game settings where it provides an interesting challenge throughout (again, wrestling with controls is not an interesting challenge.) Yet the graphics and sound are (comparatively) decent, with a hyperspace animation and everything, so there's a sense here that the effort on this game was largely expended there.

Considering that, I got a bit interested in who made Death Star Battle, because there’s a dearth of good information on it online–Ewok Adventure is, if anything, better memorialised.

In his interview with Digital Press about Ewok Adventure, Larry Gelberg described that after Parker Brothers signed the rights for Return of the Jedi he and Ray “Raymo” Miller “came up with 3-4 game concepts” after seeing concept art and production stills: “Raymo came up with the Breakout-style Death Star Battle game.”

(It’s interesting that he describes it as “Breakout-style” considering the finished game has little to no relation to breakout other than I suppose the Death Star is destructible. It speaks to how unrefined the final design was.)

Unusually, although Parker Brothers did Ewok Adventure in house, as they did with their earlier Star Wars games, Death Star Battle was in fact outsourced to James Wickstead Design Associates (JWDA) a fascinatingly unhallowed developer who you may only have heard of due to Kevin Bunch’s detailed article for the Video Game History Foundation on the lost Atari 2600 game Tarzan.

As Bunch noted, JWDA already had a relationship with Parker Brothers as toy designers, and so it seemed likely that they’ve have been considered a safe pair of hands for Ray Miller’s concept if the rest of Parker Brothers was at capacity.

Indeed, in an interview with Atari Compendium, JWDA’s Todd Marshall said of Death Star Battle “we had a lot of freedom and leeway to redesign things until the 'client' was happy with it” so it seems likely they were largely left to their own devices.

However, the best piece of information I have to go on, and you’ll never believe this, is original research. It looks like Todd Marshall provided JWDA engineer Henry Will IV’s notebooks to Atari Compendium (which is… interesting, because Henry Will IV is still kicking, so why did he have them?) and while you have to parse some difficult handwriting at points, you can follow the entire development of Death Star Battle from the 1st of February 1983, where Will writes “Discovered that: Parker has asked us to do VCS Star Wars.”

History is made.

He even says “1% royalty & fees - no cap” which is crazy, because I thought only Gen Z said that. He was saying it in 1983!!!

A much more dedicated historian than I might want to pour over the notebooks for more details, though even at a glance just learning that Will was by and large solely responsible for Death Star Battle is something–and he even notes on the 12th of September 1983 that the game is available in “Bradlees” for $31.77 giving us the earliest confirmed release date for the game. Wow! Etc.

Of course, the problem now is that I can put a face to the game–it’s Ray Miller’s concept, sure, but Henry Will IV’s fault. Sorry Henry but this is fucking rubbish.

Will I ever play it again? No thank you.

Final Thought: Look, to be fair to the guy, he had like seven months to make this while working on several other things, and for the Atari 2600 as I said the game honestly looks pretty good, with strong perspective and animation on the Death Star’s shield and pleasingly iconic sprites. But it cries out for a dedicated designer; it manages to have even less of an unified design concept than Ewok Adventure, and above all it makes me wonder why after The Empire Strikes Back Sam Kjellman didn’t design any more Star Wars games–he was good at it!

(Kjellman wouldn’t design another game until… Outback Joey for Sega Genesis??? One of the rarest games on the system, that used a heart rate sensor???)

Anyway, I think discovering that this was a JWDA joint gives some clarity as to why it was published over Ewok Adventure. This has arguably even more horrible controls than Ewok Adventure, but it’s about a more exciting part of the movie and Parker Brothers almost certainly put more money into outsourcing this than on Ewok Adventure in-house, which I suspect made it somewhat easier to throw away what their programmer made. So perhaps less of a punishment for Gelberg’s hubris than he thought, and simply some sunk-cost fallacy at work.

Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24 is OUT NOW! You can pick it up in paperback, kindle, or epub/pdf. You can also support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up digital copies of exp., a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[blue-pasta]

LETSGO FIRST IN GRIDRUNNERS!!!!

[kiwimadegames]

'Gridrunner Pico-8' (2021) By: Paul Hammond (Napier) For: PC A Pico-8 version of Jeff Minter's classic for the Vic 20. Links: - Pico-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=44406

[nerdyenby]

Aqua time :D I’m watching Impulse

This team’s chemistry is wild, their practice stream was so much fun, I’m so hyped :))

They’re all so confused and silly goofy, I love them

“I’m twerking” “Ok, you can twerk if you want to” already so chaotic I’m so excited

Rocket Spleef

Sneeg being one of Illumina’s first big twitch follows :))

Already bullying the drunk team, as they should lmao

Impulse saying they should target pink and accidentally killing Jack in the first round 😂

“I genuinely can’t remember the names of any of the maps, to be honest” “… wait there’s names?” Illumina 😭😭😭

Impulse top ten!!!!

A whole team of ethogirls calling noxcrew fanboys 🤨

Hole in the Wall

“The platform!! The platform’s a fish!!!!” “Looks more like a squid, to be honest” “It-… I hate this team” 😂😂😂

“We can just hate each other, that’s really good for synergy” Sneegsnag my beloved

Joel popping off!!!!!!!

This team’s vibes are so great, they’re so funny and so supportive, everyone’s so happy for Joel :))

“I got severe adhd, I have to make noises, man. The medicine doesn’t stop that, it stops the worms in my brain” REAL

I don’t think I knew Sneeg had adhd, like, I ~knew~ but I don’t think I’ve heard him say it (I have adhd and am a psychologist lmao)

Did they all get top 15 there????

Good comms and comm appreciation :))

JOEL IS A GR HATER???!?!! It’s okay everyone has flaws /lh

Impulse calling Sneeg old my beloved

“Let’s game til we die” being an almost entirely serious response to this conversation is so /pos

Sky Battle

Sneeg is giving such a good and thorough run down, what a guy

Rip Impulse

Sneeg hyping up Sniff :))

“You’re scaring me, bud” “I’m scaring myself” Illumina is so real for this, honestly

Impulse doing a lil sing-song after killing Etho

Joel using they/she for Sniff <33333

Meltdown

They’re doing so well!!

Sneeg popping off!!!

Aw rip, got sandwiched but kept morale high

Them being playfully upset at how well cyan are doing :))

*Tubbo falls into lava* “That’s what alcohol does to you, kids” JOEL 😂

Impulse 21st after the first half!!!!! That’s my streamer!!!!

Battle Box

This isn’t going great lol

Yeah, this map is rough

Ace Race

Sneeg’s deadpan “wiggle wiggle wiggle” is way funnier than it should be lol

“Imma vibe” “Imma vibe, too. I might yell, but it’s alright” I love this team so much

I BLINKED and impulse recovered from 40th to 17th, he’s doing so well!!!!!!

Iirc, Impulse has been neck and neck with every one of his teammates, they could all get top half!!!!

Impulse slipping up the exact same way Sneeg just did 😭😭😭

Holding hands in the early 20s <333

Grid Runners

Sneeg being so excited about the new pig room :D

THE GOLF COMPLETION OF LEGEND!!!!!!!

That was a smooth dunk tank

“OH my boy!!! Get at it!!” “What are we doing?” “You’re redstoning, you’re redstoning!!!!!” Sneeg hyping up Impulse my beloved <333

“THATS MY REDSTONE MONSTER!!!!! DUDE, ATTABOY, LETS FUCKING GO!!!!” “Swearing!!” “SORRY” I love this team so much, you guys don’t understand

FIRST OVERALL THOSE ARE MY GUYS!!!!!!!

Everyone had their moment to shine :)))

Easily one of the best gridrunners of all time

No one else knew repeaters could go through walls, same here bro

“Very convenient gridrunners for us, I gotta say: trident for me, redstone for you, whacking people for Illumina,… Joel was here”

“This team has some freaking synergy” “Aw dude, I just really love playing minecraft with good people” I DEMAND more Sneeg and Impulse teams

Joel sot hater????? Smh

Sands of Time

“I’m such a lil menace for sands, bro” Sneeg is so based you guys

The new sound 😭😭😭

Impulse is such a chill sandkeeper, it’s really nice

Illumina taking one for the team

First out, ruh roh…. It’s not necessarily a bad sign but it’s a bit demoralizing

Impulse tossing all the tomatoes so other people can’t throw them at Illumina <33

“Wait, we’re aqua” Sneeg 😂

IMPULSE 23RD!!!!!!! MY STREAMER!!!!!!!!!

Dodgebolt

Them being happy for whoever wins :))

Love how you can tell Joel and Oli are genuine, irl bffs because of how they talk, it’s all smack talk, they’re kinda brothers-coded

Hyping up and then immediately bullying Oli lol

Impulse said shit!! Technically “shat” but same thing

“There was an a in there” “Yeah, it’s different, guys”

Great times, great vibes, incredible team <333

[patchesjam]

Dream spitting facts about how he’s helped develop the strategies or changed entire games for MCC

SOT, dodgebolt, parkour warrior, ace race, parkour tag, hole in the wall and gridrunners are all games where he's significantly affected the way of playing it or a key strat others now all use like he is That Guy

[tinamybeloved]

Game 8 gridrunners my god