9. Tropes in retrogaming

You are listening to the Ericade Radio Network. Good evening and welcome to another hour of Amiga Retro music. And another episode of Amiga Flashback. DJ Demon here and today we are going to talk about tropes. That is things that games do for storytelling, for making the game more playable or just trying to cheat you out of something. Yeah, it's an interesting story.

convention. So what is a trope? Let me say it like this. If you've ever seen the site TV Tropes, can Google for it if you have not seen it yet, then you know that a trope is something that Hollywood movies can use to tell a story. Some cheap little device to make storytelling better or at least more predictable or well unpredictable.The definition of the word is that a trope is a significant or recurrent theme, a motif if you want to. One way you can say a trope is like a movie is often built around the hero's journey. Then the hero's journey being the trope. You probably know about it. You start as nothing and then you become a hero during the game or during the movie. I mean, you start out as nothing and you end up like a king.So that's the thing. Some tropes can be super powerful and make the games all better and some can break it totally.

Super Mario Land very fitting isn't it and Today's first trope will be making the short route taxing back in the day computers were limited when it came to CPU memory and disk space So the games had to be short and arcade games Which were often the first environments where games were built for?They also had to make sure that you often paid for new extra lives, but not so often that you would be put off by it. It had to balance how much you were ready to pay and how short the game would be in order to make it rewarding. So that worked fine, but when the games were ported into home computers, only the taxing part remained. You had no way of putting new money in the slot.because you know, home computer didn't have any such thing. That meant that the game had to be played time and time again, which I could guess was super annoying. Or actually guess I played enough games to know they were. And if I want to look into this, I think Turrican 2 is a good example of that. It's a fantastic game.which makes it right. doesn't matter that you have to try it again and again and again, restarting because you ran out of lives, because it's such a magic game. Other games can be really annoying beyond belief, like Raid Over Moscow. Well, that game had one super taxing moment, and that was trying to get out of the hangar. You were on the aircraft and you...You crashed into the wall more times and you actually got out of the hangar. Seems like a construction error right there.

Since we're talking about games, it's good with game music, isn't it? This is Beach theme from Jack Jazz Rabbit. The second trope is artificial limits. They can be time limits, but also other kind of limits that makes it harder to complete the game, or at least more challenging. And they can mask out that the game simply doesn't have that much to sell to begin with.When done right, you get something like Impossible Mission 1 and 2. You're trying to stop an evil professor, a mad genius of sort. You get into his underground lair. You have six hours in real time. That's the time in reality, so to speak, to defeat him. And you need to find map fragments. But you have robots trying to kill you, and there are holes in the floor that you can fall through. And if that happens,you automatically lose 10 minutes from the clock. So die five times in a row in some way and one hour is gone. So the time limit itself would be easy if it weren't for the fact that you will be losing time. And that makes the game living up to its name. Yeah, you know, impossible mission. And you also have to be a bit smart because map fragments can't be stitched together. You have to actually rotate them correctly so they line up.And I guess that's like an IQ test or something. Super hard game, really. The second one, they actually did understand a bit of the problem. So then you have a real clock on the bottom of the screen that shows how much time you have. So you can kind of line up how much time you need for each section of this building that you're infiltrating. But if you run out of time, you will pretty much be very ticked off by having like three levels left.and no time. So that is a tough one. Another kind of artificial limit is shown by a game called Theatre Europe. but some music by thinking about that.

Amiga Deadline. So, well, time is not the only way you can artificially limit a game. Theater Europe is a game that puts you into the seat in Washington or Moscow. You are the leader of the Warsaw Pact or NATO.and Europe is the battleground. You have access to a number of different ways of fighting tanks and soldiers and all that kind of thing. But you also have nukes. The thing is, the game's artificial limit is that the nukes are more or less useless. If you get into a situation where you you can't beat the enemy in one battle, you can nuke that unit and that immediately grants you the victory.However, the response will be that one of your cities are gone. If you continue noking back, that will escalate immediately, or very swiftly at least, and you will have a full nuclear war, which in itself is always a losing condition. It is game over basically if that happens. And you get the infamous message that the suicide pill is in locker seven. Well, good luck.I think the game tried to do that to tell the world about the folly of war, but it ended up crippling the game a bit, because the whole game built on the idea that you always ran out of resources and nuking a unit, which is something both you and the other guy could do, would become more more a viable tactic, which meant that it was very easy to lose the game because it ended up being the only thing that you could do.

Free Channel Background, signed Dr. Awesome. Alright, the last part of this artificial limit takes us back to school. School's in, and you are a bully. Or some kid trying not to get into military school. We're talking about school days. This Commodore 64 game had you trying to shoot down the shields in order to win.and you had to pretty much always shoot down a teacher, not with a gun of course, but with a slingshot. It was kind of Bart Simpson style. And you had not to be seen because if you were ever caught doing that, you would be told that you had to write lines. And this is the Bart Simpson moment. You had to write them with a chalk pen on a blackboard. But if you amounted up to 10,000 lines in one gaming round, the game was over and you were sent to this military school.Yeah, and why did you shoot down the teachers? Yeah, because the second shot would bounce off their head and take down the shield. The game had this 10,000 lines working as an inverse counter, hit point counter. You wanted it as low as possible and the artificial limit therefore put a constraint on it. It's not a very weird trope. None of those are, but it's a bit more uncommon thanyou have like five lives. So it's kind of interesting and a fun game to boot and if you didn't like your schoolmates and your teachers you could actually rename the characters in the game to whatever you wanted to. So that bully who always stole your lunch money he could be part of the game I guess.

The third trope that I'm giving to you is something I called Random Number is the Arbiter. Yeah, all games have some sort of random moment unless the game is specifically made to be totally deterministic. So that's not a weird thing at all, but sometimes the random number generator really pretty much decides the outcome of the game.Casing Point, Nuclear War for the Amiga. Yeah, that's a funny little game that is almost not a game at all. It has very little options, but when you start up, you can select your opponents. You're one person in the middle and you have four different people that you contend with and they are caricatures of very well known leaders with very punny names. Actually, Mao Tse-Dong is called Mao Tse-Pan.pretty much lampshading that. Ronald Reagan was called Ronnie Reagan after his... how much he loved this Star Wars program. And of course we had Koka Mamey, you know who that is, and Infidel Castro, and P.M. Satcher, which of course is Margaret Fatcher. And it probably seems like a weird name, but if you read it out it becomes P.M.S. I don't think that...Joke really aged well, but there we are. The thing with the game is that you want to nuke them and not get nuked yourself. And who nukes who is pretty random. You can of course game the game by trying to flirt with the leaders, like putting a smiley face. And some of the leaders will fall for it some of the time, and some will not. I think Mrs. Thatcher, Mrs. Thatcher that is.will fall for it and so will Ronald Reagan. But for an example, Rickard Nixon or Tricky Dick, he will not. So you have to kind of balance that. And who knows who or for what reason seems to be impossible to predict. You can try to get a guy like in Fiddlesticks or Fiddlesticks to take the blame because everybody seems to hate him for some reason. But more likely than not,

everyone who gets defeated sends their whole arsenal into random players, meaning that it's very common that nobody wins. Everybody pretty much wipes everyone else out. And then you see an animation of the planet Earth exploding. Very depressing, but I guess it's some kind of message about follow war even here. But there we are. And sometimes you can seeSomeone like Tricky Dick jumping up and down on a burnt out world run, shouting I won, I won, I won and that's the end of the game. If you win, yeah, you get nothing except a high score list and a scorched earth basically. The game is fun, but it's totally random and this is not always a good thing.

Down is the name of the song and funny we should be talking about random number generators because almost all songs have been called something on D and I have not built this playlist. It's random. I doubt it, but I think it is. Alright, so now time for another trope. T for toe is what I call it.That's the game that is really boring if you're just one person but becomes something totally different if you're two or more depending on how the game is built. North and South is a really nice game where you play the American Civil War. You can play as the North States or the Federation in the South States. It has you hijacking trains, trying to steal gold, putting soldiers on the ground, fighting out battles.and all that thing and if you capture more ground you get more taxes and you defeated all the military units from the other side you win. But the whole thing with the T42 is that you can set it to play against itself with different levels of competence from the computer or you can kind of play against another person and the game becomes much better. Playingagainst the computer is boring because the AI is really crappy. There's some seriously dumb things you can do to pretty much win every time. But if you play against a real human being, the game is so good that it might be the best multiplayer game I ever played. It doesn't work over some kind of network. You're actually sitting side by side and using two joysticks and part of the keyboard, if I remember correctly. But that game is hilarious.Same goes for another game, Worms, that was meant to be played against other people. I remember me and my free brother sitting in the same sofa in front of an old PC and playing the game. It was hilariously fun. But that's the idea of it. The T4-2 trope pretty much means that the game is meant to be played with more people than one. And even if it allows one person to play against an AI, it's not fun that way, simply.

youErik Zalitis

Thanks show and before that it was as I saidI don't know how to say this, I have to admit something. I invented all those names. Probably there is a name for the trope if you look around on the internet, but how fun would that be? So here's the next one. Caveat Emptor. That is Latin and means buyer beware. That is the game that delivers something else than what is on the box.It doesn't necessarily mean that whatever you see on the box isn't the game because that counts. But it could also be that the game gives you some vibes that the real game doesn't really live up to. And one of the biggest offenders there is OutRun. It was originally, as far as I know, a decent arcade game. But the C64 version is atrociously bad. Here's what's being sold on the...Convaloat sorry box you get it then that is you get hot car you get super cool road Yeah, you know racing and and stuff in sunny, California with a woman by your side. Okay, that seems nice. I take it Well, first of all, they didn't think much about the SID chip capability So you get a tape a pre-recorded cassette tape that where you can playCalifornia style music on your boombox. That in itself does not instill much confidence. But the game could have been fun. I remember how much I loved those Formula One games where you had to like, okay, I need to go to pit stop, but then they will actually beat me to the times. What to do, what to do. You had to make very much split second decisions. My wheels are getting worn.

But can I run this thing? And the clock is saying that and things. Really nice. This is basically you start feeling sleepy after playing for a few minutes. It's boring. You're just driving around trying to dodge stuff and drive as fast as possible. That's pretty much the whole game. I don't even remember if there was anything else there, but that's the thing. And before we're going on, I want to add another T4-2 game because I...is really criminal not to mention it. That would be the World Games, the Summer Games and all those. And the Winter Games. They were made for two people and could not be played by one and still being fun. So they are winners in all that respect. But be fit in that trope.

The Ericade Radio Network. Remember the BBS scene in Sweden? Go to the.ericade.net to read the histories. They are in the Swedish language. One of the weirder games I have come across when I was playing around on the CD32 with a game collection that I bought along with a terrible fire card. It was a game called Emanuel. As far as I have been able to deduce, it is based on a soft...horror erotic movie by the same name. It has you, some kind of cad, running around in a hotel trying to seduce women. That's a whole game's premise. You have money, you can go around in the world and do pretty much that and you should somehow find this Emmanuel woman. Well, it turns out to be a really crappy dating simulator where you have to try to figure out which lines you should say.I mean, she says something and you have like four different choices and this must lead in a way that leads into bed. That's the whole game. I mean, if you just think about how good stuff like that can be, if you think about Fallout, where you can use your skills in speech to get better deals or nice little tidbits of story progressing the games. And here it's just, yeah, as I said, game, dating simulator.It's kind of a few minutes after playing it you already feel like yeah Not only has this not aged very well.

youErik Zalitis

Dig Env 2 is the name of the song. I want to add another game to the caveat emptor trope so to speak, but it's not one that does it wrong. It's one that actually inverts that trope by delivering exactly what's on the box. I don't know, I haven't seen all the versions of that box, but the ones I have seen have screens from the game on it. And there's a good reason for it, because this gamePSI 5 trading company made in 1985 for the Commodore 64 has some kind of spaceship simulator where you have five people working in different departments of the ship. Gunnery, navigation, engineering, repairs and what have you. And they have to be instructed because they're dumb and they're dumb as a pair of bricks and a half.So you have to pretty much give them orders and they execute it and the situation goes totally haywire Everybody's shooting at the ship everything breaks down people get stressed out and the orders and the counter orders and the information Yes crisscrosses the screen. It's a thing of beauty It's a short game with a lot of replayability You need to get into harbor before you're shot down and your precious cargo is lootedSo that is a fine game and the graphics is so nice. It's not the best thing you've ever seen, but it's very... It evokes a bit of imagination. It looks like, I'm the captain of Star Trek Enterprise, because that's the feeling the game gives you and that is what it delivers. So it's an inverse of a caveat emptor. As soon as you see the box, you know exactly what you will be playing. And that's not a bad experience at all.

And that is my friends the whole enchiladas as you say in this piece Look extra jingle nice This is DJ Demon saying thanks for listening and please if you have any points comments criticism or I don't know praise perhaps go to radio dot ericade dotnet to well talk back a bitWe'll see you next Saturday.

The EriKade Radio Network. Remember the BBS scene in Sweden? Go to the.erikade.net to read the histories. They are in the Swedish language.Do you remember when Paula sang the blues and Denise had the moves? This is the Ericade Radio Network, and we remember.

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