What is Bullet Hell

"Bullet hell" ("danmaku" in Japanese) is a term used to describe a sub-genre of manic shoot 'em up. The screenshot below is from Cave's 2001 game, Progear, and summarises the genre pretty well.

Progear (Cave/Capcom 2001) - 2nd Boss "Gabriel Hammer"

As you can probably tell, bullet hell shooters are above and beyond your usual shmup, with intense and complex enemy bullet patterns that require skill and nerves of steel to negotiate.  Talking of Cave, they are the bastions of the genre and continue to make arcade games to this day.

MTW

What is a boss fight?

Big Core boss from Gradius II

Bosses are extra tough enemies that turn up key points during a game, usually at the end of a level (hence why they are sometimes called 'end of level guardians') or sometimes half-way (known as 'mid-level bosses' or 'sub-bosses').  They are usually big, have incredibly powerful weapons, lots of health or armour and use cheap tactics to dispense of the player.
Traditionally bosses have one or more weak spots that you must exploit in order to defeat them. It's this weak spot that lead to one of the most famous phrases in arcade games, "Shoot the core!" It first appeared in Konami's classic Gradius II and was an instruction to the player on how to defeat a boss with a weak central core (pictured above-right).

There is some debate as to which was the first arcade game to introduce the concept of bosses. Some argue it was command ships in Namco's Galaxian (1979), some would cite the UFO in Atari's Asteroids (1979), while others say it was the motherships in Taito's Space Invaders (1978). However, none of these enemies really fit the description of a boss, as none of them were at the end of a level and none of them were particularly tough to beat.

Were any of these the first boss?

For a the first "typical boss" we need to look at three games by three different manufacturers that were all released in 1980. They were the samurai master from Sega's Samurai, the ninja from SNK's Sasuke vs Commander, and, perhaps most famous of all, the mothership from Taito's Phoenix.

To be honest, all you need to survive most boss encounters is the ability to learn their attack and defend patterns. Nonetheless, there's something empowering about facing down an enemy who, on paper, is completely out of your league. When people think about old games, you can guarantee they will mention at least one memorable boss. They almost define the game itself.

MTW

What are dip switches?

Dip switches are small switches that can be found on lots of different circuit boards, from computer motherboards to engine management systems in cars to air conditioning systems. They allow engineers to turn on different operating modes by selecting different combinations of switches. These different modes may may be something simple like a diagnostic mode to something that fundamentally changing how the machine works.

They can also be found in the system boards of arcade machines. Dip switches on arcade machines allow arcade operators to things like how many credits are required to play or turning sounds on and off in attract mode. They often even allowed operators to change the gameplay, with options for how many lives players start with, when to award bonus lives and even difficulty.

Here's a pic of dip switch banks 6K and 6J on a Galaga system board, highlighted by a red border:

As you can see, they are pretty small -- too small to change with your finger tip, so people usually use a small flat screw driver or even a pen, if they're feeling lazy.

If you play games on MAME, go into the options and you will usually find dip switch settings you can change in there too.

MTW

What is screen burn?

Back in the 70s and 80s, people were not quite so energy conscious and as such arcade machines would be left on for 12+ hours a day, with the phosphor on the back of the monitor sizzling away from the constant beam of the cathode ray in the back of the unit. If an image was left firing at back of the screen for long enough, the phosphor layer would erode, leaving a ghost image known as screen burn, burn-in, after image or ghost images, pictured below:

Domino Man title screen (left) and the "screen burn" effect on a CRT monitor (right)

The mainly affected early arcade games, as manufacturers quickly discovered what was happening and started adding "attract modes" to their games, with constantly moving images to prevent the phosphor damage. This, incidentally, is precisely why computers have screen savers.

MTW

What is attract mode?

What month I talked about screen burn and how arcade manufacturers started to add attract modes to their games to help prevent this, however, that wasn't the primary function of an attract mode. As the name suggest, attract mode was to attract players. Pretty obvious, huh?

Usually attract modes would alternate between a demonstration of the game, the highscores, profiles of the characters or vehicles and the story of the game (if indeed there was a story). They often said "Game Over" or "Insert Coin(s)" and were sometimes silent, although usually that was controlled by a dip switch.

Now, I like to include videos in my posts where I can find them, so imagine my delight when I discovered a someone on YouTube calling themselves Narox has uploaded a series of 41 videos on Capcom attract modes, including such classics as Captain Commando, Three Wonders, Dark Stalkers and loads from the Street Fighter series. If you don't know what attract screens look like, you will after this:

Can I be honest? I like just leaving this video series playing in the background. Ahhh, nostalgia. 

MTW

What are kill screens?

What happened when you completed an early arcade game?  Did they even have an ending?  Did Jump Man (AKA Mario) ever rescue Pauline from Donkey Kong?  Did Frogger finally get home?  Were the Galaxians ever thwarted? The answer, I'm afraid, is no. The truth, however, was only ever revealed to players with the skill and patients of demi-Gods, because in most cases you had to play through hundreds of screens to get to the "end" - and let's be honest, even getting past the first dozen screens on Pac-Man is impressive.  So what did happen?  Quite simply, the game broke, like this:

This is a 'kill screen' and in the case of Pac-Man it occurs on level 256.  When games like Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong and Galaga were originally developed, nobody expected players to play for that long.  So kill screens are little more than bugs, often caused by integer overflows on the level counter.

Back in the day, I never heard anybody talk about kill screens.  The first I heard of them was when I watched arcade championship documentary King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.  For top arcade gamers, reaching a kill screen is the Holy Grail and the only way to "beat" these old games.

MTW

What's a cockpit machine?

The crown jewels of any arcade were the cockpit machines. These big, all encompassing machines that had authentic controls (steering wheels and pedals for driving games, yokes or pistol-grip joysticks for flying games) and an integrated seat, hence cockpit.

Most cockpit machines were open, like this Hydro Thunder machine (right):

Sometimes cockpit machines were enclosed, like the Star Wars machine pictured below.

These machines were great, because they provided a sense of seclusion in what might otherwise be a bustling environment, helping the player focus.

There were even cockpit machines that had hydraulics, so the whole thing moved as you played. Sega made loads motorised cockpit machines, including Space Harrier, Hang-On and After Burner, but the absolute king of morotised cockpit machines was the ultra-rare G-Loc 360 machine, pictured below, which used a gyroscopic mechanism so it could turn players fully upside-down:

For those of us who dream about having our own private arcade, cockpit machines would be an amazing addition to the collection.

MTW

What is a cabaret machine?

Sometimes, whilst fact checking for this blog, I learn something new and the term "cabaret machine" is an example of this. Quite simply, cabaret machines are shorter and sometimes also narrower upright arcade machines, designed to save space. As a kid I never questioned why some machines were smaller and I certainly never heard the term "cabaret machine" before now.

Below is a picture of an SNK Neo Geo MVS-2 upright and an Neo Geo MVS-2 Mini (their name for cabaret). As you can see, there's a quite a difference in size.

MVS-2 Upright machine (left) and MVS-2 Mini cabaret machine (right)

What is a cocktail table?

Most arcade machines were upright, but because it was common for bars and cafes to have a few machines, a table form factor was invented know as "cocktail tables". These machines were designed to be used as a table, featured a screen that pointed upwards through the glass surface and often had two sets of controls (on either side of the screen), so two people could play without swapping seats.

Cocktail tables were quite rare and just like this picture, I think I only ever saw Pac-Man machines. Unsurprisingly they are much sought after pieces of hardware. My guess is, like me, most old arcade fans know a cocktail table is their best chance of persuading their wife or girlfriend to let them have a real machine in their house. If that sounds like a good idea, expect to pay two or even three times as much as you would an upright.

MTW

What does tilt mean?

Following on from last month's 'What's a pin game?' post, I thought I would follow up with term that is synonymous with pinball, tilt.

Early pin games did not have flippers, instead players jostled the table to get the ball to go into scoring holes. As pin games became increasingly more mechanized, triggers we added to limit how much players could move or "tilt" the table. Often the tilt mechanism comprised of a plumb bob hanging from a bracket inside the cabinet. When the machine was jostled too much, the plumb would bang against the inside of a ring that surrounded it and the game would lock out things like flippers and anything that added to the player's score, allowing the ball to fall out of play. This was known as "tilting", because you had tilted the plumb bob.

When electronic displays were added to pinball machines, they were programmed to display "TILT" when the player had gone too far with jostling the machine. Nonetheless, it remains a legitimate tactic when playing pinball, with top players knowing just when and where to jostle a table to keep the ball in play or activate high-scores.

Incidentally, next time you are on Google, try searching for "tilt". You'll find some interesting results.

MTW

What's a pin game?

Everyone is familiar with the term 'pinball', but before pinball these games were just known as 'pin games', because that's all that was involved -- no bumpers, no ramps and not even any flippers, just a launcher, a metal ball, a load of pins and holes to score in, as pictured below:

You know when you're talking to a true pinball enthusiast, because they often prefer to use this ancient tern for pinball games. In fact one of the leading pinball magazines is actually called 'Pin Game Journal'. Check out their website here at http://www.pingamejournal.com/.

MTW

What is JAMMA?

Short for apan Japanese Amusement Machinery Manufacturers Association, JAMMA is an association of arcade manufacturers Atlus, Capcom, Konami, Namco, Sega, Taito and Tecmo.  They started out as a rights movement in 1981, but by 1989 it turned into an organisation that established a set of standards for arcade cabinets, which included standard connectors and video displays.  Chances are, when you've played an arcade machine you have played one built to JAMMA standards, as it allowed distributors and operators to swap out boards without lugging around entire cabinets.

MTW

What does 1UP mean?

These days, video games require gigabytes of storage and hundreds of megabytes of memory to run, but in the early days of arcade games, memory was limited to just a few kilobytes. In fact, this post needs more memory than Breakout or Asteroids needed altogether. So, programmers had to be frugal with naming conventions and rather than displaying 'Player 1' and 'Player 2' on the screen, they would simply put '1UP' and '2UP'.

The term first appearing on pin games in the early 70s. As video games developed the term started being used in multiplayer games, with '1UP' and '2UP' written next to each player's score. Over time, the term was also used to represent collectibles that would increase the player's lives.

But why 'Up'? Most arcade historians believe it was short hand for 'Player 1, step-up', since there was often only room (and indeed controls) for one player at a time.