[BRIEF NOTE] More on the Commodore 64

I wasted this morning completely playing Paradroid. "Waste" is perhaps too strong a word, mind, since I really enjoyed playing that game for the first time in a decade. The port of the game over to the Windows operating system was quite well done; I even recognized some of the layouts.

I wasn't expecting my search at news.google.ca using the keyword "paradroid" to actually turn up a hit, though.

Videogame developer DC Studios is extremely happy to announce that its Commodore 64 Direct To TV console is to be released in the UK and Europe.

The C64 D2TV™ recreates 30 of its most well known games from the Commodore 64 home computer, including favourites from legendary developers Epyx, the Bitmap Brothers and Hewson. The C64 D2TV™ brings the seminal Commodore experience to a whole new generation of consumers, allowing them to relive the excitement the early generation of games systems without the long loading times.

Other sources suggest that a quarter-million copies of the C64 D2TV have been sold so far. If/when I ever bother to buy a television, I think I'll have to consider picking one up.

I've mentioned that my cell phone has rather more computing power than my dear old Commodore 64C. Even so, it was a wonderful computing system, remarkably flexible given hardware limitations. Consider GEOS, Berkeley Softworks GUI interface. As the Wikipedia article notes, it was remarkably efficient.

How the programmers at Berkeley Softworks could possibly devise a GUI-based OS within the limitations of an 8-bit Commodore CPU (with its 64K of RAM and 40 column video screen), was nothing short of incredible, nay miraculous. With GEOS, your C64 could do more than games. You could actually get work done with it. Or so the theory went (more on that later).

Also, take Q-Link, the Commodore computer messaging service that was the direct ancestor of AOL. I remember running the Q-Link demo program that came on a 5-1/4 disk and wishing, just wishing, that my parents would buy me a lightning-quick 2400 bps modem. Q-Link prefigured AOL, down to the emoticon usage.

I'm happy that the Commodore 64 and related computers live. Even now, there is an active Commodore newsgroup on USENET (comp.sys.cbm). Commodore--sadly defunct as a company from 1994--did remarkable things.

(All of this means, of course, that I'll have to resist playing Paradroid when I get home. Oh, and the Zzap!64 article mentioned by nickbarlow describing the development of Paradroid is located here.

[NON BLOG] Why I Like Simulation Games

I rather like simulation games. First-person shooters never interested me particularly. Starting from the hacked copy of SimCity for my Commodore 64, I loved the idea of being able to simulate the foundation, growth, and expansion of complex societies. My favourite simulation game of all time is Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: There's nothing quite like dispatching hordes of ravenous mind worms upon your terrified ideological foes even as you work on building technologies capable of communicating with Planet. The Gaians and the University were my favourite factions; the Hive and the Believers, I fear, the least. I really enjoyed exploring Planet's surface, creating a complex web of internal trade and external diplomatic relations, downloading new maps (Mars, a gas-giant moon) and scenarios (different or extra factions, specific territorial goals), and the like.

This is one reason why I didn't take that game with me to Ontario.

Instead, I picked up three new games.

( Middle East Political Simulator )

( Crisis in the Kremlin )

( My favourite, Europa Universalis II. )

There are very good structural reasons why the alternative histories I created with these three simulations never occurred. An Israel actively imperialist during the 1980s would have provoked a global catastrophe, and Israelis knew this. The preservation of even a democratized Soviet Union would have been a difficult task at best, given the ongoing collapse of the Soviet economy and the growth of local nationalisms. France never developed an interest in colonizing California and Australia because it never needed to establish many Pacific-front colonies of settlement, given low population growth and more Europe-centred policies. Portugal's transitory presence at the Cape explains why South African Portuguese is not a everyday vernacular but a language brought quite to the country within the past generation and a half.

Despite these structural factors, though, there were also possibilities. Taking the single example of France's failure to echo Britain and Spain in intensively settling extra-European territories, if there had been some population movement in France that echoed the 17th century flight of religious dissidents from Stuart England or the 16th century out-migration of the newest generation of conquistadors from the new Spanish kingdom's recently conquered south to the lands on the other side of the Atlantic, New France might have grown as quickly as New Spain or New England. Had elite personalities in 17th century France been different--had Louis XIV, say, sought to consolidate the Canadian frontiers and clear up social blemishes at home by sponsoring the settlement of urban poor and rural peasants on the shores of the St. Lawrence--then there would at least be more Canadiens, and despite the structural issues tending to militate against an especially populous French colony.

Back on the 23rd of February, I noted in my CFTAG report that the perfection of human knowledge about the functionings of human societies would let us have exceptionally good simulation games. It's also true that the expansion of human knowledge would let us know about the contingent nature of our present-day circumstances. There are reasons for the way that things are; these reasons, though, are not nearly so certain, or nearly so inevitable, as we might want to believe. The progressive improvement of simulation games just provides an entertaining face on this reality. And besides, a Portuguese Cape is just fun.