The Connecticut Leather Company and me.
Written: Oct 16 '00 (Updated Oct 18 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: good games if you can find 'em
Cons: no scroll chip, stubby joysticks
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| KickMe's Full Review: Colecovision |
In 1982 Coleco, the Connecticut Leather Company, released my favorite classic game console of all time, the Colecovision.
I was ten years old, and my family had owned an Atari 2600 for two years. While I still enjoyed the 2600's big blocky graphics, bleepy sounds and simplistic game designs, I learned from playing some of the incredible machines gracing the arcades, pizzerias and party stores of my area that there was much improvement to be made. The 2600's games were simplistic and stylized to the point that an educated uninitiate might think them to be animated peices of modern art. Perhaps an unholy matrimony of minimalism and cubism resulting in what was fancifully called Superman, Adventure, Missile Command and Space Invaders.....nah.
Meanwhile, Donkey Kong and other games like it were producing visuals in the arcades which, while by no means realistic, appeared at least visibly similar to the subjects which they were supposed to represent, and sometimes even possessed a cartoonish charm. I wanted those games at home!
So when Coleco advertised their system on TV with the words: "Our vision...Your vision...Colecovision!" and seduced us with fleeting shots of a surprisingly arcade-like Donkey Kong, me and my brother Gerald were immediately hooked.
Whenever my mother or stepfather took us to K-Mart, Sears or anywhere else that sported an electronics department, we would make a beeline to the videogame section and salivate on the securely locked glass which cruelly seperated us from the Coleco goodness we so desperately sought. I still remember the boxes clearly; they were festooned with photos of the Colecovision, its controllers--Wow! Look at all the buttons!--and many screen shots of games which were so superior to the 2600 that going home to my Atari made me depressed and resentful. I wanted Smurf Rescue, not Adventure! I wanted Donkey Kong, not PitFall! I wanted.....what can I say, I was a greedy kid.
Mom instructed us to start saving money if we ever wanted one of those "damn things." Why should she help us pay for one when she just spent $200 on that Atari two years ago? This was long before the whole concept of built-in obsolescence and the accompanying cruelty of the upgrade cycle had sunk into popular culture. You didn't buy a new TV until the old one broke and, to my parents minds at least, you shouldn't need to buy a new video game system until the old one was a smoking husk. So Gerald and I proudly instituted a cardboard box money policy. (We had a policy of placing our money in the box) We then drew a Colecovision logo, traced carefully from a printed advertisement, on top of the box and commenced a countdown starting from the price of a Coleco going down to zero. Every time we got some money, be it from a birthday or allowance or a holiday, we would stick it our paltry proceeds into the box and subtract the amount from the nascent total. It seemed like it took forever and a day to save up even half of the going price for that thing. We would never get a Coleco at this rate! But, miracle of miracles, my mother had a sudden and unexpected change of heart.
You see, she had read about the expansion port and the Atari 2600 adapter which had become available. That option made the bridge in her head from denying us to indulging us. Her fractured reasoning went like this: "If the boys get the Coleco AND this thing-which-lets-them-play-Atari-2600-games, then they will play their old games again, and the money I spent on that old Atari won't be wasted!"
We welcomed her change of heart, and the $100 that came with it, and wisely stayed silent about the old Atari 2600--remember, $200 two years ago!--which, instead of simply being less used, would now be completely discarded should we get that 2600 adapter. I guess her decision did made some sence anyway, as the Coleco with the expansion device took up much less space under the TV table than the Coleco AND the old 2600 would've.
Anyway, we cashed out the box, and Mom made up the difference in price. A Colecovision came home with us that night in 1983. For the next four years, I would be a loyal Coleco gamer, regardless of the fact that, by 1985, the system would be completely dead and gone.
The System
Many people disliked the phone-like controllers with their flat, stubby joysticks and membrane numeric keypad, but I actually got very used to them. They didn't break nearly as often as my freind's Intellivision pads did, and at least they were joysticks. The placement of the trigger buttons, one for your forefinger and the other for your thumb, was a bit awkward, but kids are adaptable. I was soon pumping those springy little buttons fast enough to give myself blisters. If you really hated the regular controller, there was an alternative to be found in the SuperController. This used a pistol grip with trigger buttons, with a miniaturized and softer numeric keypad and ball-handled joystick on top. I wanted one back then, and I still want one now.
The expansion port, which was used by the aforementioned Atari module, was a neat innovation which also could accept a steering wheel module good only for Sega's Turbo (an excellent translation) and, later, an ill-fated computer. More on that further on...
Two things about the system irritated me then as well as now.
First was the 12-second load time(!) for the games. This was the only catridge based system that has ever had this strange affliction, and while load time would become a lamentable and necessary side effect of CD based systems years later, it was extremely agitating to a kid who was impatient to play Space Panic or Donkey Kong. I have read that this startup delay was a software affectation, and was not necessary from a hardware perspective at all. Perhaps it was just a method of forcing us to look at the trademark a little longer; but, honest to goodness, the unit would take 12 seconds to go from the "COLECOVISION" logo screen to the game select menu.
Secondly, there was the lack of a scroll chip. Even the Atari 2600 had hardware scrolling, but not the Colecovision. Anytime a programmer needed to scroll a playfield on the Coleco, they first had to program a scroll routine into their programs. This software scrolling was inconsistant from game to game, and often resulted in jerky scrolling and chunky fill rates. Zaxxon, 2010, and the year-end summary from Fortune were all good demonstrations of this phenomenon.
The Games
Believe it or not, there were games produced on this system which are, even now, somewhat playable. This is unlike the 2600 which, in my opinion anyway, possessed games presenting an alien and unsatisfyingly thin gameplay model compared to today's standards. Most Atari games' entire play-structure could be summarized in a single or perhaps a couple sentences. But not on the Colecovision. Here are a few games, some of which may be rare, that demonstrate the playability achieved by the Coleco in its heyday.
Fortune Builder
Some call this the "daddy of all sims", and I agree. But this is more than simply a precursor to SimCity.
As in SimCity, you start off with an empty map to fill. In Fortune Builder it's a fictional eastern seaboard with plains, lakes and a mountain range to the west. But, unlike SimCity, your goal is to reach a certain financial net worth within a certain number of "years," not to simply have a healthy city. The net worth and the time limit are chosen from the game select screen before starting a game.
In Fortune Builder, you build roads and bridges like in SimCity, but you are more of a developer than a mayor or zoning authority. You also build resorts, amusement parks, stadiums, marinas, docks, casinos, ski lodges, factories, condos, cottages, apartment blocks, oil wells, drilling rigs, fishing fleets, mines, etc. Fortune builder used an algorythm to calculate income based on an object's proximity to other objects. That is, placing certain objects close to other objects would either enhance or lower the earning potential of those objects. For instance, a vacation resort next to a factory may not do so well. However, an apartment building next to that factory does great! And that resort would do much better next to a hotel, the seashore, and/or a marina. Well connected roadways are also vital, as no one can visit a resort without roads, and the factory cannot operate without roads to bring in raw materials and to ship out the finished goods. A factory does best with a mine nearby, and a bunch of roads. An amusing, yet useful, element of this game was the tiny, little, bug-like dots which crawled along the roads. These were supposed to be cars, and the number of them on any given stretch of road gave a loose indicator of how well the establishments along that roadway were doing. These cars would even pull into and out of properties which were doing very well. I loved to watch the cars and imagine the tiny drivers, and what the view must be like from their standpoint.
This all made for a fun one-player game, but Fortune Builder's two player game was what gave it the most staying power. You could compete with another player in a split-screen, real-time strategy mode. One player could scroll the map around, and build roads and buildings, on the top half of the screen while the other player was doing the same thing on the bottom. You were both occupying the same map, and could either build off of one another's efforts or try to sabotage them. I used to frustrate Gerald to no end by plopping an oil-rig right off the shore next to a resort complex he had just built. No one visited his resorts THAT summer!
To make things unpredictable there was also a news-ticker which separated the top half of the screen from the bottom. Periodically, headlines would scroll across announcing disasters or perhaps fortunate events which would affect certain portions of your empire. A typical headline might read:"Termites Hit Condo Owners for Big Renovation Costs!" or "Record Snowfall Contributes to Best Winter On Record for Ski Resorts!". These random events could help or hinder your best efforts. At the end of each game "year", which lasted 15 minutes, the map would become full-screen and scrolled back and forth, displaying your empire, before summarizing the current financial status of both players. The winner was the first to reach the financial target, or the one with the most money at the end of the time limit.
Truly an innovative game, and one which I would like to see an update of someday. *sigh*
2010
This game was based loosely on the movie of the same name. (Excellent movie: if you haven't seen it, rent it!) The player acted the part of the engineer, frantically racing to repair the Discovery well enough to pilot it out of the gravity well of one of Jupiter's moons. If you failed, the Discovery would crash to the surface. If you succeeded, the Discovery would scroll its way off the right side of the screen, accompanied by the synthesized sound of the engines and a congratulatory message. During gameplay, a detailed graphical cross-section of the Discovery extended several screens wide. You had to scroll the screen to get from one section of the space-craft to the next, while a bank of indicators remained fixed on the bottom quarter of the screen. All along the length of the Discovery were little glowing ovals. Red ones were broken circuits, and these must be fixed in order to escape. First you would select a broken circuit and then a faux-schematic would be displayed showing various circuit elements. You needed to quickly thread a circuit through each element on the screen without looping the thread or missing any elements. Each element had one or more possible alternative routes leading into and out of them, and with the smaller circuits, this was a quick tap-tap of the joystick to complete. In more complicated circuits, however, the elements were more numerous and getting through the circuit without missing an element or short circuiting yourself was more difficult. An element would burn out if you looped into it or missed it, and there would be a momentary delay as you selected the element, selected what kind of element it was, and then replaced it with a new one.
Sound hard? To make matters worse, you could NEVER repair every circuit on the Discovery within the time limits of the harder difficulty levels. Instead, you needed to choose your repair targets very carefully. Circuits were seperated into Reactor, Engine, HAL, LifeSupport, and Communications; you needed only to repair a specific percentage of each category. You might need 80% engine circuits repaired, for instance, but only %50 life support to get out of orbit.
As you got closer to the moon, however, the ship would start to take damage from volcanic eruptions below, or possibly meteor impacts. This was very frustrating, as you would find yourself redoing repairs you already had performed. If you got TOO close to the surface, you might be forced to try and launch prematurely to buy time. The ship might rise a few hundred kilometers, but that engine burn, without the requisite repairs, resulted in many more broken circuits. So you would be racing even quicker, as your work load just doubled and the ship was still in danger.
The sound and graphics in this game were great, with some of the sound-effects almost sounding like high quality digital samples. I know they're just FM stuff, but it sounds like it anyway. I will never forget the hollow thump of the hull taking damage while you are in a circuit-view.
As a neat extra, the pause music is a drunkenly out-of-tune instrumental rendition of "Bicycle Built for Two," which was the song HAL sang as he was shut down way back in 2001. (You know:daisy, daisy, give me your answer do...)
Can you tell I wasted a sizable portion of my youth playing this game? But all that work helped me learn troubleshooting strategy, priority management, and patience.
QBert's Qubes
You know QBert, right? Snorkely looking, round, orange dude who screams foul gibberish when he loses, right? Hops around on stepped pyramids to make them all one color? There was even a Playstation remake of the original game last year, and it blew chunks. Except for raw graphical quality, QBert's Qubes was a much better QBert than either the original or the playstation remake.
Instead of hopping around on a stepped pyramid, QBert hopped around on a pyramid of loose, floating, dice-like cubes. As QBert hopped off of a cube, it rotated once in the direction of the hop. Each cube face potentially had a different color, and the goal of each level was to rotate all the cubes so that they matched the faces of a model cube shown in the upper right hand corner. QBerts two nephews showed up occasionally, and would rotate your cubes randomly as they hopped around\ until you cought them. This sounds hard, but was actually quite fun, with very fast gameplay and great graphics. The cubes boasted incredibly smooth animation and were convincingly 3D. They moved so smoothly that they easily could've been polygonal in nature. It's more likely that they were traditionally animated however.
These were my three favorite games, and each stands the test of time and qualifies as playable even by today's standards, even if their graphics are a bit primitive. But there were other good games as well. Turbo, with the steering unit, played convincingly like the arcade game. Donkey Kong, while visually a little different than the arcade version, had pretty much the same sounds and most of the levels. Smurf Rescue was alot of fun for the kiddies (Look! My smurf is farting!), and LadyBug was a frantic and turnstile take on the PacMan theme. B.C's Quest for Tires, a great early action/adventure game, was an early release by Sierra OnLine, future maker of King's Quest, et al. It featured one of the first "save-the-princess" themes and its sequel, Grog's Revenge, was another example of a great looking game, which could've easily been a first or second generation NES game. Wing War, a strange and bleak adventure game where you play the last living dragon in a wierd and huge world, actually gave me nightmares. (this is probably because I was a strange little boy, but this game was very depressing. If you want a full review on it, EMail me)
The ADAM
The thing which ultimately killed the Coleco, in my opinion, was the ADAM home computer. I know some folks think that Coleco would've gone down in the videogame crash of 1984 like everyone else anyway, but I think they could've held on if it weren't for the ADAM.
Let me start by saying that my family owned one, and that it was my only computer until 1989.
But I was one of the lucky ones, and had a fully functional unit which still works today.
You see, there were two versions of the ADAM. One was able to plug into the expansion port on a Colecovision, and made up the majority of the ADAMs sold. And the other was a stand-alone unit which required no Colecovision--it, in fact, had a Colecovision built in! Unfortunately, most of the Colecovision plug-in units were defective, and failed pretty quickly. They were returned in droves, and those that weren't returned were reduced to burnt-out junk in short order, and disgruntled Coleco owners rebelled.
The stand-alone version, with its built in Colecovision, was much more expensive, but also more reliable. My family purchased one of these stand-alone ADAMS, which is probably why it still works today.
As a home computer, ADAM was pretty good for the time. One relatively attractive feature it posessed was a letter-quality daisy-wheel printer which came with each ADAM. No one uses daisy-wheel anymore, since laser and ink-jet printers have even better print quality lowadays. But at the time the choice in the consumer realm was either 9-pin dot matrix, which produced obviously computer print, and daisy wheel, which created output which looked like that of an electric typerwriter. It was noisey, slow, and made "bang-bang-bang-bang-bang" noises as it worked its magic. While it couldn't print graphics, you could print school-papers on it, or business correspondence. While this was a pretty good choice for a printer, the selection was forced upon the consumer, and an irreversable selection, at that! This is because, in an act of unbridled idiocy, Coleco saw fit to route the power for the entire computer through this printer. So if your printer broke, your ADAM stopped working. Want a different printer? Forget it. No other printer could ever be hooked up to an ADAM other than the one it shipped with. Also, the printer had to be on constantly while you used the computer and, aside from being a single point of failure and wasteful of electricity, this got quite annoying because the printer had a tendancy to hum loudly while the computer was on.
As a saving grace, the ADAM had an "award winning" graphical word processor built right into the system ROM, complete with loud sound effects (it beeped as you typed, and would make a chime sound when word-wrapping or when you hit the return key) and had many advanced features which could controlled through the function keys (which were marked with roman numerals instead of Fnumber like IBMs). You would cycle through menus of roman numeral keys to save, print, adjust margins, etc. I can still hear the sounds produced when tapping the series of buttons necessary to save a file: bling! bling! bling!...doodle-oo!
The units also used a proprietary streaming tape media instead of a floppy drive. I think this was meant to save money, but I'm sure Coleco spent a fortune developing this special tape drive. Unlike the Commodore64 which, when not hooked up to a floppy drive, used a normal speed audio tape-deck and could take minutes to load or save a file or program, the ADAM had a high-speed tape which would stream at incredible rates of speed. It made a delightful whine as it sped through a cassette and could go through the equivalent of an hour and a half of tape in less than two minutes. It was fun to watch the tape spin from one spindle to the other, and I had plenty of opportunity watch as I waited for progams to load or files to save. I wonder what the RPM of this tape drive was, anyway. This tape drive was many times faster than tape storage on any other computer at the time. However, it was still leagues slower than a floppy drive. Whoever thought up the idea of using tapes as a software distribution medium and a storage medium should be dope-slapped silly. A real floppy couldn't possibly be that much more expensive than this hyper-fast custom tape drive was, and even a slow floppy was faster than this fast tape!
As for software, you could purchase an excellent version of Logo on tape, and I spent many hours programming silly games in this easy language. (How to square, anyone?)
You could also get a great graphical spreadsheet called SmartCALC as well. Back then, Lotus was still character based, but CALC had a mouse-like cursor (you controlled it with the Colecovision controller mounted into a holster connected to the keyboard. The numbers on the controller doubled as the ADAM's numeric keypad), visual formatting and a graphical calculator. My mother ran the family finances on this program for years. I'm certain she was the only one still using the Adam for real work in 1991....
Near the end of 1984, there was a floppy drive released for the ADAM. I never bought one, as it was quite expensive and I couldn't convince Mom to buy one. By the time I was 16 and making enough money to get one for myself, I was more interested in other things than buying used parts for our old ADAM. In addition to the belated floppy drive, there was also a modem. This is, as far as I know, a rumor. I have never actually seen the ADAM modem, and wouldn't know what to do with it if I had one. I guess you could've connected to some BBS systems, but you wouldn't be able to use any of the C64 or IBM programs stored there in those days...
Anyway, with all its faults, the ADAM was Colecos very original attempt at devising a computer system which was inexpensive and feature-rich from scratch. If only the Colecovision plug-in units were more reliable, or if the Coleco didn't get its power through the printer, or if the thing had been shipped with a floppy drive, then perhaps it, instead of the C64, would have been the computer of choice for gamers in the mid-to-late eighties. And perhaps Coleco wouldn't have gone under. I wonder what their next computer system might've looked like if they hadn't hemorraged financially? They were so messed up that even the Cabbage Patch Kid craze couldn't get them out of the red.
Great....now I want to hook my ADAM up and play with it.....
Recommended:
Yes
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KickMe
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Member: Joe Whited
Location: Utica, MI
Reviews written: 23
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
35 year old computer networking engineer, with a penchant for hard sf and spicy food-stuffs.
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