Is it possible to have the same game-play of a video-game, but with mechanical devices?
Some resources about this issue:
- Zima: Coconut Climbers. A cute game in which the player tries to keep a bunch of very active monkeys from reaching the coconuts in the trees. Electro-mechanical. (source)
- Tomy magnetic maze. The maze itself boasts an impressive landscape - sort of like a discount version of Pac-Man's original adventure route, but with the added advantage of being in complete 3-D. ... the entire maze rests atop a flimsy 'pole.' You can control the maze's angle by using the attached joystick, enabling the magnetic characters to move along the horizon.
- Mechanical pong. Pongmechanik is an absolutely physical game. The game is realized electromechanically, and essentially consists of four elements: A relay computer, the mechanical movement with collision detection, the display and the acoustic components." (source, source)
- Pinballs were electro-mechanical devices, but their game-play is a simple and standard one, they cannot be considered as video-games.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Mechanical video-games (including pacman)
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4 comments:
Yes, with a bunch of dollars you can get a full replica of a M4A1 soft-air and go to play a full electro-mechanical version of COD4. :)
I don't want to be too b*stard (like always) but I think that your question is a little under defined.
What is gameplay?
What is a videogame?
For example the pong device you propose is really cool and a top ten nerdish gadget, but the question is: where is the difference from this one and the classic game?
Think about a classic console, a very simple one. There are some small chips each one containing a small set of miniaturized electromechanical device. Everything inside a microchip is a very simple device, the usage and the disposition of those pieces is very complicated (like in modern cpu), but the components are always the same.
So, if I'm not completely wrong, I think all this is about removing the monitor from the videogame and use something else to show what appens in the game?
(like always: I'm sorry for my bad english)
You are probably right, I was thinking about something more precise when I wrote that post: more on the line of "is it possible to make a steampunk videogame?".
Also a post I wrote recently was about building mechanical automata, and that was still in my mind too...
I was still considering the pac-gentleman (here) game and how disappointing it is that it didn't really work!
So basically a mechanical videogame could be a sort of videogame-console without a screen, and with possibly no electronics. Something like the laptop described in the book The Difference Engine (by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling).
Actually: another crazy idea I was considering was if it would be possible to use LEGO technic to implement old LCD card-games (like these!)
Something like a steampunk device and a lego(pure mechanical and not mindstorm) are surely possible, but I think they come out with a very big (and expensive in case of lego) computational engine.
The pacman is a not so simple game: you have fondamentally 4 objects, the pacman, the monsters, the stuff to eat and the amphetamine (or whatever it was).
The collision between those objects change a lot of things in the game. The monters became vulnerable for some time, the level is finished, the pacman dies, etc.
So the engine must be something like a room full of lego... sbav :)
But if you can take a compromise and use the mindstorm (or a custom circuit) for the game logic and only build the "display" using lego I think you can build something interesting.
Another idea is to use some kind of radio controlled robots that move inside a labyrinth and try to eat your pacman or run away from it. Not steampunk but another interpretation of a lot of games usable without a monitor.
With a complex robot you can do a mario that really jumps on real platforms, destroy turtles and eats a lot of peyote (or whatever the mushrooms he eats was intended to be).
I agree: for a "complex" game like pacman, you would get a HUGE machine...
This is why I was looking around for simpler games: the Tomy magnetic maze for example is great in that sense. The elements of the gameplay are the same, but it is mechanical and low-tech, and still some of the original rules are implemented... even if not all of them of course.
I'm would not be happy using mindstorm or robots, but it could be a nice game to play with :)
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