Alrighty, folks - this is a weird one. Immediately I'm going to make a call on it being not a game. What we have is essentially another Boomerang Puzzle, but this time with some casual racism inserted into it. Fun! This one will, as a result, be much shorter than the last couple of articles.
Chief once again comes to us from 101 BASIC Computer Games. It's going to be a strange day when that book is behind me - only for it to come back when the 1978 coverage rolls around. This game is another one not done by David Ahl, but was submitted for publication by John Graham of Upper Brookville, NY. Another one-game-wonder with no searchable information. All I've got to work with is the description he provided for the game, which suggests that he wasn't a student. Likely a teacher or university guy. He also suggests that Chief is "mostly a game", which I strongly disagree with. By my definition, there isn't really a goal or any mechanics that would qualify it as a game.
Even Ahl doesn't spend much time on this one.
What Chief really is is an educational program designed to drill kids on basic arithmetic operations. It's actually quite similar to Boomerang Puzzle, in that the computer is the one doing the guessing instead of you (I'm reminded that it's actually a concept that goes all the way back to Digits). The arithmetic it has the player do is different, but the premise is exactly the same.
Feels like even less in the 1978 edition.
Where Chief makes itself stand out though is the... odd way it presents itself. That's putting it nicely. In Chief, you are being "tested" by "CHIEF NUMBERS FREEK", the "INDIAN MATH GOD." Hoo boy. What do I even say about this? Graham intended for this to give a bit of "fun" to the program, but all it succeeds in doing is giving me secondhand embarrassment. Especially when it calls me "PALE FACE WITH WISE TONGUE." A strange combination of insult and flattery - neither of which are true.
You think you're funny, calling me a smart white guy, eh?
The "test" is as follows: take a number, then add 3 to it. Divide by 5, then multiply by 8. Finally, add 3, then subtract 1. In mathematical terms, it would look like this:
(((((n + 3) / 5) x 8) / 5) + 5) - 1
I think... That's a lot of brackets. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong - I feel like I am anyway.
This formula has some strange results to it - almost every number you'd think of choosing will result in a decimal-point answer. Part of me thinks that it's an intentional choice, purely due to how the program is designed - I think it wants you to fail.
So you'll come up with a number, put it through the formula, and then realise that there's a problem at around the second "divide by 5" step. If you're like me, you'll ignore it and round down or up and continue on, typing the final result into the program. The game ("Chief Freek") will then try to tell you what the number you started with was (it essentially runs through the formula in reverse). Inevitably, unless you picked a number like 22, which doesn't have any rounding issues, the game will suggest something absurd like 6.375. If you find any other numbers that give a whole number answer, drop them down in the comments.
I admit, I'm impressed.
Of course, nobody would think to pick a number so precise, so you'd tell the game "no, that was not my number." Then Freek gets grumpy with you and lays out the math to tell you why you're wrong. Even with such strange numbers (it can even deal with negative numbers), the program manages to get it all right. Initially I thought it was full of it, and that there was no way that it would get to a number like 2 from -9.25. Yet, it does.
So, Freek always proves himself correct. Still, if you're feeling in a Patrick Star kind of mood and say "that's not my wallet," when Freek says "Now do you believe me?" Then, this happens...
I can't believe you when I'm dead.
I can certainly say that this is a first - being smote by a computer program. Yet, I have lived to tell the tale. I must say that I'm rather impressed by the lightning bolt. Our developers are beginning to get more creative when it comes to text graphics. It's all fairy simple stuff, still - I think Star Trek still has them all beat, though.
On a different note, there was another coding error in this one, similar to the one in Bullseye. However, this one was entirely a copyist error; whoever copied the game over for Vintage BASIC was at fault for the mistake. If the game guesses your number correctly, and you say yes to it, the game will freak out and respond with this:
!BAD GOTO TARGET 500 IN LINE 130
What this is saying is basically that the "GOTO" target listed in line 130 of the code isn't working. Within the whole code, there actually is no line 500. A quick check of the book tells us that the 500 is meant to be 510. This also appears in line 290, so two places where 500 is incorrectly written. It's an easy fix, just change the 500 in lines 130 and 290 to 510 - problem solved. Now you get the actual response: "BYE!!!" A bit anti-climatic, don't you think?
...and that's all there is to discuss with Chief. Like I said, not a game, and as such, no scores for it. If I did, I think it would easily end up in the F tier, anyway, because there's so little to it. It's a joke program, more than anything, as far as I can tell.
I have slightly more hope for next week's game.
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Realised thumbnails might help the videos... bear with me as I figure out a style I like.
Release Date: July 1973
Platform: Mainframe (BASIC Type-In)
Genre: Board Game
Developer(s): Alan J. Segal
Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation
It's been a while since since I talked about the board game Checkers... or Draughts, if you prefer. In fact, it was one of the first games I ever wrote about - what I consider to be the first true video game ever created - back when computers were the size of houses and programming then was akin to the dark arts.
Twenty years on from then, it's a different story. Massive improvements in technology, computers decreasing in size and price and - most importantly, an easier way to code. Being able to make such a comparison makes it a great time to revisit the theme of the first video game.
Seeing as I didn't do so in that first article, I'll start with a brief introduction of the board game Checkers, a.k.a. Draughts.
A Brief History of Checkers
According to online sources, it's entirely possible that Checkers has a history dating back to 3000 B.C. However, just to temper the potential excitement that comes from a date like that, it's highly speculative. In reality, the best conclusions arrived to with some degree of certainty on Checkers' origins is that it's likely derived from an ancient game called Alquerque. That's also where you end up if you forget to take the left turn at Albuquerque.
May look familiar to some.
Alquerque dates back to the early-mid 2nd millennium B.C. (~1400 - 1000 B.C.) Sources seem mixed on this, but that's the general dating given. It was played across Egypt and the Middle East, being brought over to Europe through the Moors in Spain during their invasions in the early 8th century A.D.
From Alquerque, we fast forward a few hundred years and move north into France, and Checkers finally takes the form we all know today. Somebody in France in the 12th century got the idea to play Alquerque on a Chess board, and that's it - Checkers was born. Nobody seems to know who the individual was that did this, but I hope they got knighted, or whatever the 12th century French equivalent to that is.
The rules for this new "hybrid" game - if I dare use such a term - were developed steadily over the centuries, with many regional variants also developing across Europe that deviate from the standard Checkers rules: a larger or smaller board, and non-diagonal movement are some of the distinctives to other variants.
Computer Checkers
Moving forward to the age of computers now. We've already seen the first attempt at making a Checkers computer game as arguably the first video game ever created, back in 1952 by Christopher Strachey (check the link at the start of the article for more about that one). Now, 21 years after Strachey's game, we have our second (or possibly third - there's another 1952 Checkers game out there that I might need to investigate...) go at making a Checkers computer game, written in BASIC, this time.
The lady looks utterly thrilled...
This Checkers game is yet another of the many games from David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games book. Although, he isn't the author this time. Alan J. Segal is the credited author, of whom we regrettably, once again, know nothingabout. Don't even know if he was a high school student, university student, professor - diddly squat.
We haven't had one of these in a while, but this is also one of those annoying instances where the game was significantly modified between the original edition of 101 BASIC Games and the 1978 microcomputer revision. I determined that I'd be happy to still play it here in the 1973 coverage as it's still the same game at heart. Steve North and Lawrence Neal of Creative Computing (Ahl's post-DEC company) just modified some (note: some) bugs out of the game, like fixing being able to double or triple jump without threat of losing your own piece instead. They also programmed in a way for the game to know who's won. I would've thought that that would be... important for a video game, y'know?
The opening screen is also too big to fit in one photo.
Oh, but there's even more to say about the game, after I started playing it. The typical Checkers ruleset only allows pieces to move diagonally forward. Diagonal movement is still the case in this game, but it doesn't prevent backwards movement. So you can basically cheat to win, as the computer will never move a non-kinged piece backwards. I did this in my first playthrough, as I couldn't remember whether Checkers rules allowed for it or not. Keep in mind, I like to do my first playthroughs before I do any research. I didn't win my first attempt - it got into an unwinnable position, so I reset, and won my second attempt, using backwards movement. Once I started looking into how Checkers is supposed to be played, only then did I know for sure that backwards movement wasn't in the standard ruleset. There's also a rule that requires you to jump a piece if there is an opportunity to do so on your turn. This is also not enforced in the game, either. Once I began my research in official Checkers rules and strategies, I imposed on myself the standard ruleset in the interest of honouring how Checkers is meant to be played.
But, don't just think that only you, the player, can cheat. The computer can also cheat, but in a far nastier manner. While North and Neal fixed some of the bugs in Segal's original code, they didn't fix everything. There happens to be one very nasty glitch that they didn't fix, which allows the computer to spawn effectively an infinite number of king pieces. I'm dubbing this the "Infinite King Glitch." Only the computer can effect this glitch, where the game, instead of moving the computer's piece to the back row to be kinged, instead spawns a new, kinged piece on the board, with the piece that was supposed to be kinged not moving at all. I had a game occur where the computer spawned six kings with this glitch.
"Infinite King" glitch in full flight. Continuously being spawned by the X on 1,1
One small mercy is that the computer is quite the incompetent Checkers player. It starts every game with the worst possible starting move - I believe it's 24-20 in official terminology; 1,5 -> 0,4 in the game's terms - allowing you to counter with the best possible starting move (called 11-15; it's 2,2 -> 3,3 in this game), giving you an immediate advantage. Once I learnt how to play the game properly, this made beating the computer all the more easy.
Even computers fall victim to the Checkers noob trap.
What was less easy was wrapping my head around the control scheme of the game. Unlike official Checkers terminology, Segal's game does not number each of the playable squares on the board from 1 - 32. Instead, it uses the cartesian co-ordinate system - though a confusing implementation of it. One might expect the bottom left point of the grid here to be 1,1, but it's actually 0,0 here. This put me in a spin regularly throughout my first few rounds until I got the hang of it - constantly having to do mental math in my head, making sure I was inputting the correct co-ordinates I was moving a piece to. To make matters even worse, I couldn't figure out at first how to stop a piece after jumping, and ended up crashing the game. The game can't detect whether a jump is a single, double, or triple, and it expects you to input negative co-ordinates to cancel the jump. Because I'm daft sometimes, I didn't see that the in-game instructions tell the player this.
The issues don't end there, though. The more I played, the more technical issues I ran into with Checkers. One game, I was doing quite well, giving the computer a good thrashing, when the game suddenly decided it didn't want to be played anymore. The below picture tells the story:
I guess the computer got grumpy from losing.
There I was, making another jump, capturing another computer piece, when the "!NEGATIVE ARRAY DIM" line shows up. The game had crashed. Just as I was about to win, too! How rude. I don't know what the terminology means - I'm no programmer - so if anyone does know what this BASIC error means, please let me know in the comments.
Despite all this, you may be able to tell that I played quite a lot of this Checkers game. I think I maybe played for a couple of hours all up. It turns out, I actually quite like Checkers as a board game. It's one of those funny games, where you play it as a kid and don't think much of it. Growing up, one might see it as a simple game that doesn't have much to offer. I know I did. It turns out I was wrong on that point. While it doesn't quite match the strategic depth of a game like Chess, Checkers offers a surprising amount of depth in its strategy and ways of playing. The research I did on Checkers strategy, which can be found here, if you'd like to understand more about the game yourself, opened my eyes up to what Checkers truly has to offer as a game of strategy.
I'd consider that a downright thrashing.
As a result, despite how truly broken Segal's Checkers game is, I found myself strangely addicted to it. The broken-ness was more a point of laughter and derision than it was a source of frustration, because I couldn't help but chuckle at the absurdities present within the game.
All that in mind, the scores ended up being quite lopsided for this game:
Time Played: 2 hours
Difficulty: 4 (Mild)
Between the computer being a bit of a dim Checkers player, and the ability to cheat, it's not terribly difficult to win, but does at least require some thought and awareness of what's going on. The computer can still jump you if not paying attention.
Gameplay: 4
Whilst I discovered that I really enjoy Checkers as a board game, this computer game version leaves a lot to be desired. Technically, it's a mess, and doesn't enforce basic rules, allowing the player to effectively cheat. And again, the computer is not very good at the game. One later port of the game compares the computer's competency to a six-year old playing for the first time. In short, source game = good, implementation = terrible.
Controls: 3
I found the game's control scheme somewhat unintuitive, and quite cumbersome. The grid starting at 0,0 I found terminally confusing, and I constantly made co-ordinate errors, even after playing it for a couple of hours. Visual: 2
The visualisation of the Checkers board is appreciated. The squares are spread out not too close, nor too far apart to make the board easy to read. Functionality: 2
I think this the worst game I've reviewed so far from a technical basis. And this version has even less bugs than the original. From the Infinite King glitch, to the game not acknowledging the basic Checkers rules, to just crashing randomly - this game is quite broken. Playable, but broken.
Accessibility: 2
All of the above makes the game hard to recommend. Unintuitive controls, glitches, you name it. It's not completely impenetrable, as I think most people know the basic gist of Checkers, so the game saves itself from a worse score there.
Fun Factor: 6
It's bizarre, how oddly fun this game is. It's utterly broken, poorly programmed, yet somehow attractive and slightly addicting. It may have helped if the computer was a more formidable opponent, but for a novice such as myself, it proved enough of an acceptable challenge to make me want to come back to try and beat the computer again - with the added challenge of preventing it from triggering the Infinite King glitch.
The amusement that Checkers gave me unfortunately isn't enough to truly redeem it in any sort of fashion. It only gets a score of 19, which puts it with the rest of the 19s at the bottom of E tier. Of course, Checkers sits at the top of that pile because I actually had fun playing it, unlike the rest of that sorry lot. Still, it's a terrible, incompetently-put-together attempt at computer Checkers that I don't recommend you try.
