#043 - Guess: The Number, As Long As You Know it in Binary

Video in progress...

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle

Developer(s): Walter J. Koetke

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

I've probably mentioned this before, but I've done some basic programming in my time. One course I took had me program a game in C++ called Number Wizard. It's a simple number guessing game - the computer picks a number between 1 and 100, and you guess it, with the computer telling you if your guess is higher or lower than its number. I don't remember how to code it, but I know it was very easy to do.

Today's game, Guess, is one of those Number Wizard types of games. We've seen plenty already, and will see plenty in the future. Guess does have a couple of ways in which it distinguishes itself from the pack, however. One of those is its author, who is unquestionably far more interesting than his game could ever dream of being.

Origins & History

Walter J. Koetke is the author of Guess. I've played one of his other games for the blog already, Bull. Although, that's not technically his game - he just had his students convert the game, originally written by David Sweet, into BASIC. So, I suppose we could say that Guess is Walt Koetke's first actual game that he authored himself. I didn't give him much of a bio in the Bull article, so now's as good a time to do so as any.

Walter J. Koetke (1939 - 2013)

Born in Chicago in 1939 (died 2013), Walter J. Koetke was actually quite a significant figure in the realm of computer-based education. He earned a Bachelor of Science from MIT, and did his Masters in Education at Harvard. We know that he worked as a teacher at Lexington High School in Massachusetts during the late 60s and through the 1970s thanks to the games he was involved in producing, such as Guess, but his contributions go much beyond that. We'll get to his work on integrating computers into mathematics education a bit later, so I'll instead turn my attention to his later work. 

During the 1980s, he worked on a series of educational programs for the Microzine magazine, run by Scholastic. These magazines often came with a computer program that was basically a "choose your own adventure" styled educational game. Koetke worked on several of these, and also worked on a few other educational programs for Scholastic, such as Math Shop. For all this, he earned a Distinguished Teacher Award, from the Presidential Commission on Academic Scholars. Unfortunately, nobody on the internet bothered to mention when he earned this award. I even tried to do some digging myself, through the US Department of Education's online database, but to no avail. The "Distinguished Teacher Award" records go back to 2003, but they don't even have lists for all the years! All the ones I looked at didn't have Koetke's name in them, so either he's in one of the years that didn't have the list available (2005-08), or his award predates 2003.

The source for Guess.

I digress. Back to the game. What's likely the most interesting thing about Guess is where it's been sourced from in Walter Koetke's body of work. 101 BASIC Computer Games cites the original source of the game being from a book, written by Koetke himself, entitled "Computers in the Classroom." Another of Koetke's important contributions, this book is intended as a resource manual for teachers in using computers to assist students in learning algebra. Keep in mind that this book was originally written in 1968-69. To say that computers weren't commonplace in the classroom at that time would be an understatement. The original form of Guess appears across pages 40 and 41 of that book, from which someone at DEC (possibly David Ahl; 101 BASIC Games doesn't say who) converted the game from FOCAL into BASIC. This all makes Guess another game rooted in Koetke's educational purposes, though not strictly an "edutainment" game itself, unlike his 1980s projects.

Guess the Game

As I noted at the start of the article, Guess is another one of these simple number guessing games that we've already seen several of up to this point in time. Number: A Number Guessing Game, Trap, Stars, and even Letter: A Letter Guessing Game are alternative takes on the format that I've already played. None of these games rate particularly high in my esteem. Guess is no different, hence my saying that the most interesting thing about it is the where and who it originates from. Although, it does distinguishes itself slightly above all of the above in one way none else do.

The numbers - what do they mean??

Guess allows the player to choose the range of numbers the computer can select from. The lowest will always be 1, but the upper limit can be whatever you like. This was not the case in Koetke's original program - that had a set range of 1 - 100. Someone added that in for 101 BASIC Games. Once again, we don't know who that was. The idea in Koetke's mind remains the same across both versions of the program, regardless. The premise of number guessing like this was built on binary search - how computers essentially think in bits that can either be a 0 or 1, each successive bit representing the next number in a sequence of numbers always increasing to the power of 2 (think of the 2048 sequence, to use a game analogy: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and so on and so forth.) The logic in number guessing is that you should be able to guess the number in one less digits than required to represent the number in binary notation. So, for example, a number like 73 would require 7 digits to represent in binary (100 1001, read from right-to-left.) Therefore, it should take you no more than 6 guesses to guess the number chosen from within that range. The game will actually tell you this if you take more guesses than expected to correctly guess the number.

If we talk about this in more game-like terms, the basic strategy that gets you to this "binary-1" number of guesses is what I call "splitting the difference." If the number range is from 1 to 100, split the difference and guess 50. If the number is higher, split the difference between 50 and 100 - 75. If lower than 50, split the difference between 1 and 50 - 25, and so on and so forth. Bigger numbers simply require more splits. Thinking about it in binary notation just helps in knowing how many guesses (and splits) you'll probably need. Like, a number between 63 and 32 is going to need about 5 guesses, whereas a number between 512 and 1,023 should expect 9 guesses.

I get a lot of enjoyment out of these cartoons - mostly for the sheer oddness of them.

This is probably far more of a discussion than a game like Guess deserves, yet I'm here doing it anyway. I haven't even talked about my experience playing it yet! And, truthfully, that's because there's very little to report. I've played countless games just like this, so what new can I possibly say?

Pick a number. Any number.

Well, I can at least comment on the one thing Guess does differently. Having a choice of the upper number limit is surprisingly refreshing. There's certainly a temptation to see how high the game will let me go with it, even if, in reality, it just boils down to the same thing, but with more steps, and therefore more mental maths to do.

15 is 1111 in binary.

The one thing that does annoy me, though, is that Guess doesn't let you change the upper limit during gameplay at all. It's a pick-and-stick game, the upper limit you set is the one you're stuck with until you close and reload the game. It's a minor annoyance, but minor annoyances become major annoyances when there's nothing else to talk about.

Something a bit more adventurous. 255 is 1111 1111 in binary.
5 guesses is a good round; 7 guesses is par.

And, seeing that I now truly do have nothing else to talk about, let's do the scores.

Scores

Time Played: 11 minutes

Difficulty: 1 (Brain-dead)
I don't think I need to comment on the "challenge," or lack thereof, in a game like Guess.

Gameplay: 2
I'm giving this a 2 to distinguish it from the other "Number Wizard" games - purely because Guess lets you choose the upper limit of numbers the computer can select from. It's one more gameplay element than Letter has, and that, by default, makes it better and more interesting to play.

Controls: 5
It couldn't be simpler. Remember, I don't give extra points just for doing what should be expected.

Visual: 1
There's nothing noteworthy about the game's formatting to speak of; very standard.

Functionality: 5
Free points if the game works properly.

Accessibility: 4
It's very easy to understand a game like this, and it seems to be written in a way that's designed for younger children to understand and read. It's still text-based, which is a fundamentally inaccessible format for a video game, but Guess is probably as accessible as it gets.

Fun Factor: 1
I can at least replay Guess fairly easily, with the free choice of number limit giving opportunity to try larger and larger upper limits. It's fundamentally the same, but generates a bit more interest in my mind - compared to Letter, at least.

Overall: 18 (weighted to 22.5)

A score of 18 (weighted to 22.5) for Guess is, for what it's worth, not actually that bad. It's a E-tier game, sure, but that's the same score that Galaxy Game and Fur Trader got - which are far more complex (and more deeply flawed) games. That one, simple little act of allowing the player some customisation of the game rules has made a big difference. Relatively speaking, of course. This still ain't a good game, nor is it really worth your time.

I can't believe I've written over 1,500 words on a simple number guessing game. What madness am I succumbing to?

Anyway, this will be the last "new" game from the list for a while. I'm quite intent on finishing the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device project, and getting started with what I'm calling a "soft reboot" of the blog. I will be revisiting all former years, covering all of what I missed, and redoing the "Prehistory" series in more detail with better research and writing. As for the video side of things, I think it's inevitable that it will become asynchronous with the blog; the videos do take a lot more work now, and are predicated on my having finished the game's blog article so that I can write the script. So if you're a follower of both, take note of that moving forward.

#042 - Gomoko: Japanese Connect Four (Five)

[Ed. I've spent an awful lot of effort in changing up the style of my videos into something with a bit more production value. Well, as much "production value" as my self-taught video editing skills can provide. This video is more of a "mini-documentary," and mixes produced content with live gameplay. Hence why it's taken so long to complete. Let me know what you think!]

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Board Game

Developer(s): Peter Sessions

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

Here's a curious game - one from the People's Computer Company, yet is exclusive to DEC and David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games. I scoured the first several years of PCC magazines, and no mention of this game was to be found anywhere.

History

There were very few early video games based on distinctly Eastern board games around up to 1973. The only ones I can see on my list are "missing" games. One is a version of Go from 1968, and another is an earlier version of this game - Gomoku (Sessions misspelled the title), from 1972. I'm unsure whether these are recoverable in their earliest format (the '72 Gomoku was ported to the Sol-20 in 1981, so we'll get to see it then, at least.) We also have Awari, which I've already covered, but that game's origins are centred more around the Near East and Africa, not the Orient. This, for now, makes Gomoko the earliest extant video game based on a game from the Far East.

By quick way of reminder, Peter Sessions is a game author we've seen a couple of times before in my 1973 coverage. He also wrote Reverse and The Game of Chomp for PCC, before leaving the publication the same year (perhaps why Gomoko never featured in the magazines...) Gomoko here is his final credited work, according to MobyGames. As far as specific information is concerned about Gomoko, there unfortunately isn't anything beyond what we're given in 101 BASIC Games.

These cartoons really are something, aren't they?

As for Peter Sessions, after he completed his final game, he remained in the computing industry for many years. He also delved into his other chief interest: music, writing a book on music theory, entitled The Functions of Chords: For Pop, Jazz, and Modern Styles. Very nice.

The Game

Sessions' final game comes with a welcome message, "Welcome to the Oriental game of Gomoko. What is Gomoko, or, correctly spelled, Gomoku? And why is it Oriental? Well, I won't go into too much detail here - I'll save that for my Brief History of Gomoku - but what I will tell you is that it's a Japanese board game that dates back several centuries, and also spread to neighbouring China and Korea. The objective is simple - line up five stones of your colour (black or white) in a row (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) on the board to win. Why it's not four-in-a-row like, say, Connect Four relates directly to the Japanese superstition surrounding the number four. In the language, one word for the number four is the same word for death. So instead we have what could be basically considered Connect Five.

The rules.

Typically, Gomoku is either played on a 15x15 or a 19x19 board, with the black and white stone pieces of Go, a related Oriental board game. Sessions' game allows you to choose a board size between 7x7 and 19x19. According to 101 BASIC Games' notes, 7x7 is the smallest size "that can be used for a meaningful game." It would be rather difficult to make five in a row on a 4x4 board, wouldn't it? It also warns that the computer isn't very good, nor does it keep track of who has won. My playing experience can confirm that the computer is quite terrible.

All seems fairly regular here...

I played my first round with a standard 15x15 board, and the computer's moves were... well, they were certainly moves, I can say that. The game notes do say that the computer's moves may surprise, though I'm not sure if randomly placing pieces on the outskirts of the board is the surprise Peter Sessions had in mind.

...until the computer pulls out this.

Interestingly, when I played a second game on the smallest board (7x7), I played almost the same strategy, and the computer responded in almost identical manner. It seems to not know what to do if you start your pieces in the centre of the board. For a third round, I tried developing my pieces in a different direction, and the computer responded in a slightly more rational manner - although it was still highly incompetent and didn't understand the concept of blocking your opponent's progress. I find this rather disappointing, as there have been some computer opponents that have been relatively decent in recent times, and ones that even learn from their human opponents.

Scores

You'll likely be expecting a low score for Gomoko, and you'd be correct in that expectation.

Time Played: 5 minutes

Difficulty: 1/10 (Brain-dead)
You don't have to think a whole lot when the computer makes nonsensical moves that allow for you to easily win every time.

Gameplay: 1
I can only give it a 1 for gameplay because it's rather broken in its execution. Yes, there is a range of board sizes to choose from, but with an AI so incompetent it hardly matters what you do.

Controls: 5
It's very standard for the type of game. The co-ordinate system is simple and as expected.

Visual: 1
There's nothing necessarily wrong with it visually - it does what you'd expect it to for the type of game it is. I do find the larger board size a little overwhelming and harsh on the eyes with how many zeroes are present on screen at once.

Functionality: 5
I think the AI is broken, but that's a design choice, not an error in the code (or just poor programming.) The game itself runs well, and I didn't run into any problems other than it not being fun.

Accessibility: 3
This rendition of Gomoku is relatively easy to understand for a text-based adaptation.

Fun Factor: 1
The times when the computer isn't being completely broken provide the faintest glimmers of rewarding gameplay, but those are very few and very far between. It isn't fun to always win.

Overall: 16

Gomoko earns a pitiful score of 16. This puts it in league with some less-than-stellar company in the F tier, alongside the likes of Button, Button, Who's Got the Button? and Stars. It's not a game I'd recommend playing, not even out of historical interest. Some bad games are entertaining on account of the hilarity of their terribleness, while others are just bad and hold no value at all. Gomoko is one of the latter.

You may notice of you check the Master List, that I've updated the Tier List. I've changed the score lines and tier thresholds to make it work with a 100-point scale. Very few actual position changes, but the F-tier is a whole lot smaller now. Gomoko still manages to find itself there, even after the changes.

Up Next: A Brief History of Gomoku.

A Personal Note

I know I said that the article on the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device was coming up next. It's since been delayed by a couple of weeks. I want to quickly apologise for that, and simply admit that I heavily underestimated the amount of work that project required. Even a couple of years into this blog, and I'm still learning things - particularly about work flow and ensuring a consistent stream of content. This article is quite heavy on research, and the accompanying video is quite ambitious for me, and in a very different style to what I've been doing. A lot of growing pains.

On a personal level, things have not been well either, and that has impacted my motivation to work on blogs and videos. It becomes increasingly hard to not feel depressed and guilty about performance or not doing the right things when one is surrounded by people that disapprove of everything you do and constantly question your character and faith. I don't typically like to share a whole lot about my personal life, but I'll admit that this year has been one of the most difficult of my entire life. But, be reassured that I am making changes, and to surround myself with people who will have a positive impact on me going forward.

#041: Game of Hangman - Educational Electronic Executions (and A Short Update)

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle

Developer(s): Kenneth Aupperle, David H. Ahl

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

Out of the gate, this is a somewhat interesting title, as I originally had Game of Hangman slated as a 1970 game. I had mistaken it for another Hangman game on account of the online information being somewhat unclear in distinguishing between the two games. So this article's been hanging in limbo for something like a year, although I've chosen to completely re-write it anyway.

History

I don't condone this action, fyi.

Game of Hangman has a fairly straightforward origin, although there is an oddity to address, which I'll mention two paragraphs down. The game was included in David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games as a game he personally modified from a game written by high school sophomore Kenneth Aupperle. Aupperle was attending Half Hollow Hills High School in Dix Hills, New York at the time, and this is his only known game credit.

Now, here's where I'd normally say that I found no more information on the author. Not today! I was actually able to find a significant amount of information on Kenneth Aupperle - very interesting information, I might add. Kenneth Robert Aupperle (born August 1957) ended up founding a company in 1982, alongside Kenneth Plotkin, called Hauppauge Computer Works. This name immediately rang familiar to me - I recalled many of the YouTubers I watched in my youth referencing their use of Hauppauge TV recording devices to record their game footage. Hauppauge was also heavily involved in computer hardware, satellite products and a software known as WinTV, which allowed for tuning and viewing television on a PC. The company is actually still around today, still selling TV recording devices and TV tuner cards. However, Kenneth Aupperle is not. He died in January 2001, at only 43 years of age.

The future's really upping the efficiency of execution, eh?

The aforementioned oddity of this game comes in when inspecting the game code included in 101 BASIC Games. The book was published originally in 1973, however in the game's crediting of Auppele, it lists him as being part of the "class of '75." Now, I don't know if this is some kind of American school convention that I'm unaware of as an Australian, but on the surface, it strikes as a strange inconsistency. With Aupperle being born in 1957, 1975 would've been his graduation year, so it makes sense to me that the "class of '75" is referring not to the grade he was in at the time of writing Game of Hangman, but rather his future graduation year. American readers may be able to correct my understanding if I'm wrong about that.

The Game

Getting straight into it.

Game of Hangman is very much your typical Hangman game. The game will give you a word, with quite a wide range of length - between 3 and 19 letters long - and you get 10 guesses before you're hanged. This digital version also draws out a stick figure getting hanged on the gallows as you make more and more wrong guesses - another early example of ASCII graphics.

The only "lug" here was me.

David Ahl also encourages adding your own words to the game in his book writeup. You'd add extra words at the bottom of the code where all the other words are stored, but you also would have to adjust the random word selector code at the start of the program. I didn't try this, and was content to stick with the base selection of words.

Almost lost the poor guy, there.

The few rounds I played favoured shorter words, which I often find more challenging to guess than longer words. Less letters in a word means more probability of guessing wrong. Some of the shorter words are more uncommonly used ones, too, like "lug," which I failed to guess. I only ever hear that word used as an insult in films, or directed towards large pets. I did almost fail to guess "kangaroo," much to my shame as an Aussie. We typically call them "roos" out here, because - fun fact - we Aussies love shortening words wherever possible.

I don't think there's much need to say anything more. You know Hangman, but you don't know the scores. Yet.

Scores

Time Played: 25 minutes

Difficulty: 3/10 (Easy)
Hangman is always kind of a funny one for me, as often the shorter words end up being the most difficult to figure out. Less total letters means more probability of guessing wrong. There's some luck to it all, but there's also strategy in knowing what the most common letters in the English alphabet are, and various spelling conventions.

Gameplay: 2/20
The selection of words has a good amount of variety to it, in terms of the types of words and the lengths of the words, which range from between 3 - 19 letters long. But... it's also Hangman, already one of the simplest games out there, and this version of it does only the basics.

Controls: 5/10
It's what you'd expect for a Hangman game - type letters and words, no frills.

Visual: 2/10
It gets a point for the hangman drawing - it's quite well done.

Functionality: 5/5
I didn't run into any issues, so free points here.

Accessibility: 4/5
Hangman is one of those games that's friendly to almost all ages. This done does get pretty college-brained with some of the word choices, but it's still very accessible for a text-based game - graphical bits always help.

Fun Factor: 2/20
Some of the words are silly, which is good for a chuckle. But, again, it's Hangman. I enjoy it on some primitive level, but it's not exactly giving me a deep and intricate gameplay experience.

Overall: 20/70 | 28.57% | E-tier

Game of Hangman earns a score of 20, which, despite being an E-tier score, makes it one of the better games I've played in recent times. How sad. On the bright side, there are some more interesting games coming up, among some certain F-tier placers.

A Short Update

In case you didn't see my update on the direction of the blog, with my return is coming some changes in content, and an increase in frequency of posting. Every time a game like this - based on a real-world game - crops up, I'll be following the game article with a brief history of the real game. These "Brief History" articles will always release on the following Tuesday.

I will also be, for the foreseeable future, alternating between a new game and a revisit. I've been wanting to revisit my early articles for a while, as there's quite a lot I missed in my early days. My breakthrough with PDP-10 emulation means I can play most of the BASIC games I originally skipped over, too, so those will also come up in the revisits of past years.

With that, next week we'll begin the revisits, by starting at the very beginning of video game history, and a game I never actually bothered to cover way back when: the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device. Try saying that 5 times fast.

Don't forget - if you enjoy my blog, be sure to leave a comment and follow so you don't miss any updates!

#040: Fur Trader - The Ontario Trail

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre(s): Management Simulation

Developer(s): Dan G. Bachor

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

This week's game is quite a fascinating one. Fur Trader is a historical-educational game of several firsts: the first Canadian-made video game, the first business simulation game... there's also some adventure game characteristics, and aspects reminiscent of The Oregon Trail, which Fur Trader also happens to have an interesting connection to... come join the fur trading expedition!

History

Authorship here is attributed to Dan G. Bachor (via Ann Brebner), of the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. This also happens to be his only game credit, which is curious to me, as fur trading seems an odd topic for a psychology professor to make a game on. A brief scan of his available academic works also reveal that they have very little, if anything to do with the content of his game, so there's no help there in determining why he chose to make a game about fur trading. Currently, Dan Bachor is on staff at the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

As far as my list is concerned, this is only the second game from Canada - the first being Bertie the Brain, all the way back in 1950. Arguably, it's not technically a video game, meaning that Fur Trader is potentially the first ever Canadian-made video game. And fitting too, considering the game's content is distinctly Canadian.

I'm not really sure what's going on in the cartoon...

After this game was included in Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games, it was ported both to the Sol-20 and Commodore PET computers, the latter by Ahl's Creative Computing, and the former, interestingly, by MECC. For those who aren't clued in, MECC is the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium - the company responsible for developing the commercial version of The Oregon Trail. Fitting, as Fur Trader bears some slight similarities to The Oregon Trail. Outside of that info, crickets, though real-life fur trading role-playing games (furs not included) still appear to be rather popular in Canada as a means of teaching Canadian history to youngsters.

The Game

Fur Trader stands out initially as a type of game we haven't really seen much of up to this point in history: management simulation. There are some lost games that could potentially fall under the umbrella of business/management sims, but the closest games I've played to this would be Civil War and Hamurabi. Fur Trader still remains distinct from those two in that this is a game strictly about running a business and turning a profit. Those other two games certainly involve management, but as a means for a different purpose, rather than the management itself be the purpose of the game.

We ain't buying your clanker junk!

As I've been mentioning throughout the article, this game is also primarily concerned with Canadian history, also serving as something of an educational title. Fur Trader is set in the year 1776, and you play as the leader of a French Fur Trading expedition in the region surrounding Lake Ontario. This year's expedition has been declared a great success, and you are now returning to sell your wares at a select destination. There are three destination forts to choose from, each varying in several ways:

1. The first fort is Fort Hochelaga, in Montreal, and is the "easy" route of the game. The journey is a safe one, with the fort under the French Army's protection. On account of the ease of the return trip here, your furs sell for the least amount of the three forts, and the supply cost is the highest - no doubt to pay for the hungry soldiers.
2. The second fort is Fort Stadacona, in Quebec. This is the "medium" route. The fort here is also under the Army's protection, however the road there is more perilous, requiring your troop to make a portage and cross the Lachine Rapids. The value of your furs here is a middle ground between the other two forts, as is the cost of supplies. The soldiers must be more well-disciplined and less prone to gorging themselves on the available rations here.
3. The third and final fort is Fort New York. This is the game's "hard" route, with the Dutch controlling the fort, and the route necessitating traversing the lands of the Iroquois. One the flipside, this route gives the highest payout for furs, and has the cheapest supplies.

At these forts, your expedition has 190 furs to sell. You get to select how these 190 are distributed between the four different pelts: mink, beaver, ermine and fox. Each appears to have a different value, but the exactness of their value is something that the player can only figure out through doing some external calculations. My initial assumption was that mink would likely be the most valuable, which is generally in line with my playing experience - beaver also tends to sell quite well, while ermine was generally the poorest performing fur during my playtime. Fox pelts tended to have the most variance in value - sometimes as valuable as mink and beaver, and sometimes performing as poorly as ermine.

The starting situation.

On this, I also noticed that there seemed to be a vague formula the game uses to determine how much you get for your furs at each fort. This is purely anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but it appeared to rely on the total amount of each fur selected, and (like the game suggests) the route chosen. At the easiest route (Fort Hochelaga), I tended to get paid around 66 - 75% of the total of each pelt I had, while at the hardest (New York), it tended to be 90 - 110% of the number of each pelt (again, with ermine typically being the worst performing). The middle route (Fort Stadacona) tended to have the most variance, with each fur netting between 75 - 110% of its total number - mink and beaver being the best performing.

No! My precious beaver pelts!

All this discussing furs a their value is well and good, but it doesn't mean much if you can't actually get them to their destination. Fur Trader makes the difficulty distinction between routes evident by having random events that can occur on each separate route that can cause harm to the year's expedition. Events can affect your overall expedition, or can be specific to one type of fur. For instance, at Fort Stadacona, there is a chance your beaver pelts may be too heavy to make the rapid crossing. Alternatively, your canoe might flip during the crossing, causing you to lose all your furs. At the most extreme point, your game can end early if, on the Fort New York route, your party is ambushed and killed by an Iroquois raiding party. Game over. Yikes. That certainly raises the stakes a bit, eh?

I'll admit, I didn't come across that event on my first playthrough, and it came through experimenting with the different routes, seeing what could potentially happen on each. From my testing, it seems that nothing bad ever happens on the easy route (Hochelaga), and the risk increases from there. The other two routes seem to have two, maybe three bad events that can occur - I'm not sure if I saw them all. One thing I did see was a random game crash, though, and that's also a bad event, but an unintended one.

RIP. Game over.

It's an intriguing game, is Fur Trader. As mentioned earlier, there's definitely some similarities to The Oregon Trail. Perilous river crossings, the threat of native raiding parties... although, Fur Trader is far more simplistic in its gameplay, by obvious comparison. I also detect within some nascent adventure game elements, with the game being more narrative driven than gameplay driven, in some sense. There isn't really a story here, though. It's more a historical setting in which your own story can develop - or, at least, that's what the idea seems to be. That's a gameplay-narrative integration concept that will be more fully explored later down the road, but we can see the seeds of the concept being sown here in Fur Trader.

Anyway, that's a lot of chat for what I've been regularly describing as a "simple" game. There just so happens to be a lot to talk about with Fur Trader, which is a nice change of pace. We still have the scores to talk about, too, so let's do that.

Scores

Time Played: 30 minutes

Difficulty: N/A (Variable)

More or less determined by the player and what fort they choose to go to, although the result of the choice of fort is random to some degree.

Gameplay: 2/20
I can only give Fur Trader a 2, unfortunately, as there's very, very little proper gameplay here, and much is reliant on the semi-random outcomes of your fort choice. The most "gameplay" aspect I can see is figuring out which of the furs has the best value and using that to determine how many of each you take each year. There's also no endgame to speak of, and no real point or objective to the game other than "make money". Unless you die, that is. You can also figure out fairly quickly which of the furs make the most money, and capitalise on them, which trivialises almost the entire point of the game.

I'm being slightly more generous with the score here, because I can give props to the game for its simple attempt at trying to immerse the player in a historical setting. I argued with myself as to whether the immersion constituted a story, and whether I should include the story metric for Fur Trader, but ultimately decided against it. Fur Trader seems more in-line with Civil War or Hamurabi in the sense that it's not exactly trying to tell a narrative, but has narrative elements built into the gameplay. If Fur Trader didn't have this narrative/immersion aspect, I'd probably have given it a 1, to be perfectly frank.

Controls: 5/10
Nothing unusual or out of the ordinary here.

Visual: 1/10
It's not formatted very well at all. There's large chunks of unformatted text that are cluttered and hard to read, like the descriptions of the different forts; the numbered list isn't formatted correctly. The code was ported over to the '78 edition of BASIC Computer Games, so the poor formatting suggests the author wasn't overly familiar with programming BASIC, as we've seen far more well-formatted games predating Fur Trader.

Functionality: 4/5
The game can randomly crash at certain points, but seems to be a rare occurrence.

Accessibility: 3/5
While a lot of reading is required, it's not overly wordy, and the game is intended somewhat for educational purposes. No actual knowledge of Canadian history is required to understand what's going on, either, so I'm comfortable with giving this a standard text-based game score.

Fun Factor: 3/20
I think there's some merit to exploring the possible outcomes the game provides for each fort, and for experimenting with how much of each pelt to take, so it has some replay value and interest beyond its incredibly basic gameplay. The historical setting also intrigues me, but I'm biased as a history nerd.

Overall, Fur Trader only ends up with a score of 18 - just enough to keep it out of the F-tier, and put it at the bottom of E-tier. I do feel kind of bad for the score, as a solid amount of effort has been put in to make something rather interesting. However, it just doesn't fare well from a game design perspective. There's little player agency, and there's just not really much point to the game outside of teaching some Canadian history. Feels like a lot of words for what I'd objectively call a "bad" game. At least it's an interesting kind of bad.

Next week is back to the simple, pen-and-paper type games - a common childhood game that, surprisingly, hadn't gotten the digital treatment as of 1973.

#039: Flip Flop - Xs and Os

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle

Developer(s): Michael Kass

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

We're continuing in the realm of basic (ha) puzzle games today. Flip Flop, while it's an odd name, turns out to be a fairly straightforward logic puzzle.

History

Flip Flop continues our run in the original publication of David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games. It's not a game of Ahl's own making, instead being submitted by a Michael Kass of New Hyde Park, New York. Unfortunately, I can't precisely identify this Michael Kass; even AI couldn't help me with this one. MobyGames lists him as attending Herricks High School, the major high school servicing the area, but after that the trail goes completely cold. Kass has no other known game credits, either, so nothing to go on from that end, either. There is a well-known computer scientist named Michael Kass, who worked on several Disney-Pixar films, but there simply aren't any tangible connections that can be made. Plus, that Michael Kass looks too young to be Flip Flop's creator.

These illustrations really are something, aren't they?

Flip Flop also received a couple of ports, one by Creative Computing itself for the Commodore PET in 1979, and a second done by the Association of Computer Experimenters for the RCA COSMAC in 1980. That's all the info I've got. I tried scanning the archive of Creative Computing Magazine as well, but found no mention of the game anywhere, despite CC doing their own port of the game. In some sense, I'm not surprised, considering how insignificant this game is in the overall scheme of computing history.

The Game

The nature of the puzzle of Flip Flop is, like the last game I did (Even Wins), hinted at in the game's title; something's getting flipped - fortunately it's not tables. No, the simple objective of Flip Flop is to turn a row of 10 Xs into Os. That's it. Not pulling your leg, that's literally all you have to do.

Here's how you "flip flop."

It's the how you flip the Xs where the puzzle element of the game comes in. Each X corresponds to a number - 10 Xs, 10 numbers. To flip the X, you simply input the corresponding number, and the X will turn into an O - just like a binary switch. However, there is a catch: some numbers don't always flip their corresponding X alone. Some of the numbers will also flip another, random X in the sequence. So 1 might flip itself and 5, or 4 might flip itself and 2; some of the flips are one-way, so 4 might flip 2, but 2 may not necessarily flip 4. It's up to the player to figure out how to make it all work together to flip the whole sequence. If you do happen to get stuck, there's two different ways provided to restart: type 0 to reset the current sequence to all Xs, or type 11 to start over with a new sequence.

An easy game.

On top of that, this isn't a one-and-done game with a single, set puzzle. No, each round the algorithms are randomised; no two rounds are the same. From a replay standpoint, it's great, but it's a double-edged sword. This mechanic also has the nasty side effect of making some rounds significantly harder than others. 101 BASIC Games states that you should be able to get the sequence flipped in 12-15 moves. In some cases, I could get it done in 8-9 moves because the sequence had no tricks. In other cases, the sequence was so confusing that I just gave up and started a new round. It would've been fun if there was a level structure that increased in difficulty more consistently, but we're not really at the point of game design yet where devs figured out that that was probably a good idea. Decimal Darts is really the only game I can think of that actually has a conventional difficulty curve up to this point in time. It's only a matter of time, though.

A not-so-easy game.

There's not a whole lot of sense in doing a play-by-play commentary for Flip Flop. It's not really the kind of game conducive to that style of writing and is probably better discussed within the context of my scores. so that's where we'll head now.

Scores

Time Played: 20 minutes

Difficulty: N/A (Variable)
Since the patterns change each round, the difficulty varies wildly. Some times it's incredibly easy and I win in 8 guesses - other times it seems impossible and I have to start over.

Gameplay: 2/20
If the algorithm wasn't randomised each round, this would get a 1. It's a double-edged sword, though; randomisation ups the replay value, but the rules are so simple that it ends up lacking the depth or interest to make it worth replaying. The randomisation also adds a severely fluctuating difficulty curve which I didn't appreciate.

The other way the game could've gone about the replay vs. depth problem is by upping the complexity of the algorithm, but make the puzzles more static. The numbers could flip up to 4 other numbers, for example, but the algorithm is set. Or, add difficulty levels; the easiest being 1-2 numbers change, then 3-4, then 5-6 for a hardest difficulty. That way, replay value is added from having more challenging levels, and depth is added through the levels gradually increasing the complexity of the puzzle. I know this is a 1973 game, and game devs didn't think like that yet, but a man can dream.

Controls: 5/10
As adequate as can be for a text-based game.

Visual: 1/10
The formatting is quite poor on this game. I would've liked to have seen more line breaks, as it feels very cluttered and is hard to read.

Functionality: 5/5
No issues found.

Accessibility: 3/5
Fairly standard for text-based games.

Fun Factor: 1/20
I didn't particularly enjoy this puzzle. Too simple, and too much variability. Not conducive to replayability, and I lost interest in it pretty quickly.

Overall, the scores don't make for great reading here: a final score of 17, earning a spot at the tippy-top of the F tier. These little throwaway games aren't really enthusing anybody these days. I wish I could get through them more quickly, but the current pace of life doesn't allow for that. Next week's game promises to be a little more interesting, at least.

#038x: Even Wins - Cybernetic Version

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle (Nim Variant)

Developer(s): Eric Peters

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

Trust me, it sounds way cooler than it actually is.

History

This little side quest is a follow-up from last week's Even Wins article. As I stated there, 101 BASIC Computer Games has two versions of Even Wins. The one from last week's article is the original, which uses a conventional AI. This one, which is called EVEN1 and Game of Even Wins by the two versions of the book respectively, does something a little different with its AI: it learns.

This version of the game was written in-house at DEC by Eric Peters, who also developed the Lunar Lander variant, Rocket. MobyGames dubs his version of Even Wins the "Cybernetic Version" (I think based off of the game's description in-book), uses a different AI pattern that begins only knowing the basic rules of Even Wins, and progressively learns how to play the game better over successive rounds.

A quick refresher on Even Wins.

The whole idea of "machine learning" in this sense isn't new to the blog; we've previously seen this form of AI learning in a couple of previous programs. Animal is likely the most notable, although is different in the sense that the player was the one teaching the computer different questions and animals, instead of with games like Awari and this version of Even Wins, where the computer learns by itself. Animal, as a side, happens to be one of my most-read articles, though I honestly don't know why - it's not even a game. This is supposed to be a gaming blog!

The Game

Anyway, I said this was going to be a short one, so let's get into it.

Look familiar?

First of all, the game is almost entirely re-written from the original, and has significant differences as a result. Visually, the game presents the objects as chips instead of marbles. Mechanically is where the majority of changes are, however.

No longer is the pile of objects set at 27 - it's now a random, odd number. The game code suggests that a pile size of a single chip could be generated (there is failsafe code in place for this occurrence); in practice it tended to be between 7 - 21 chips.

The player does not have the choice of going first or second anymore. Instead, the computer always goes first. I find this a curious choice, with first being the advantaged position. However, it makes sense in the idea that it showcases how the AI begins squandering its advantaged position, but progressively learns the game and gets to the point where it can rarely be beaten.

Bro is pretty stupid.

On the note of the AI, it does indeed start out woefully bad at the game. It makes some truly bizarre and illogical choices, and continues in that pattern from quite some time. Sometimes it will completely blow a winning position, like being at 5, myself taking 1 chip, being on an even number, and it'll just take the whole pile like it's giving up.

...but he does get better. Eventually.

Eventually, it does start to get good, and did start taking game off me. However, I seemed to have found a flaw in its algorithm, as there was a particular strategy that it just couldn't figure out. I would force the pile, if I was on an even number, to 9 chips remaining. From there, the AI would always take 3 chips, putting me in a position I would always win from. It never learned how to beat this strategy - I must have beaten it 10 times in a row at least.

Closing Thoughts

No scores for Even Wins: Cybernetic Edition. For one, I think it's somewhat redundant as it's functionally the same game as the source. It's more of a showcase of AI programming, which is inherently interesting to me and worthwhile not skipping over just because of "redundancy." Every game matters.

#038: Even Wins - An Odd Duck in the Nim Family

Release Date: July 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Puzzle (Nim)

Developer(s): Unknown

Publisher(s): Digital Equipment Corporation

History

101 BASIC Computer Games already has several variants of the ancient game of Nim. We've already seen Batnum (the 1970 version) and Nim (otherwise known as Gamnim), and now we've arrived at the final variant of the "piles of objects" games in the original version of the book - Even Wins.

Fittingly, there's an even number of games.

This is actually a pair of games, as there are two different versions of Even Wins present in the book, creatively named EVEN and EVEN1. The 1978 version of the book calls them Even Wins and Game of Even Wins, respectively. Here, I'm looking at the former of the two, which happens to also be the original version of the game.

What's the difference between the two games? It comes down to how the AI is programmed. In the former of the two, the AI runs with a set algorithm, essentially a "set" difficulty, whereas the latter leans more into the "machine learning" style of AI that's cropped up a few times before. This "Cybernetic Version," as MobyGames calls it, implements an AI similar to that present in a game like Awari, where the AI starts of not being very good at the game, but improves its play over multiple rounds as it "learns" how you play. 101 BASIC Games states that it'll take about 20 rounds for it to become "a challenge to beat." I'll be covering this latter version of Even Wins in the next article, probably as a Gaiden article next Tuesday, as it seems redundant to dedicate a full Friday release to the same game two weeks in a row.

This and the original are the only media I could find on Even Wins.

While we know who developed the EVEN1 version of the game, Eric Peters of DEC, the author of the original game is unknown. I even scoured through several computing magazines to see if there was any mention of the game or a possible original author, but to no avail. Neither PCC nor Creative Computing even make mention of the game.

The Game

So, what makes Even Wins different to the other Nim games? Hint: it's in the name. The same gameplay loop is present, of two players taking turns removing objects from a pile - a pile of 27 objects (marbles) in this case - no more, no less. How the victor is determined is the major difference. In the typical game of Nim, it's the person who takes the last object that wins or loses, depending on the ruleset. In Even Wins, however, it's the amount of marbles the players take the determines the winner. Whoever has an even-numbered pile of marbles when the last marble is taken wins. It's why the game starts with a pile of 27 - it has to be an odd-numbered pile for the game to work. The aim of each player then becomes to force the other into ending with the odd-numbered pile.

Here's how the game explains itself.

Forcing the AI opponent into losing is easier said than done. Unlike some of the other "solved" game AIs I've dealt with in the past (OXO, Batnum '67), Even Wins' AI presents a stiff challenge, but not an unbeatable one. 101 BASIC Games' take on the difficulty is "the computer... is impossible to beat if you don't know how to play the game." So tough - but not impossible.

In practice, I found this to be a very accurate assessment of the game's challenge. Unlike a game like Batnum '67, I wanted to try and beat the game without doing any sort of research into the winning algorithms. Naturally, I got stomped pretty badly the first ten times I played because I, like the book says, had no idea what I was doing. Once I got a handle on what I needed to do, by observing the way the computer played - that's when my progress in beating the game moved in a positive direction.

How most rounds end up.

I observed that the computer liked to try and force me into a position at the end of the game where there was 5-7 marbles remaining. That seemed to me to be the red zone where the winner is always determined; whoever forces their opponent to take marbles when 5-7 are remaining will always be the victor. So I looked over the previous matches and observed what moves the computer made - what numbers it liked to leave the pile on at the end of its turn, and how it responded to my moves - and tried to incorporate those moves into my own strategy.

After about 15 minutes worth of attempts, I had a win! I was able to manipulate the pile into a position where I had it end on 11 marbles - apparently a key position, which allows making the decisive move into that 5-7 range. Admittedly, I was quite chuffed about this - the computer really made me earn that win. I was also extremely relieved that this wasn't another one of those "impossible games" situations, where the AI is programmed to be perfect, mercilessly slaughtering all comers who would dare challenge its genius.

Victory!

However, I'll briefly note here that, from all my testing a playing, that the only position the player can win from is by going first. I was unable to win going second. This is typically the case in most early Nim variants and other solved games, that winning is only viable from a certain starting point. Some, it's going second, others, like here, it's going first. It seems that going first is the position of control and dictating the flow of the game.

A Brief Word on Difficulty

There's something to be said here about games and difficulty. It's apparent to me that balancing the challenge level of a game can have a vast effect on the overall quality of the playing experience. Take Batnum '67, for example (one of my favourite punching bags as of late). That game makes it nigh-on impossible to beat the AI outside of the deliberately programmed first round. The level of challenge is far too high, and it royally sours the experience, because I know I can't beat the game. What's the point in trying? LEM suffers the same fate, but more because that game is far too complicated for its own good.

On the opposite end, there's Batnum '70 - the younger brother of Batnum '67. That version allows for near-endless customisation of the game rules and settings, so much so that I can just manipulate the game state to where I'll always win - Bomber also has the same problem, for a more recent example. This also ruins the game experience, but at the opposite end of the scale, because I can basically cheat in a game-approved way to always win. And, like the near-impossible games: what's the point in playing?

Just some brief shower-thoughts for your consideration. If you have any thoughts, considerations or counter-arguments, I'd love to hear them in the comments. With that out of the way, let's score Even Wins.

Scores

Time Played: 13 minutes

Difficulty: 6 (Challenging)
It's like the book says: impossible to beat if you don't know what you're doing. I needed to play a few rounds to get a grip on how I needed to manipulate the numbers to get into a winning position. Watching what the computer was doing in response to my moves, and where it boxed me in helped to give me an idea of what I needed to do to beat it.

Gameplay: 4/20
This reminds me of Batnum '67 but better in the sense that the computer is beatable without the game having to do some weird programming nonsense to force the AI to make a mistake in the first round. Otherwise, Even Wins is more-or-less the same game, except with the difference of how to win, which did subtly change the way I played compared to the other Nim variants. It's got that going for it at least, and the computer being beatable presents a proper challenge to overcome, which I feel like I earnt over the course of playing the game. Even Batnum '70 doesn't feel as rewarding due to the customisation options of it permitting me to manipulate the starting parameters in my favour, hence why I think Even Wins is slightly better than it.

Controls: 5/10
It does that funny thing that Cube does where you have to use binary for yes (1) and no (0), but it doesn't feel as intrusive or unintuitive here as it did there.

Visual: 1/10
Even Wins is very rudimentary on the visual front. It's only text, no other formatting tricks like what we've seen in other text-based games from 1971 - 73.

Functionality: 5/5
No bugs present during normal gameplay.

Accessibility: 3/5
Putting this as standard for a text-based game.

Fun Factor: 5/20
There's nothing Earth-shattering here, just a simple puzzle game, but I actually did enjoy trying to beat the computer somewhat. It was a stiff enough challenge that didn't feel too far out of reach, so I enjoyed the process of trying to figure out how to beat the AI.

Overall, Even Wins earns a score of 23 - much better than what I was expecting coming into the game. It's tied with Dartmouth Championship Football in terms of total score, but Even Wins has the better gameplay and fun factor, so it wins the tiebreaker of which is the superior game.

Next up I'll be doing a short side article on the Cybernetic Edition of Even Wins, which will be coming on Tuesday. After that, we have a rather oddly-titled game for Friday's full release. 

As a side, I hope everyone is enjoying the new article on the origins of video games. I had been feeling quite dissatisfied with my early work on that period of time for a while, and felt a revisit was due. I'll likely do individual pieces on all of those early games periodically, in the lead up to revisiting some of my early articles. My writing and research is much improved from two years ago, and I'd like to give those games the respect due them. Thoughts and feedback are always appreciated - I'd like to hear from you readers what you'd like to see out the blog, and what improvements I could make.

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