{"id":568,"date":"2008-07-30T16:15:15","date_gmt":"2008-07-30T06:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=568"},"modified":"2008-08-01T09:20:55","modified_gmt":"2008-07-31T23:20:55","slug":"escape-from-the-devils-doom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2008\/07\/30\/escape-from-the-devils-doom\/","title":{"rendered":"Escape from the Devil’s Doom"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently found this sitting at the bottom of a box.<\/p>\n

\"Escape<\/a><\/p>\n

It is an original Bandai Electronics<\/a> “Escape From The Devil’s Doom”<\/a> solar-powered LCD game, manufactured in 1981\/2.<\/p>\n

It still works too! (Although the tinny piezzo speaker has bitten the dust.)<\/p>\n

Relax; this isn’t some middle-aged geek reminiscing about one of the great bits of electronics from his youth… This is a middle-aged geek remembering how awful this little game was. Repetitive. Brainless. Suspect religious themes. Man, I played this game for hours<\/em> when I was a bored kid.<\/p>\n

But, wait! You don’t need to believe me! It seems that a fellow called Julien Foyard has ported it to Windows<\/a>!<\/p>\n

Foyard’s port misses a tiny detail. The score board on the original is zero-padded to four digits. See the screen-shot below, which shows a score of zero, in demo mode.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

Notice the space for four zeros. Notice that there isn’t room on the LCD for an additional digit*<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

*<\/sup> I wrote the above sentence before I actually looked at the photograph that I had taken. What you can’t see in the demo mode screenshot is the letters “G1” or “G2” in the top corner, which appear during one-player or two-player games, respectively. When they are lit up, my point is much clearer. Oh well.<\/div>\n

My ultimate goal was to clock this game – to get a score greater than 9999, which is higher than the display can handle.<\/p>\n

This game, like many, suffered from score inflation. The points were awarded as follows: 50 points per escape from Hell, 10 points per angel feather caught when God drops them, and a 500 point bonus (plus ascension to heaven as an angel) for the perfect (50 out of 50) feather collection. So all scores were multiples of 10, and the rightmost zero never changed. It may as well have been dropped from the screen.<\/p>\n

The worst case that I ever saw of score inflation was a real-life pinball machine that had an entire motorised mechanism to turn the reel of the least-significant digit, that never actually turned because every point score awarded was a multiple of ten.<\/p><\/div>\n

For hours I repeated the same brainless activity, ascending to Heaven time and time again, trying not to die three times.<\/p>\n

I was tense as I got closer and closer to the magic score of 10,000, and ultimate mastery of this little machine.<\/p>\n

My tension turned to elation and then very quickly to profuse swearing when I actually reached the 10,000 point mark.<\/p>\n

For you see, there was no room to add another 8-segment digit to the start of the score. There was, however, room to slip in the number “1”. The score read 10,000 – and a score of 20,000 was required to truly clock it. The bastards had fooled me.<\/p>\n

I did beat that score eventually, and clock the system. The game was put in the bottom of a box and forgotten for 25 years, but my feelings for the game are still tainted by this cruel trick by the nasty developers.<\/p>\n

By the time you have read this, I have donated this game to a friend of mine who is a collector of LCD games, so please don’t jump in and tell me it is now very valuable.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In which the author reveals his age, and reviews an old electronic game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,35,47,26],"tags":[58,376],"class_list":["post-568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-heroic-failures","category-review","category-tribal-affiliation","tag-gaming","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}