After a stammering pokémon: Arzeus, I recently started a casual game, Breakout: Recharged ( " Recharge " ) , yes , the brick you remember.
It's 2022, and anyone still plays bricks?
That's right, but the brick-and-mortar game is really fun. "Charging" also adds a lot of fresh elements that I can keep playing.
Although playing bricks is simple, Charge offers a variety of gameplay, divided into arcade games (with props and a ball), classic (three balls without props), and arcade classics (with three balls). The gameplay is still very traditional: control the platform, catch the ball, knock out all the bricks.
There are many prop bricks in the arcade mode, and random props will appear after hitting to reduce the difficulty of the game, such as some props can display the ballway, which is convenient for you to control the landing point of the ball.
Some props can lengthen the platform to reduce your catch mistakes.
There are also many offensive items, and the tracking missile can hit every brick accurately.
Extreme speed shooting can quickly empty the screen.
A variety of weapon effects, prop abilities are mixed together, and a simple brick can also give you a tense and exciting atmosphere.
Bomb bricks can also bring surprises, and with the vibration of the handle, it is one step closer to victory.
"Charge" landed on PS5, XSS | X, PS4, Xbox one, NS, PC and Atari's own Atari VCS platform are basically fully covered. In order to serve more types of players, it also has a multiplayer mode, where two people can operate two platforms separately to play bricks.
Bounded by the center, the two people are divided into two sides of the scene, like doubles players, cooperating like doubles players, helping each other to win together.
Charge also offers a challenge mode where you can complete a defined number of challenge items in a game, such as getting a certain score, emptying all bricks, etc., and unlocking more gameplay after completion. Although bricking is simple, it is still difficult after adding various challenging projects.
At the same time, Charge Up also provides an achievement page, if you are a full collection player, completing all achievements is a challenge in itself.
In terms of networking projects, "Chong Neng" supports competing with global netizens and competing for a high competition.
Hit the empire behind the bricks to fall
That's it? Well, that's it.
"Bricks: Charging" is a very good brick-fighting game, whether it is the game screen, the feel of the operation or the settings of various achievements and challenges, it is very interesting to the player, and the player can easily indulge in the simple and random experience of brick-playing in a wealth of props, decompression explosions and cooperation with friends.
If you want to buy a game casual, it's a good choice.
But I don't rate it as "fun" because of how good the game is, but because every classic game — whether it's Tetris, Pac-Man, or Bricklay — is fun, and the designs in Charge aren't new. So why did this ordinary brick-and-mortar game pique my interest? The answer is the company behind it: Atari, a name you may not be familiar with.
In the 1970s, Atari was equivalent to today's Xbox and PS, with 80% of the market. In American bars and billiard halls, you can always hear the sound of "pong, pong", and a large number of young people gather next to atari arcade machines to open the door to the virtual world with this PONG.
▲ Image courtesy of the documentary Atari: Game Over
Today there are video games everywhere, so it is difficult for us to understand the fanatical pursuit of Atari in that era, and we can say that at that time, Atari was almost equivalent to video games.
In the era of home consoles, atari 2600, developed by Atari, brought classic games such as Space Invaders, PONG, Atari Breakout, adventure and other classic games to the home, copied the huge and complex functions of arcades into a home console, and changed the TV from passive reception to active playback, which was unimaginable in that era.
▲ Atari 2600
You may feel that Atari is too far away, but everything it creates is still affecting our entertainment life.
▲ Adventure that appeared in Ready Player One
In Atari's internal handbook, all game sales released throughout the company's history are recorded in detail, and are used to remind employees what kind of games are worth making and making money.
One day, David Crane, the company's game engineer, discovered that the games he wrote were bringing the company $20 million in revenue, while he was only making a meager $20,000 a year. Angry, he took the other 3 game engineers to the boss to seek justice, but the boss said: Your importance is similar to the workers on the production line who assemble the cassettes.
▲ Warner's airborne CEO Ray Kassar refused the young man's request
In an era when computers were not yet widespread, players, manufacturers, and investors thought they were producing/buying cartridges, not games. Games are not created, they are made. This has led to a miscalculation by investors and game companies: game cartridges can make money. Game? With such industry acceptance, the engineers responsible for all the game development work naturally seem unimportant.
But an enraged Crane and his colleagues left Atari to form the first third-party game studio in history: Activision Publishing, Inc. It was one of the protagonists of last month's acquisition that shocked the entire gaming world.
The four engineers who founded Activision, known as Atari's "Legendary Quartet", developed games that accounted for more than 60% of Atari's game sales at that time, and naturally did not let Activision develop.
Atari went around publicizing Activision's theft of their intellectual property and began a protracted lawsuit with Activision, even chasing and blocking it to prevent Activision from establishing its own sales network. But players know that the game made by Atari 2600 is the most fun.
The foursome who fled Atari: Bob Whitehead, David Crane, Larry Kaplan y Alan Miller. Image credit: TheDotEaters.com
The success of Atari and Activision has made more and more companies start to do the business of making cassettes, remember the aforementioned? Everyone is just making cassettes, and the game has it. By 1982, a large number of low-quality games were gradually eroding the industry.
For a simple example, you ask dad to buy a down jacket (cassette), dad did buy back a down jacket (cassette), but it was not warm at all (the game content was not good), and finally everyone came to the conclusion that down jackets are not warm at all (there is no future in the game industry).
Back then, if the cartridges couldn't be sold, the store would return the cartridges to the manufacturer and ask for new cartridges to sell (no one really cared about the game inside). On Christmas Day 1983, at the request of its parent company Warner, Atari developed a new game, E.T. Alien, in just 6 weeks, and finally made Atari's reputation fall to the bottom with poor quality that was completely inconsistent with the propaganda.
▲ Atari's game "E.T. Alien"
People say E.T. Alien is the worst game in the world, and it destroys Atari. But in fact, from the distrust of investors, retailers, and consumers, to the impact of the home computer and the industry price war, E.T. Alien is only the last straw that overwhelmed Atari, which is the famous "Atari Shock" in the game industry.
After the great crash, Atari buried many game consoles and cassettes in the desert of New Mexico, and the legend buried millions of copies of E.T. Aliens in the New Mexico desert, but actually buried the entire Atari.
After that, the output value of the North American game industry fell from $3.2 billion to $100 million, and the people of North America changed their color, even Activision, which has been working hard to make excellent games, was also expelled by bad money, the stock price plummeted, more than half of the employees were dismissed, and it gradually became profitable after turning to the computer game field.
Atari's collapse was almost entirely self-inflicted, and now think about it, wouldn't it have been different if the boss had been willing to write the names of Crane and the others on the cassette and improve their treatment?
The North American gaming market didn't pick up until two years later, in 1985, when Nintendo officially landed. Of course, this is another story.
Can Atari return to console wars?
When playing Bricks: Charging, I always have some fantasies in my trance: once (though too much) the game overlord has the opportunity to add some new colors to the industry ruled by the "Imperial Three Houses" with a new game console, exclusive games, and a correct understanding of the game field of this era?
Although it is easy to be punched in the face if you say that you are too dead, in this matter, I still want to say: Atari has no chance.
In 2015, Robbie Bach, then head of Xbox, said in an interview that the initial loss of Xbox was between $5 billion and $7 billion, and we can understand it from another perspective: Want to enter the game console field? Let's get $5 billion out!
That's the price from 20 years ago.
In terms of scale, under the leadership of Matt Booty, Microsoft has made a drastic acquisition of game companies, using "money capabilities" step by step; Sony has also recently acquired "Halo" creator Bungie Studios to try to make up for its own business shortcomings and lay a good foundation for the future of GaaS; Nintendo, although it looks less radical, is not on the same track as the other two, sitting on the Fishing Platform.
With such a pattern, how can Atari break it?
In terms of hardware, Atari's "new" game console was also launched as early as 2018, that is, the Aforementioned Atari VCS, which is in line with the design of The Atari 2600, retro also tried to "integrate the advantages of the host and PC", but it was repeatedly delayed until 2021, with a high price, not very fun games and a chicken PC model, which ended the beauty that has not yet begun.
How can such a machine compete with the "Imperial Three Houses"?
▲ Atari VCS for $299.99, not even a handle (set of $399.99)
Gamingly, if you want to play car gun balls, Microsoft's Xbox XGP service comes with an EA gift pack, Destiny, Halo, Forza Motorsport, FIFA and everything; if you're interested in exclusive games like Spider-Man, Azabot," and Ghost Line, Sony's PS is naturally a good choice; if you want to play with your family, Nintendo's Switch is designed for you.
Everyone who is interested in the console, can find their own game console in the existing console, play bricks? There may not be many people who are interested.
Like the countless Atari-related easter eggs that appear in Ready Player One, Atari has another path to follow: affection. Of course, it is already taking this road, whether it is "Bricks: Charging" or Atari VCS, the relevant reports are full of the words "Ye Qing Hui".
Atari pioneered the industry, recognized a whole new way of entertainment, allowed everyone to fly a spaceship, had "three lives," made Silicon Valley engineers stars, and even, to some extent, showed the potential of personal computers at the time.
But how far can these feelings take Atari?
References: 1. Documentary "Atari: Game Over", Microsoft; 2. Book "Game Over: A History of the Nintendo Global Conquest", David Schaefer.