MAME ROW #174 - Q*bert

[IanDaemon]

Q*bert is a great game, but harder to play thanks to its "45° rotated" joystick. It also has the zeitgeist/popular culture impact that "classic" games have.

(My vote goes to Q*bert, an old school "bad boy" with those un-translated death remarks.)

[IanDaemon]

Subroc-3D (1982) reminds me A LOT of Viper (1988) which turns out to be an excellent trackball game in MAME 2003. Here's some YouTube video I found of Viper.

[IanDaemon]

Viper is really fun once you get the analog sensitivity settings adjusted. It's cool that it has a ton of control options in the ROM itself. I've read that the Viper arcade cabinet was criticized for complicated controls, but in MAME 2003 you can set it up to play with one trackball and one button (technically one trackball and two buttons).

In retrospect I guess "Crazy Ali" could be racially insensitive.

[Impman66]

Toughie this time, torn between Q**Bert in the end. Mainly due to it's originality, nobody had seen that type of game before, whereas Op Wolf, despite it's great graphics was (albeit with a light-gun - I mean a light gun!!) just another shoot 'em up.
So again I went old school and voted for Q*Bert.

Weird, when I posted the "" was lost between the Q and B, and it turned the text into italics. The only way round it was to put in two ""'s Oh its done it again! Any ideas??

[IanDaemon]

@Impman66 To italicize Q*bert use *Q\*bert*. Essentially you use the backslash to escape the asterisk in the name.

In the example above I'm using the backtick " ` " (often on the keyboard next to the "1") around the characters to make them visible and highlighted inline without being translated. To put things in a multiple-line code block you can use:

` ` `
Q * b e r t
` ` ` 

Or you can use a blockquote with a single greater-than sign ">" preceding each line.

>Q*bert and then some more Q*bert and then some
>more Q*bert

Here's some info: https://commonmark.org/help/

[Impman66]

@IanDaemon Many thanks for that, didn't notice any issues until after I posted. Strange though how you cant put the * in-between a letter without making it change the format of the font.

[IanDaemon]

@Impman66 You can by escaping it; it's just that the asterisk is a reserved character.

[obsidianspider]

This week's winner is Q*bert

[IanDaemon]

I got 1175 with a four-way "+" joystick (instead of "x"), but I need to do something about these controls. I wonder what I can do besides turning my head/thoughts?

[IanDaemon]

I was able to improve it slightly (2700), but playing with a "+" joystick isn't ideal. (I'm sure this can be beaten easily. I only made it to the second level on my custom MAME cocktail cabinet.)

[IanDaemon]

I'm gonna go get my six inch tall Q*bert cabinet with its tiny "x" joystick.

Surprisingly, I didn't do much better (3875).

[IanDaemon]

I managed to slightly improve (4,950) on my MAME2003 cocktail cabinet (with a four-way joystick) by standing at 45 degrees and turning my head. (It's odd that the high score screen lists the scores "top to bottom" and not "left column-right column", but...oh well.)
[op deleted image]

[IanDaemon]

It's nice than the default scores are so low.

[IanDaemon]

5350

[IanDaemon]

7750

( @BuZz Curious, I can no longer upload pics. Is something wrong on my end? - Cool, it works now.)

[BuZz]

@iandaemon No - I will sort it (compatibility issue with nodejs v14) - It's fixed but a dependency needs to be updated but ill just downgrade for now.

[BuZz]

@iandaemon Should be ok now.

[obsidianspider]

MAME ROW #175 is now live!

[IanDaemon]

I was able to improve slightly with an "plus" arcade stick.

[IanDaemon]

@iandaemon I just had an idea for a modification to my control panel that would allow me to use the same four-way joystick for this and Pac-Man/Donkey Kong without opening up the machine OR any software changes.