Back in the early 80's video games were extremely basic. They had to be because the world had very little in the way of technology. This was during a time when my house still had a telephones with rotary dials on it and making a small mistake in dialing a number was really frustrating because it was going to take a while to dial it in again.
Our expectations of gaming was as high as it is today when we were gaming on the 2600 and the reason for this was simple: We didn't know any better. Obviously attempting to compare any game on that system to games of today would be ridiculous because you could fit the entire world's electronic games one a very inexpensive memory card that exists today. Most games were around 4kb in total memory. That's kilobytes folks, not MB, not GB. These days when we think about storage, even megabytes seem small. Now combine all of the 2600 games that were ever made and you could fit them on a single 1.44Mb floppy disk. That's crazy.
At the time game designers probably couldn't fathom that a game would ever be even a single MB, let alone the crazy sized games we have today that routinely encompass 20 GB or more. That would just blow their minds if we were to go back in time and tell them what gaming had evolved to.
So we were dealing with very simplistic games on the 2600 and in order to make games different, the concept of gameplay had to be very inventive in order for a game to stay interesting. Warlords was one of those games.
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Just like any game that existed back then, the cover art of this title was quite deceptive but it didn't matter. None of us thought that we were going to be dealing with realistic looking graphics. We just kind of hoped that it wasn't just squares.
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In Warlords your objective was to defend your castle, and the only thing preventing the downfall of your kingdom was the walls surrounding it. A ball or probably a cannonball, was bounced around the playfield and you would control the shield that protected your walls and eventually your exposed castle or keep.
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What made this game so great was the fact that it was one of many games that involved multi-player and as far as I know, Warlords was one of the only games that allowed up to 4 controllers to be used at once. Unlike other games this didn't need to be you against the computer and that was what made it so great to replay.
My neighborhood friends would bring over their paddle controllers and we would plug in and play every man for himself and it never really got old. The direction that the cannonball traveled in at the start seemed to be random and this meant that nobody had an advantage. Playing against the computer could sometimes be full of shit because it would make moves that probably aren't possible for a human to do. The other way that this could be would be that the computer AI was so terrible that it wasn't even challenging. I'm certain that there is only so much actual AI that can go into 4k of memory.
I don't recall many games that used the paddle controllers and unless you were using the paddles, only 2 joysticks could be plugged into the 2600. As you can tell from the above picture, two paddles would plug into a single joystick input. I have no idea how this worked, but it just did.
This video shows how crazy fast paced this game could end up being. I am quite certain that I suffered some sort of eye damage from attempting to squint or sit so close to the television to get an edge over my opponents.
Like a lot of games that are in my memory banks from my youth, this one is best not played today. The memories are a lot better than the experience would be today.
To me it is funny to see what we considered cutting-edge entertainment back in those days because this, and every other game that existed at the time, was extremely simplistic. That didn't mean that it wasn't fun though and of all the games that existed on the old-school Atari, Warlords is one of the ones that sticks out in my mind as being truly unique.