Recently, my friends and I over on the Friends Occasionally Not Disagreeing Podcast did a review of Faith: The Unholy Trinity, which has voice work that reminds me a lot of the synthesizer module they made as an add-on for the Intellivision. That is to say, everything sounded garbled, heavily synthetic, and only borderline-intelligible. Here, that was by design, but back in the day, it was the best they could do. Which brings us to today’s word.
gauge, noun – an instrument displaying a readout for some value
Learned from: B-17 Bomber (Intellivision)
Developed by Mattel
Published by Mattel (1982)
Based on the fact that Mattel was trying to add actual voice lines to games way back in 1982, you could say they had lofty ambitions. Even the base Intellivision was ahead of its time, with an actual analog pad instead of a joystick or 4-directional d-pad, and an entire phone’s worth of buttons, allowing for games with a staggering amount of options for the time, from displaying maps, to managing weapon loadouts, to pulling up gauges for things like altitude, pitch, and roll (I thought yaw was included here too, but I appear to be mistaken; I must have learned that one directly from my father).
Anyway, B-17 Bomber puts you in the role of the pilot (and bombardier, and gunners) of the titular plane, tasked with hitting various targets in WWII Europe. All the while, enemy fighters would be assaulting you, forcing you to worry about ammo management, fuel management, and timing the dropping of your bombs (not to mention how many bombs to load in the first place), and then trying to return home in one piece. Again, this was 1982, ambitious stuff in a time when most games weren’t any more complex than “avoid the ghosts in the maze and eat all the dots.”
I was never terribly good at this game, but I would occasionally load it up, just to hear the technology of the time croak out “Bee se-ven-teen Baw-mer!” at the title screen. Those were simpler times.
Brain Rot 