Othello

"And it was such simple fun 'til I left off 'easy' mode!"

With the limits of the Atari 2600, Othello seems like a relatively good game to put on it. Video Chess bombed heinously as the Atari would spend far too much time blinking during its 'thought' before promptly walking into Scholar's Mate(e4 e5 Bc4 Bc5 Qh5 Nf6 Qxf7#.) You could take the king and play on afterwards, too, and it redeemed itself a bit then. Without a king to defend it was freer, you see.

Othello's rules are simple enough. You start with four tokens in the center of an 8x8 board. Tokens of the same color are kitty-corner, and players alternate moves. With each move, a player must flip one of his opponent's tokens, or forfeit his turn(my family originally thought the cartridge was defective, as we always took the in-demand corner squares with our first moves and didn't understand its muffled beeps. A big part of our games was also not overlooking when we could flip a piece, or sneakily ignoring one we didn't want flipped. The Atari made all that irrelevant in short order.) A move is legal if, in any one of the eight directions, there is first a line of markers of the opposing colors, broken by a friendly token. Then all enemy tokens are flipped. This isn't always good news for the player to move, as when things get crowded people tend to hold off on the squares you really don't want to put a piece on, and a tense battle can result in a more lopsided score than the game originally seemed that it would turn out. It's all much more exciting than silly old checkers where you build up defensive formation and nobody gets to take anything for far too long. Plus you get lots more pieces.

Some strategic points become obvious quickly: get on the edge, don't give corner squares easily, and be wary of taking the squares next to the corner. But then things get more complicated. Often any old opening seems good enough, but there's another edge you don't want to cross. The first player who goes outside the four-by-four box is asking for trouble, as he leaves a square vulnerable, and there's a huge debate between playing defense and positioning a solid formation of markers or just trying to pick off as many as you can. You'll also often have to give up one edge square to get another foothold in the early middle game, and worst yet you'll sometimes overlook that you left a marker vulnerable, or one flipping orgy gave your opponent something to flip right back.

But this went over my head when I was young. I liked Othello because I could beat it on the easy version regularly, and it was different each time. I could often sucker the computer into a move that flipped many of my pieces but ceded an edge square or, better yet, a corner square. Even there the game afforded a challenge; could I shut the Atari out, leaving him with no markers? It was a tough proposition often involving technically unsound moves to escalate the fight on the edges, but after some 62-2 heartbreakers I finally made a compact formation early and moved it up the screen. The game's random opening book didn't help my direct search for ways to thump it completely.

When I saw the game many years later I dismissed it as an amusing aside, the sort of Atari game I could beat, but it got old, you know? But apparently I had repressed the 'select game' switch from memory. The blurb on an 'Othello unplugged' box mentions five minutes to learn, a lifetime to master. And the three levels of play showed me why.

The medium level made marginal mistakes where you had to think carefully to beat it. The tough level took me at least twenty tries to beat. A few binary calculations(a cinch for a computer) determine if you really can place a piece down, or if you will be the one stuck having to move into one of the nasty squares. Of course the computer stops blundering too. The expert level doesn't even let a casual player get an edge square until it's hopeless already. The progression is rather funny; the easy level's mistakes seem moded, and you are able to press on the middle level, but the hard level forces you to play the opening well or you'll be losing and you're not sure why. It even lets you have a few edge squares before reaching out and nabbing the important ones.

Yet it's all very entrancing. In a quick game it's not always clear when you should take the edge, or where, or when you should risk putting a piece next to the edge. Often you seem to be treading water when in fact your position is slipping subtly--it's very much like chess only you know the answer will be resolved much more shortly and simply, with much less possibility of a draw, and with many superficial yet entertaining lead changes because all the tiles get flipped constantly. The game thinks very quickly, too(demoralizing though on the hard levels when it shreds you) and allows you to scroll past the edges when you move to place your piece, so you have few potential annoyances other than your own ineptitude.

If you really want to learn about Othello, or you wanted take-backs, I wouldn't be surprised to find freeware that has opening moves and strategies, or even set puzzles(the game has a mode like this, but it takes a while to set up.) The Atari's very dry and black-and-white with only a scoreboard at the top.

But for the time it was very strong at its game, beating out a frankly stupid AppleBasic game that beeped with ghastly unsportsmanship when a player couldn't move and whined every time it played, I mean lost. For all its features(save a game with a PASSWORD too, change the board colors) it just wasn't much of a challenge, and plus you had to use one paddle to control where you wanted to move. The Atari version is a fine product packed into just 4K given how infuriating Othello is to beat on the harder levels, and even on the easy levels your advantage accrues gradually enough so it feels like you're thinking much harder than you are(for my own variant, I call it a loss when I don't get 3/4 of the board.) Reading the NES reviews it seems they did bungle things, and the Atari's simplicity makes for a fine game. Othello's good enough on the 2600 that I trusted Backgammon on it. Heck, I may want to ride my luck some more and even give Checkers a spin.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/25/01, Updated 09/27/03