California Games

Description

California Games was the original "Extreme Games" – what today's generation might call "X-Games in the sun". Players can select sponsors (absent in some versions) and compete in events such as skateboarding, footbag, surfing, roller skating, flying disc (frisbee) and BMX. The surfing event is ranked by judges, which give a score to help the players improve their routine.

The Atari versions (2600 and Lynx) of the game omit the flying disc and roller skating events, while the Genesis version omits only the flying disc event.

Alternate Titles

• "Jogos de Verão" -- Brazilian Sega Master System title
• "Calgames" -- Informal title

Part of the Following Groups

• California Games series
• Epyx "Games" series

Merchant Title       California Games     California Games     Please select your country: United States Argentina Australia Austria Belgium Brazil Bulgaria Canada Chile China Colombia Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macau Macedonia Malaysia Malta Mexico The Netherlands New Zealand Norway Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Serbia Singapore Slovakia Slovenia South Africa South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom Uruguay Other Worldwide Not an American user?

User Reviews

SMS California Games in Better than Genesis Version Shocker	SEGA Master System	Liam Dowds (51)
It's GREAT to be playing CALIFORNIA GAMES!	DOS	Accatone (5229)
This radical game is totally awesome dude!	DOS	Roedie (5145)

The Press Says

The Video Game Critic	Atari 2600	Jun 16, 2001	A	100
GamePro	Genesis	Jan, 1992	5 out of 5	100
Game Freaks 365	SEGA Master System	Jan 15, 2006	9.8 out of 10	98
Zzap!	Commodore 64	Sep, 1987	97 out of 100	97
Computer and Video Games (CVG)	SEGA Master System	May, 1989	93 out of 100	93
The Games Machine (UK)	Commodore 64	Oct, 1987	92 out of 100	92
Power Play	NES	Nov, 1991	77 out of 100	77
VideoGame	SEGA Master System	Mar, 1991		60
CU Amiga	Amiga	Feb, 1989	60 out of 100	60
The Games Machine (UK)	ZX Spectrum	Feb, 1988	45 out of 100	45

Forums

There are currently no topics for this game.

Trivia

California games was one of the handful of games released that pushed CGA to its limits by using a timing/hardware trick to get more colors on the screen. It called this trick "MORE-color" mode (as opposed to the normal "4-color" mode), and it achieved 7 different colors on the same screen by switching from one color palette to another at a particular scanline. The switch was masked fairly well by:

1. making sure that the graphics had a horizontal boundary somewhere on the screen that wouldn't look funny by a color switch, and
2. switching from the red-green-yellow palette to a tweaked red-cyan-white palette and using the common red color to mask the switch.

You can see how much better these screens looked by going to the Screenshots section of the California Games entry and looking at the shots marked "CGA MORE-color". While not as good as EGA, they were definitly much, much better than what CGA could normally produce.

While this technique has been used in other games (like Jungle Hunt), none did it so well as in California Games using clever graphics composition and good programming. Kudos to the programmers!

PS: This technique will only work on 4.77MHz machines, as the timing required to change the palette is very exacting. Also, there is no way to capture, with a program, these screenshots; I had to capture them normally, then change the used colors where the split occured. They are identical to what's displayed on the screen, however, down to the additional color split in the names at the bottom of the title screen. Authenticity, baby! :-)