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
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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:
- making sure that the graphics had a horizontal boundary somewhere on the screen that wouldn't look funny by a color switch, and
- 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! :-)
