latlk

1)Midnight Mutants 2)Ballblazer 3)Joust 4)Double Dragon 5)Xevious Worst: Jinx (I don't think I'm spelling that correctly...)

I'm going to politic my way through this: for enjoyment until I finally beat it, Midnight Mutants is the King. But for repeat play even after I mastered it, I go with Ballblazer. KLAX is the game I reach for first these days when I fire the system up, but it has the advantage of being a decade or so newer than the rest.

Battlezone (I know Super Huey is similar, but it's not as good!) Defender Just about any classic arcade ports would interest me, actually. Also, some kind of video pinball would be cool.

I worked from 1994 until late last year to assemble my collection (complete if you don't count the non-game Diagnostic Test and Monitor Carts; I also have the recently produced High Score, KLAX, and NTSC Sentinel), and the last 5 original carts I got were Sentinel (the useless PAL version, just for completeness) Planet Smashers Motor Psycho Commando Tank Command From my POV, Planet Smashers, Commando, and also Mean 18, which I'd been lucky enough to get earlier, just NEVER seemed to come on Ebay. The tragedy is that when I was in college in State College PA in the early '90's, the local Big Lots had, like, 50 Mean 18s for $1.00 apiece that they were trying to get rid of. Man, if I'd bought those up then, I'd have OWNED Ebay

Midnight Mutants is my favorite 7800 game because of the huge landscape it lays out in front of you and how you have to work to first perfect and then remember the best order to do things in and where the various treasures and weapons are located (getting lost in those tunnels is one of the most gloriously maddening experiences and any 7800 game). I love the boss creatures and the silly campfire stories about their origins. The only thing I didn't like about the game before I cracked its' final secrets is how after you grab the pumpkin, Grampa doesn't have any advice about what to do with it. Lamar

I got mine about two years ago on Ebay for $17.00. That was a time when there were a bunch on in a short period of time and briefly drove the prices down. Lamar

Midnight Mutants is one of my favorite 7800 games. You probably have to commit yourself to playing it a lot of times to get a feel for what order you should go after the various objects and boss characters. where all the shortcuts are, etc., but I think it's a lot of fun, especially the goony backstories that keep coming up. Any game where you've got to watch the level of "Mutant Ram Power" is OK in my book!

I think most people will agree that Tank Command is the toughest, it was the last one I got and I had to work hard on it before getting super lucky on an Ebay auction that seemed to go unnoticed by most everybody else. Mean 18 Ultimate Golf was harder to get than I thought, as was Motor Psycho. I hear that Title Match Pro Wrestling is tough, although I got a loose one cheap around the middle of my collecting. Planet Smashers is another title that doesn't seem to come up very often. But if you make a habit of checking "Atari 7800" on Ebay every 3 days or so, it's only a matter of time before just about everything comes up for a reasonable price, at least if you're not looking for perfect condition.

Here's my Realsports strategy: take pitches like crazy! This helps for two reasons: #1 is that the computer is much more likely to walk you than you are to get a hit with nobody on and #2, because the computer feels that it MUST throw to cut down the lead runner in any runners-on scenerio, it's much easier to get a hit with runners on than with the bases empty. That said, I've never scored more than 6 runs in a game and I still almost always lose. But I think the only fun thing about the game is that it's darn near impossible. Lamar

A couple of years ago, I got a loose Titlematch for $10.00 on Ebay. It's far from mint-one of those carts that only works if you get it in the slot just right-but it's not a very good game anyway, so I don't mind. Lamar

I won that $37.00 one, couldn't believe my luck! I bid $120.00 in an all-out effort to finally get one and it closed about 80 bucks less. It was the last of the original games I needed to complete my collection, and is actually a lot of fun, kind of like the part of Ikari Warriors where you're in the tank as a whole game. Now all I need is my replacement KLAX (the original arrived broken but they've been great about replacing it) and the old vaguely useless-sounding Diagnostic and Monitor carts. And maybe 32-in-1 just for show even though it won't play on my system. Lamar

Although I'd jiggle the order, most of these are on-target. Midnight Mutants is my favorite, although once you get good at it it takes about an hour to play one game, so I don't play as much as I used to. I'd ditch Ninja Golf (never got the big deal about this one, there are better golf and ninja games for the 7800; maybe it would be more fun in three dimensions), Food Fight (fun for a while, but once you get good it becomes kinda dull), and Crossbow (not enough fun to be as difficult as it is) and substitute Double Dragon, Joust, & Water Ski (I know nobody likes that one, but they're all wrong, do you hear me, wrong!). My favorite guilty pleasure is that awful Realsports Baseball, which in no way resembles baseball, but is really addictive in its' own stupid, unbeatable way.

Can anyone give me the link for Video 61? I don't seem to have it on my list of 7800 bookmarks. Thanks.

Congrats! I didn't have much trouble snagging Basketbrawl (one of my favorite 7800 carts) off Ebay , but Tank Command, the Monitor and Diagnostic carts, and also that Australian 32-in-1 that I'd like to have just for completeness sake have eluded me. You just never see these on the auctions or any of the retail sites I've looked at, at least for less than $100.00 or so.

I think they were only available in Europe when the 7800 was originally out, although I think I might have learned that on Ebay, so you'd have to take it with a grain of salt. I don't like them at all, but I had to have a pair for my collection (I'm wacky that way).