Hangman aka Spelling

1978

Entry posted by Guest November 20, 2005

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Hangman aka Spelling, Atari VCS, 1978

If you are from a family that can afford an Atari VCS but can't afford a pencil and paper, this game is for you!

Hangman is the time-honored game of guessing a word by suggesting letters and punishing someone else by hanging them if you guess too many letters wrong before guessing the word. This used to be real fun, until someone suggested that it was illegal. At that time, we, as a society, had to resort to merely drawing the poor condemned bastard on a piece of paper.

My son and I were both of the opinion that if we couldn't figure out the mystery word, a pixelated representation of a human being should die for our failing. What punishment could be more fitting? "Can't spell something? Here, watch this person die!" When I went to Catholic grade-school, they had a prominent death displayed in every classroom. I think it helped our spelling.

Alas! There is no morbid depiction of a hanging person if you fail to guess the word. There is only a monkey. A happy, living monkey, one would assume, because he's hanging playfully from the gibbet that would otherwise display our doomed, mystery-word friend. That monkey mocks us! Merely by living!

The only way to judge a videogame of Hangman, other than by the level of gore, is by its vocabulary. Hangman has four levels of play: vocabulary up to 1st grade, up to 3rd grade, up to 9th grade and up to High School. The words are decent and can be challenging to guess, depending on your sobriety, but we were disappointed to see a repeat in the scant 10 minutes we actually played (it used the word "magnet" twice).

I guess it's interesting to be able to play Hangman by one's lonesome self with a computer. Normally, having to come up with a word by myself and then tricking myself into forgetting it can be quite trying. Having a computer come up with a word makes it a lot easier. Using a computer to play with a friend is also easier than finding a third friend who wouldn't mind making up words and being the hangman artiste. This is good, because, if there were ever two people who actually wanted to play Hangman with each other, you know they probably wouldn't have other friends to ask.

Let me just say, however, that if they weren't going to depict an awful, horrifying hanging death, they needn't have bothered. My son and I will never get nostalgic over this one.

Next Entry: Codebreaker!!! I have hopes for this one. I'm guessing it's like Mastermind so we'll see. That will be the last Atari game for 1978.