When one looks at the 2600, they predominantly see cartridges, everywhere, more cartridges than one could shake the proverbial stick at, but far away… Across a sea of cartridges there is a dark corner. Nestled deep into that corner are twelve games, twelve pristine examples of innovation, of quality over quantity, this is the realm of Starpath. This realm is a maelstrom of quality, almost untouched by the hands of the casual consumer of retro gaming goods, because these games didn’t come on cart
Hello readers of my mediocre content! I’m here to announce the next Week Of…
Some may have seen that earlier in the week I bought a Starpath/Arcadia Supercharger. As of writing this I have NONE of the games, I still intend to write reviews for every officially released Starpath Supercharger game though. I’m bending the rules here, since I have stated before that I will not review a game which I do not own, technically though I do own all of the games, as MP3 files stored on my crappy MP3 pl
I think it’s fair to say that the Colecovision WAS the home arcade system, Atari tried with the 2600 with mixed results, and around the time the Colecovision came out Atari tried again with the 5200, with… uh… even more mixed results. I suppose you could argue that both the Colecovision and the Atari 5200 had very similar flaws, in that the standard controllers were awful, either in design or build quality, or both. In the end the Colecovision was somewhat victorious, and then the market crashe
Am I the only one who still finds the fact that both Mattel and Coleco released games for the 2600 weird? I know it’s not uncommon today for publishers to release games for all available consoles, but usually the games are from third party publishers. Just imagine if Nintendo released a Mario game for the Playstation AND the Xbox, which just wouldn’t happen today. In rare cases like with Air Raiders, Mattel, who distributed their own, rather successful console, released an exclusive title on th
Am I wrong in thinking that the Atari 2600 “Red Box/Red Label” games are some of the most advanced that were made for the system? Yes I know these games were released in the console’s final years as a desperate bid by Atari to play on nostalgia, and squeeze a few more bucks out of the system, and that some were re-releases. Many though were clever, well programmed, highly advanced games that put the aging hardware to the test. Games like Motorodeo, Desert Falcon, Solaris, Midnight Magic, Dark Ch
OOPS! I accidentally put this one in draft and left like that, this review originally came out July 28th 2018.
Bobby Is Going Home has go to be the most well known game from Bit Corp. This is a very strange game, both in premise and in practice, this game is a basic Pitfall! clone, it shares many aspects with Pitfall! I will go into further depth later on in the review, but let me just say these this could be the unofficial sequel to Pitfall! it's so similar. I happened upon this game on Eba
Mystique is a punch-line to a bad joke that never should have been asked in the first place, that joke being “what happens when you put porn on the Atari?” This is an absolute travesty, and sadly enough there were two more punch-lines waiting in the wings, them being Universal-Gamex and Playaround. There is no way of sugarcoating these games; there are no positives that outweigh the overbearing negatives. These games are the lowest that the videogame industry has sunk, and that is quite an achie
20th Century Fox was, admittedly, one of the strangest publishers on the 2600. This was, in the most part, due to their partnership with Sirius Software Inc., the TCF classics Fast Eddie, Deadly Duck, Beany Bopper, and Worm War 1, were from Red Sirius, and they are all undeniably weird. And because Fox also owned the rights to many films they were also the “Movie Tie-In game” publisher as well, and as such they released several games based on their films and various IP’s. Somehow despite their v
Imagic was never short on creative game ideas, and in some cases their games were perhaps a bit too unique, if that's even possible... Unfortunately even the great must fall, regardless of their contributions to society, and unfortunately Imagic was no different. Without a doubt Imagic was the most prolific fatality of the crash of '83 and '84, and the rights to their most popular games were handed over to the very company they played second fiddle to, Activision. Now we all know about Imagic's
It's rather strange to think that one of Mattel's best games was released on their competitor's console, when they had their own, more powerful console just begging for a good unique game. Admittedly almost all of the M-Network games released on the 2600 were poor man's versions of their own Intellivision games, Space Battle, Sea Battle, and Lock 'N Chase come to mind. There was one game though, that was completely unique, and exclusive to the 2600, and that game was Air Raiders. This game falls
I'm kind of confused here.... Why would Amiga... THE Amiga make a game for the 2600? And why is it a skiing game? Now I'm sure just about every one of us know who Amiga is, Heck... even I know who Amiga is and I've proven, on many occasions, that I don't know squat about classic computing, If you don't know who Amiga is... Google them, it'll be a fun evening. After reading the little bio provided on AA it seems Amiga wanted to be the 'peripheral' guys, you know, the company that always has a un
Commavid was one of those companies that tried to make it on the 2600, unfortunately, just as soon as they'd found their stride the entire market collapsed. Many companies were swallowed up in the crash, some deservedly like Mythicon, Mystique, and Data Age. Others were killed before they could truly shine, Commavid was one of those companies. They released only six games, and two pieces of software during it's short life, but unlike many game companies which were copying each other, or themselv
Now this is a special review... Not only is this my 50th review, this is also my first Homebrew review. I actually only own one Homebrew game, and I think I have one of the best, that being Spiceware's Draconian. I love Namco's Bosconian, even though I'm not very good at it, so when I saw Draconian on the AA store I was immediately smitten. I bought it almost as soon as I saw what it was, Bosconian on the 2600, and when it arrived I was not disappointed. This has got to be one of the most advanc
Gateway to Apshai is one of the O.G. granddaddies of the top-down dungeon crawling RPG genre, and one of the granddaddies of adventure/RPG games in general. The game was released on the Atari 8-bit line of computers, the Commodore 64, and the Colecovision, I have neither the C64 or an Atari-computer, but I do have a Colecovision, and I have a Taiwan Cooper bootleg which goes by the name Gateway to Apsh (great name change there fellas, they'll never figure it out). The only thing standout about t
RUN EVERYBODY!!! IT'S FROGGO!!! Here's another Froggo classic, which of course is stolen from the rotting coffin that contains the corpse of Sancho, It's Sea Hawk! And my god... It's glorious. I won't pretend for a second that this is a good game,it really isn't, but it's still not the worst game that Froggo put out there, we all know which game that is. In essence Sea Hawk is Defender, but worse, or depending on how you look at it, Star Fox, but better. Seriously this game has very little in th
So we're back here again... And so soon, it's almost like I'm running out of ideas! Almost. I'll get around to mocki...reviewing Mythicon's other opus Star Fox, but for now we're looking at Sorcerer, which is arguably Mythicon's best game, it's the king of the crap. I recently bought a boxed copy off of Ebay for a fairly decent price, and have received on the night I'm writing this review, now I wasn't originally going to review this game, but it has something that none of my other Mythicon game
The Atari 2600 is home to many strange and weird titles, games like Journey Escape, Private Eye, and Word Zapper, but none is weirder than M-Network's Kool-Aid Man. I'm sure many of you would agree that the 2600 wasn't really big on sponsored games, there were a few to be sure, Journey Escape (again), and Krull are the first that come to mind, but those are either music or movies, Kool-Aid Man is advertising a consumable product (I ain't gonna call Kool-Aid food). I know there was a McDonalds ga
Hey, who remembers Ultravision? Those guys who announced a too-good-to-be-true console, scrapped it, then released a grand total of two games for the 2600 before vanishing entirely, the two games they released were Karate, and Condor Attack. Now, we've all seen Karate and we all know it's a piece of crap. Karate has been done to death, and that's probably why I'm never going to review it (unless I'm very desperate), but Condor Attack tends to 'fly' under the radar due to the fact there were very
Defender... One of the hardest classic arcade games ever made, what more is there to say about it? Well.. despite not being the first side scrolling shooter ever, it was the game which popularized the genre. Seriously this was the go-to game back in the 80's, which makes sense since it was Williams best selling arcade machine, they sold over fifty five thousand of these suckers. It's also one of the highest grossing arcade games ever, and for one simple reason, it's addictive. And when you combi
Alright kiddos, sit down and SHUT UP, because papa Spuds is gonna go real obscure on you today. To those collectors who live in the U.S. and Canada Zellers cartridges aren't too rare, they are far less common in the U.S. but they still show up once in a while. A little context is probably necessary, Zellers is a budget store that currently operates in Canada, back in the 80's instead of paying Atari or the other third party companies who published games for it's console, Zellers simply stole the
Alright! I'm reaching for some low hanging fruit today. Fire Fly from Mythicon, oh boy what a glorious mess of a game. This has got to be one of the most hated games on the 2600, and is without a doubt one of the worst.This game has been drawn and quartered, beheaded, and burned at the stake, in a figurative sense at least, by the retro gaming community at large. But is this game's persecution warranted? Or, perhaps, is this game a misunderstood masterpiece, that transcends all known standards o
You may remember how yesterday I commented that a top down shooter in the style of Ikari Warriors was impossible... Or was it? Well there is a game that gets this style of gameplay down, and it does it almost perfectly, that game is Front Line. This is the game that Ikari Warriors wishes it was. It works off of the same exact formula, but it does it well, unlike Ikari Warriors or even Activision's Commando. This game was released by Coleco, who had a decent but somewhat spotty record when it ca
"Oh, no honey... Don't do that..." Those were the first words I uttered when I heard that Ikari Warriors was ported onto the 2600. This was one of the final games on the system, released in 1990, the death year of the system, this game was inadvisable, even back then. This game is in the same vein as many of the late release red box games... Ports of games released on the NES, games like, KLAX, Xenophobe, and Roadrunner. Games that were just too big for the 2600, this is definitely one of those
This arcade conversion- wait... this was an arcade game? Huh... never heard of it, but if it's as decent as the 2600 version is, it must have been fairly popular... Okay, so I just looked a klov.com and this is one of the least common and/or popular arcade machines on there. Hmmm... Well it seems, for once, the port is better than the arcade game it was based on. This game was put out by CBS, who, as far as I can tell, has one of the best records in the 2600 library, no major stinkers whatsoever
Froggo... Froggo is my favorite publisher... they made such good games... Oh wait! Duh! They never made anything for 2600... Scratch that they made some boxes... and uh, the warranty cards were actually made out of card stock. Okay Froggo Sucks, they are the whipping boy of the Atari library, and deservedly so. Every single game released by Froggo on the Atari 2600 was either stolen, or stolen, the game we're looking at today, Sea Hunt, was torn from the rotting fetid hands of Sancho. Froggo has
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