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I review games... How original...

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K.C.'s Krazy Chase (Magnavox)

Copyright is a fickle thing, and many people do not understand copyright, in fact most people don’t, and as soon as somebody has an idea that is remotely similar to another more successful idea legal action is usually filed. This was the case with Magnavox/Philips K.C. Munchkin, a clone of Pac-Man that expanded upon the initial premise and modified much of the gameplay, which constitutes fair use. Atari, who owned the home console rights to create and distribute Pac-Man did not see things the sa
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The worst thing I ever bought.

The worst thing I ever bought… Well that’s a pretty easy answer for me.   Before I say what it is, I first want to justify myself, because this is a pretty stupid thing to buy in the first place. I had just gotten my tax return in and I was feeling expensive and impulsive, and I really wanted an item that I could show off and perhaps have to act as a conversation starter. I knew it was going to be a reproduction cart of some sort, but it had to be even better, a repro cart and box, now
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Gateway to Apshai (Epyx)

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
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SpaceChase *Re-reviewed* (Apollo)

I’ve been thinking back to my Spacechase review that I posted all the way back in June, it was my second review and I feel it is one of my worst. There is almost no talking about the game itself just me bashing it for being a bad game, and holy crap the second and fourth paragraphs are just one sentence each! That’s terrible! So I think it’s about time to go back and give this review a facelift.   Spacechase by Apollo is an unabashed and shameless copycat of Demon Attack that totall- Wait what
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Beat 'Em & Eat 'Em (Mystique)

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
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Communist Mutants From Space (Starpath)

Oh man, these guys are on a roll, only their second game and they’re redefining genres, with their first game Starpath took on the First-Person Space Shooter genre, and with their second they’ve taken on the ever classic Fly-Around-The-Bottom-Of-The-Screen-And-Shoot-At-Things genre, which contains juggernauts like Space Invaders, Galaxian, Galaga, Demon Attack, and GORF. Due to the restrictive hardware the Atari 2600 could only present most of these games in a restricted or cut back form, Galaga
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H.E.R.O. (Activision)

H.E.R.O. (Activision)

Hype. I don’t get it, I don’t get it one bit. I constantly hear from my coworkers about the newest game they’ve pre-ordered and I just can’t help but wonder, “what if the game sucks? You just wasted 60 dollars on a game you’ll never play more than a few times.” I know I’m one to talk, I’ve spent more than 60 dollars on games that I’ve barely played as well but I got them for collecting purposes and the fact that the games I’ve bought are more than download codes is a bonus as well, so I can rese
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Video Pinball (Atari)

This game is rather special to me, since it was the FIRST Atari 2600 game I had ever played, and it seems like a good time to review it since in about a week I’ll have something very special relating to pinball and the 2600 coming in, and I’m so very excited. Video Pinball is just one of those 2600 games, y’know the type, the games that sit on your shelf forever, but when you look at it you smile knowingly and nod your head, like “I know this game sucks, but I like it anyway”. And honestly, I wo
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London Blitz (Avalon Hill)

There were plenty of weird game publishers out there, Amiga, Milton Bradley, and Zimag are the first that come to mind. There is one publisher that I think stands above the rest, or at the very least is on par with the strangest of them, Avalon Hill. Avalon Hill made unique, innovative, and very complex board games, though I’ve never played any of them myself. These guys weren’t a one-and-done publisher; they actually managed to release four games on the 2600 before packing up shop and moving to
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Gyruss (Parker Brothers/Ultra)

Gyruss is one of those classic arcade games that has been lost to history. It made it's grand debut in 1983 and vanished in to relative obscurity in 1989 after the NES version was released in North America, it's been included in a plug 'n play or two, but the same thing goes for Namco's Bosconian, if anything this is Konami's Bosconian. This game is what I think the illicit love child of Galaga and Tempest would look like, and when it was released there was no follow up, no sequel, it just stop
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How to play 5200 games without the 5200

Yesterday I finally crossed a big name off of my ‘get’ list, a working Atari 5200, I have long had a busted one that I’ll just keep around for parts now. I don’t intend on buying any games for it or even hooking up to my TV because I still can’t really play it. I suppose that’s the unique thing about the 5200, some consoles are unattainable because of the price of the games, or of the unit itself. The 5200 is unique for a totally different reason, the controllers. Oftentimes a working 5200 contr
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Night Driver (Atari)

I think today I’m going to dial it back a bit; I’ve been fixated for too long on the graphically impressive or highly original. I think I’m just going to talk about an old favorite, I think I’ll talk about Night Driver. Night Driver is not a graphically impressive game, nor is it particularly astounding in the auditory department, but it has the one thing that trumps them all, fun.  On a visual level Night Driver is seriously lacking, all you’ll really be seeing is a shit-ton of red-ish pegs whi
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Defender Vs. Defender II/Stargate (Atari)

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
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Activision Avoid-It Anthology

It's the next 'Week Of' and this week we've got some real classics for ya! This week we'll cover (mostly) all of Activision's 'Avoid-It' games, games where the sole objective is to avoid objects to achieve the objective of getting either the lowest time, to the other side, or simply continuing the game.   The seven games I'll be reviewing are:   Grand Prix Barnstorming Keystone Kapers Freeway Enduro Skiing (It'll be on a Monday since I've already reviewed it) Sky Jinks  
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Berzerk (Atari)

Berzerk is an undeniable classic; everybody likes Berzerk it seems, apart from me. I’m not a fan of Berzerk but I can’t deny its legacy. Berzerk was one of the earliest top-down shooters and also one of the earliest games to have voice sampling. Inevitably the game was ported onto the 2600 where it maintained its success, and it was later ported to the 5200 and 8-Bit line as well. The 2600 port is very faithful to its source material, since the arcade wasn’t a very complex game to begin with. Th
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Sorcerer (Mythicon)

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
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Harrier 7 (Avantage)

Harrier 7 (Avantage)

Budget titles always have been, and always will be, mixed bags. You might get a hidden gem of a game or you might get stuck with a bunch of trash. I honestly don’t know how it was back in the 80’s with computer and console gaming being a bit more of a fledgling market, or even which publishers were considered budget, well I know of a few. The publisher of today’s game is most certainly a budget company, it’s pretty obvious, their tagline is “The best in low-priced entertainment software™” for cr
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Frankenstein's Monster (Data Age)

After a bit of persistence I finally managed to complete the Data Age collection, that’s right, now I have a copy of every single Data Age Title. This is probably one of the easiest and cheapest publisher collections to finish due to the fairly low number of games released and how common most of them are. The only other publishers I can think of that might be easier to complete are Mythicon, and Vidtec/U.S. Games for the same reasons as Data Age. But… almost every publisher has that one game tha
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Spike's Peak (Xonox)

Alright… So I promised that I would never review this game a long time ago in my Ghost Manor review but I feel that I now know enough about the game to give it a proper review. Spike’s Peak makes me cringe; I can find zero enjoyment from this game no matter how much I play it. Right now Spike’s Peak is the only Xonox game I have that I’ve yet to review and there is a very good reason for that, because playing this game puts me in a bad mood, so I must approach this game while already in a bad mo
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Fantastic Voyage (20th Century Fox)

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
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Bump 'n' Jump (Mattel, Telegames)

It’s arcade time! And today let’s looks at one of the rarer conversions on the 2600… Bump ‘n’ Jump! I have only just recently played the actual machine for the first time and I gotta say… Nice. Originally B-n-J was published by Mattel under their M-Network label, but I was lucky enough to stumble across a boxed copy of the slightly rarer NTSC Telegames variants on Etsy of all places. It seems a lot of those Telegames re-releases are in the PAL format so I just got really lucky with this one sinc
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Good Luck, Charlie Brown (Atari)

I think we’ll start out pretty mellow with Good Luck, Charlie Brown. This game was slated to be released in the summer of 1983, but as you can guess, that never happened. Many licensed games were claimed by the Video Game Crash and this one is no different. Due to how simple the game is I’ll condense the review a bit, there is no soundtrack so I’ll just omit that paragraph entirely (get used to that).   Graphically speaking GLCB looks fantastic, the screen is colorful and there is plenty of mo
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I know I just got back but...

I ain't feeling it, I haven't been feeling it for a while. I'm going to hold off posting until many of the current issues with the blogs have been resolved, and while that's happening I'm going to try and get some more inspiration which I feel has been sorely lacking recently.   It's a bit disheartening when the stuff I put my all into, and the stuff I'm really interested in get's very few views, mainly the PC game reviews. I know people will read what they're interested in and I know
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Dishaster (Zimag/CCE)

Its games like this that simply make me wonder “Why?” Why did a company release this game, what could they have hoped to achieve with a game like this? The short answer is always money, these companies that had no experience whatsoever in videogames simply got into the industry for the perceived wealth it would bring. Enter Zimag, these guys were in the game industry for less than a year, and guess which year that was? Yep 1983… so you can bet they didn’t last long. They released a grand total o
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Bugs (Data Age)

Even though I may have softened somewhat on Data Age as time has gone by it doesn’t mean I won’t still ridicule them for producing some awful titles, the three games that I would classify as ‘as bad as people say they are’ are as follows: Airlock, Warplock, and Bugs. Now, Bugs and I have a bit of a history together, in that it was the first Paddle game I bought, long before I actually had a set of Paddle controllers, so I got to look at it on my shelf for oh so long, and when I finally got my fi
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