What the hell… Let’s review Combat… This review is neither overdue nor actually expected I was just looking at my game shelf and thought the first six words of this review. Combat is iconic; people who’ve never even held a game controller know about Combat, it is for many people the epitome of the word videogame. Combat was the pack-in game for almost every single Atari VCS up until 1982, with the main exception being the Sears brand consoles that had Target-Fun (Air Sea Battle) as the pack-in t
Time for the Intellivision! AD&D has got to be my favorite game for the Intellivision. This is one of the granddaddies of adventure games so the plot isn't too compelling. Here's the entire plot in one sentence: Three archer dudes go to the legendary Cloudy Mountain to recover the Crown of Kings from the evil Winged Dragons. It's a nice basic plot that sets you up for the game. Now if your expecting the complexity and depth of the D&D board game you will be sorely disappointed since this
What time is it? You guessed it its crappy movie tie-in time, and what disappointing movie-based game are we going to be looking at today? Krull? No… Ghostbusters? Nah! Philly Flasher?.. Hell no! Ah! Of course there can be no other than Mega Force! Who remembers Mega Force? ‘cause I don’t, this movie was a total flop at the box office barely making back a quarter of its 20 million dollar budget. It’s your standard Mad Max style post apocalyptic future with awesome vehicles and explosions everywh
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
I'm feeling lazy today, so I'm just going to review Atari's Bowling. This has got to be one of the most basic games on the 2600, both in game-play, sound, and graphics. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I find that the game gets it's message across rather well, that message being bowling. Sorry If this is a short review but there isn't much TO review... onto the graphics.
Minimal doesn't even begin to cover this... This game almost has no graphics. Two lines for the lane... ten squares
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
This is going to be a difficult game to look at since it feels almost blasphemous to do so; the first of something is always sacred. Pitfall (I’m omitting the ‘!’ because Word freaks out and capitalizes everything), is generally referred to as the first side-scrolling platforming game, or at least the first one to do it right. It is one of the best selling games on the 2600 and is considered one of the best games on the console, if not ever for its contributions to gaming as a whole. But, and th
I am well and truly lacking inspiration for a game review today, nothing is jumping out at me in any meaningful way. So instead of doing a review that I don’t really want to I’ll do something else that I keep putting on the backburner, and don’t worry it’s not a new thing for Mondays, it’s just the thing I’m currently doing for Mondays. I’m just going to take a look at some more boxes, there’s always something to talk about with those, and I honestly have fun doing it, I’ve kept them relegated t
So… This Atari 800 computer was found in the basement of West High School in Madison WI. It was with 2 other 800’s, and 800X and a 520ST, there was also an Atari 820 printer, four 5 ½ inch floppy drives, and an Atari 850 interface. The 800X works as do all the floppy drives,the 520ST is not functioning due to an issue with the power button and likely something else,and two of the three 800”s are functioning as well, it is unknown if the 820 or 850 work since we have no idea how to hook them up
Man, I hate to do the cliché thing of calling the thing I’m reviewing ‘terrible’ right off the bat, but seriously, the RCA Studio II might just be the most woeful games console I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Just a warning, my Google-Fu is pretty weak for this console in particular, mainly because there isn’t a whole lot that exists on it, and because it was disco-ed so quickly.
I got lucky recently. At my local game store he gets all sorts of weird crap in, and by weird
This game is so weird... It takes a concept that should never be made into a game, spelling, and made it into a game.This is one of the few third party educational games for the 2600, though I would say it accomplishes neither of the criteria to be an educational game, that being educational, and fun. This game learns you nothing and is not fun to play.. So what is it!?... Say it with me!! Crap, Crap! CRAP!! Who thought this was a good Idea? Was Vidtec U.S. Games dumping ground? Was Vidtec to U.
Alright guys this is the final non-game I’m looking at for a while I promise but this one is just so strange. I won’t actually be talking about the game all too much since there is almost nothing to talk about in the first place. Comitoid is absolutely mind boggling, it is the textbook definition of confusing. All you do is fly a little spaceship around as it automatically shoots at large flashing objects. There are so sounds, there are no points, and most importantly you cannot be destroyed, so
Street Fighter II: The Baddest Brawl Of Them All… Well they were right about one thing.. There was a time a long, long, time ago when the battle for gaming superiority wasn’t quite as one-sided as it is today, the battle between consoles and home computers. Now I’ll admit that I know very little about computers from this era, all of my knowledge stems from the early Commodore and Atari 8-bit machines, not the burly 386, 486, and Pentuim machines of the late 80’s through the 90’s. Around the
Okay so despite already doing a box review this past week I’m still going to do one this Monday, because consistency. Usually I will hem and haw in front of my shelf for several minutes when choosing a box to review but today was different; it almost seemed as if the boxes were calling out to me. It seems that nobody, not even a potato on the internet, can resist the power of pornography. Yes we’re looking at the Mystique boxes today, and even though I only have two of the three I think I can st
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
Oh look, another Space Invaders game, woo, how fantastic. A cursory search of Space Invaders on MobyGames will net you over 250 results and that’s not counting the rip-offs. Space Invaders might just be one of the most copied formulas in the history of gaming, hell almost a quarter of the Atari 2600 library (not really) is just the basic premise of Space Invaders, move-around-the-bottom-of-the-screen-and-shoot-at-things, but with a few tweaks here and there, and this is when the game concept was
Since the beginning of time there has been dust and since almost the beginning of gaming there have been ways of keeping dust off of your stuff. With the 2600’s unique ridged design it has a very striking look to it but it’s also a bastard to clean as all of us who’ve had basement/garage/thrift store finds know. The 2600 is a goddam dust magnet, and since its conception there have been ways of preventing such uncleanliness from occurring. Atari was clever, they build dust covers into their cartr
First-person space shooters are nothing new on the 2600, you have your classics, like Star Master, Star Raiders, and Star Voyager, then there are your not-so-classics, like Star Ship, and Space Attack, but there is one game that gets swept under the rug every time the topic is brought up, maybe it’s because the title doesn’t begin with ‘Star’ or ‘Space’ but the game is Phaser Patrol, and in my opinion it’s better than all of the others combined. I think the main reason why it doesn’t come up ver
We’re back with Commavid today but which game to choose? Mines of Minos… Why? It has the best box art, and it’s unique, and well… It’s fun (Also CaptainBreakout recommended it, so yeah I gotta do it now). Mines of Minos is not a graphically impressive game, Commavid games rarely are they tend to make it up with fun and interesting gameplay. If you want a game to compare the graphics to Entombed by U.S. Games is almost a dead ringer. Enemy design is quite good, they’re large and fairly detailed,
Alright folks this is going to be a difficult game for me to review today, mainly because I have a rather large bias against this game. The game today is The Official Frogger by Sega, and I have a confession to make… I kinda hate Frogger. Yes-yes-yes, get your torches and pitchforks and skewer the heretic, I know Frogger is an absolute classic, but there’s something about it that just doesn’t gel with me, I’ll try to explain it more in the review, but suffice to say, this will be a bit difficult
Gamma-Attack, much like Air Raid, has languished in obscurity and myth for many years until its eventual discovery in 2008. From the get-go this game was set up to have a very limited release, and to truly understand HOW limited we have to briefly take a look at the company that made it, Gammation. Gammation was a one man company out of Ohio that made and sold turbo attachments for the 2600 through mail-order. The only way to get business would be to have ads in the large gaming magazines, and f
This game seems to be rather polarizing in the community, mainly since it’s the only game I have been actively told to avoid reviewing at all costs, but mankind never got anywhere by playing it safe. So… for your delectation I present to you Karate by Ultravision. Unlike its brother game Condor Attack, Karate actually had an accessible and affordable re-release in the form of Froggo, and the inevitable Taiwan Cooper bootleg. I decided to get the Taiwan Cooper version for one deciding reason, and
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
Ladies and gentleman… I have returned, and today I’m going to be doing something a little different. A little while back I played ‘Story Machine’ by Spinnaker Software for the C64, and it was probably the greatest thing I ever experienced as a player and peruser of retro videogames. Today I will not be reviewing the gameplay, sounds and graphics; I will be doing something else. The game has a story generator and I’ll be transcribing five stories for all of you today. I’ll include screenshots if
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
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