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I review games... How original...

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A little help

Happy Monday! I recently got this Taiwan Cooper cart from Venezuela for one reason, the picture on the back. Sadly the game on the cart is not the game shown on the back of the box, an odd misprint. Does anybody know what game this is? It looks like some sort of Missile Command/Atlantis clone, and like all Taiwan Cooper boxes the description makes absolutely zero sense, so no help there. Any help would be appreciated, because I'd really like to play this game, it looks and sounds fun. If you wer
DoctorSpuds

DoctorSpuds

5
 

Wizard of Wor (CBS)

Wizard of Wor has got to be one of the best arcade ports on the 2600. Joe Hellesen and Joe Wagner have created a 4 kilobyte masterpiece. With smooth game play responsive controls and coop game play Wizard of Wor is a hard game to dislike. I've gotta be honest... I like this game, a LOT. It falls easily in my top 5 games for the system. And weirdly enough I can't really find any negatives with this game... Sure it doesn't have the Wizard of Wor taunting you from offscreen like in the arcade but t
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Mogul Maniac (Amiga)

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
DoctorSpuds

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9
 

Solaris (Atari/ Douglas Neubauer)

If you were to ask me what the greatest game on the 2600 is from a graphical, technical, and gameplay standpoint, I would hands down say ‘Solaris’. This game squeezed every drop of potential the 2600 had then added in a splash of its own, and the result is something that one would assume could only be created for a much more powerful system. As you would likely assume, ‘Solaris’ is a Red Box game and as such was released late into the 2600’s lifespan, even though it was 1986 I get the feeling 26
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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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5
 

Sea Hunt (Froggo/Sancho)

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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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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Kool-Aid Man (M-Network)

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
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Sorcerer's Apprentice (Atari)

Sorcerer’s Apprentice is an odd one to say the least. This was the only one of the four planned Disney games to be released on the 2600; it seems the market fell out from under Atari very soon after this game’s release. What year did this game release on? 1983? Oh, that would explain it. The three other planned Disney games were Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Donald Ducks Speedboat, and Dumbo’s Flying Circus, if you were wondering. All of these games have been recovered and it seems that they
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Mangia (Spectravision)

Spectravision was mostly known for their Quickshot brand of joysticks, but that didn’t prevent them from entering the home game market in early 1982. Spectravision released a grand total of eleven games for the 2600 before abandoning it in late 1982, eleven games in a year is quite impressive. They are also one of the rarer companies on the 2600, in that a majority of their catalog is an R5 or above. You can actually track the rough time when the games were released by their rarity, with the ear
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3
 

Space Cavern (Apollo)

While Space Cavern can only really be considered an 'Average' game, I find that it's actually kinda good, at least for Apollo. It's nothing too special just a guy running around on a rather cool gradient floor shootin' monsters... Huh? What? those aren't monsters? they're... *picks up manual* Electrosauri... whose horns generate.. uh... electr-ro molecular charges capable of disintegrating you? Huh... Well, it seems that more effort was placed into writing the story and drawing the box art than
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1
Super Space Invaders (Taito/Domark)

Super Space Invaders (Taito/Domark)

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
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Miner 2049'er (Tigervision)

Hooo boy! How did they get such a good game THIS stupendously wrong? The Miner 2049'er that was released on the Colecovision was fantastic whereas the version we got on the 2600 is rather legendary for it's inferiority for it's home computer and Colecovision counterparts. I saw this game cheap on Ebay and thought to myself 'why not?" and bought it... I put it in my 2600 and was immediately disappointing, this was nothing like what I was expecting, I'd played the Colecovision version and was expe
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5
 

Snail Vs Squirrel (Bit Corporation)

This game has been on the docket for a very, very, long time, but for the longest time I was completely stumped by it. I simply couldn’t play this game properly, until recently when I sat down and just played it, and looked up the manual on Atarimania but that isn’t important, what is important is that this is one of the strangest and most unique titles on the 2600, whilst having one of the most unique titles on the 2600. Snail Vs Squirrel or Snail Against Squirrel, or just Squirrel, it doesn’t
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4
 

Street Racer (Atari)

Of the nine titles that Atari released in 1977 I have reviewed three of them, them being Combat™, Star Ship™, and Indy 500™, I think it’s about time to add another to that list. Now I think we can all agree that some of these titles have not aged all that well, sure they were well liked back in the day (with the exception of Basic Math™ BLECH) but they were all new and unique ideas that hadn’t really been explored before on a home console, yes the Channel F did it first but Atari did it right. D
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2
 

Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom (Sega)

Before Sega was the darling of the 16-bit era it was the darling of arcades worldwide. With games like Zaxxon, Turbo, SubRoc 3D, and the classic Carnival, Sega was a force to be reckoned with in the arcades, but the console market was different for Sega. Many of Sega’s IP’s were already on the popular systems of the time but being released by other companies, so what do you do when all of your most popular games are being distributed by other companies? In Sega’s case, distribute non-Sega titles
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3
 

Star Raiders (Atari)

It is no secret that I’ve recently acquired an Atari 800 computer, and when I asked on the forum which games were the best to play on it, one game was recommended above all else… Star Raiders. I found this a little confusing since I had played Star Raiders on the 2600 and was thoroughly disappointed, but the game store I bought the 800 from did have a copy of it, so I bought it and played it, and now I know why people like it so very much. The 2600 Star Raiders absolutely pales in comparison to
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2
 

Popeye (Parker Brothers)

There are a lot of strange games out there, I know I keep reiterating this point but it’s like if I sneeze I find more weird games. I had previously though this particular game to be fairly normal but then I gave it a little though and realized that no this is a strange game indeed. Cast your eyes over to Japan and to Nintendo, it was 1982 and their home console, the Famicom, was still a short while away so what do they do in the meantime? Arcade games I guess. I don’t know why they chose Popeye
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2
 

Star Fox (Mythicon)

It’s time to finish off the unholy trinity. I’ve really been dreading reviewing this one, mainly because I view this as amongst the worst games ever created. Star Fox by Mythicon is an absolute train wreck, and yes it is one you can look away from. Star Fox was the third and final game from infamous publisher Mythicon before they went belly up in 1983. While the games that preceded it, Sorcerer and Fire Fly, are virtually identical to each other, Star Fox is actually an original game, much to my
DoctorSpuds

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4
 

Polaris (Tigervision)

OOH! Now here's a treat! Polaris... Wow what a game, It's gotta be one of my favorites for the system... Polaris is a submarine shooting game with other elements thrown in for good measure. Out of all the games that Tigervision published for the 2600 it's a near tie for me between this game and Jawbreaker as my favorite, but I think Polaris just beats it out. Now Tigervision, who were a subsidiary of Tiger Electronics, have put out some of the rarest and most expensive games on the 2600, thankfu
DoctorSpuds

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1
 

Skiing (Activision)

Okay, uh, so I have just realized that I haven’t written a single review about an Activision game, holy crap, how did I even manage that! Apart from Atari Activision has released the largest amount of games for the 2600, well let me rephrase that, Activision has the largest third-party game library on the 2600 with a whopping 46 released games (correct me if I’m wrong), more than any other third-party. I suppose Activision had a leg up in the competition being the first ever third-party game pub
DoctorSpuds

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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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Sir Lancelot (Xonox)

Well now if this isn’t a sight to behold, we’re back in the land of Xonox. These guys produced some of the most advanced, and beautiful games on the 2600, and they packaged them in a very unique way. When it comes to exotic cartridges Xonox has the competition beat with their Double Ender cartridges, each side has a different game and the things are massive. Playaround also did double ended cartridges but we don’t like to talk about them, since Xonox did it first and they did it best. I have on
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5
 

Phaser Patrol (Starpath)

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
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Condor Attack (Ultravision/Taiwan Cooper)

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
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