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
Alright so it's a Tournament 2000 by Unisonic, on its own that's not very interesting but stay with me here.
The box is unlike any other I've seen, it's most certainly not a standard Unisonic box.
The thing is completely unbranded and it looks like the thing was printed with ink rollers.
The console itself is the only thing that says Unisonic on it and the serial number is pretty high so maybe it was a budget thing to cut costs?
Frankly its weird and cool and I'm happy to ha
So I’m gone for over a week and what do I come back with? Space Attack, a very bad idea from Mattel. Mattel’s MO was to make, slightly inferior perhaps, ports of their Intellivision games and release them on the 2600 to entice people over to the Intellivision, whether it worked or not is anyone’s guess. Most of the games Mattel ported were simple shooters that didn’t require much use of the Intellivision’s keypad controller, Space Attack, or Space Battle as the INTV port was called, is the major
I have a rant for you, I’m very tired and it’s very rambly but I think I may have made a few good points.
Here’s something odd that many people have a hard time coming to terms with, rarity does not equal value. When the topic of old games comes up in conversation I usually have to reiterate this multiple times, and almost every time I do this the person I’m talking to gets that greedy little gleam in their eye. “Oh, I have a Nintendo/Atari/Sega in the basement, and I have a bunch of
Qix is a fun little arcade game than seems to defy any standard one would care to throw at it. Qix was an arcade release from Taito back in 1981 and by all accounts it was a modest success and it was all about drawing rectangles, hmmm. Qix was very slow to reach a home audience with the first home releases being for the Atari 5200 and 8-Bit computer line in 1983 with it finally reaching other consoles and computers in 1989 and into the early 1990’s, the Apple ][ version didn’t come out until 198
Originality in games is not a dead concept though it is getting harder and harder to find as more and more games fill the same genres while attempting to stand out from the rest with a unique concept, visual style, gameplay element(s), or some mix of the three. Some games succeed at originality and other don’t, but the game I’m looking at today isn’t even trying to be original, in fact it almost seems to relish how generic it is, but it shouldn’t have been this way. Threshold is a game made by O
There are many words I can use to describe Cosmic Corridor, 953 to be exact. This is the final game from Bit Corp. (That I know of) that I have yet to review, and it is quite possibly the worst. In fact I would go so far as to say Cosmic Corridor, or Space Tunnel in Europe, is one of if not the worst shooters/games on the 2600. I’ll freely admit that there are some terrible games in the 2600 library, Skeet Shoot being my prime example but others like Strawberry Shortcake or the Froggo games, but
There is nothing worse than a common game that is locked behind an obscure peripheral. In the case of most Atari games with these obscure peripherals you can still play the game normally since these things only act as a substitute for the standard controller. Milton Bradley Games and many of the games slated to be released by Amiga are prime examples of this, there are three games however that ARE locked behind this wall of inaccessibility, Sentinel by Atari which required the usage of an XE lig
I’ve debated whether or not I should review this game for some time, due to its complexity, but I’ve decided that now is the time. There are advanced games for the 2600, Solaris, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Dragonstomper being excellent examples, but there is one that I think beats them all out in terms of volume, and complexity. Mountain King is one of those OG games that never seems to get talked about anymore, kinda like Miner 2049’er or the Jumpman series of games, games that were big for a
It’s sequel time, and boy do we have a doozy today. We all know about the Atari 8-bit line of computers that were launched in 1979 starting with the Atari 400 and Atari 800. Without question the most beloved game on those computers is without a doubt Star Raiders, it is a classic. So what do you do when you have such a popular game? Well, you make a sequel of course! Luckily for Atari a member of their Coin-Op department Aric Wilmunder had almost completed a sequel to Star Raiders; it truly was
I don’t think I’ve ever actually done one of these but I’d like to give a few updates on the state of my collection. Let me start off with this, I have absolutely no ideas for future reviews, I’m completely out of them, so if anybody has recommendations for games good, bad, or obscure I’d love to hear them. This happened a little while back but I do feel it’s worth mentioning. Back when I got my UNO Cart I decided to sell half of my collection, some of the stuff I sold earlier too. I no longer h
Ever since the inception of DSRT I've been keeping a Word document with every single review I've written in it, alongside .txt files of every review as well (in case I need them for quick reference), after depositing my most recent review into the Master Document I noticed just how much I've wrote. With double spacing and 11pt font the document comes in at just shy of 440 pages with a word count of 154,098. This realization got me thinking... What if I selected the best of my reviews and condens
When it comes to Catch ‘em games one reigns supreme Kaboom! But we’re not going to be reviewing Kaboom! for a while, we’re looking at one of the games it inspired. Which could be? Could it be Lost Luggage, Eggomania, Big Bird’s Egg Catch, Berenstain Bears, did I find the unreleased prototype of Kickman? (Hint: it’s no). I’ve already looked at two of the more notorious Catch ‘em games, Beat ‘em & Eat ‘em and The Music Machine, and chances are you’ve read the title to this review so you alread
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
Hmm... Now here's a game that definitely would have benefited from some more powerful hardware, that's why they made versions for the Colecovision and Intellivision, unfortunately both of those versions are very expensive, the Intellivision version in particular. But we're lookin' at the Atari 2600 port of the game, which is by far the most inferior port. I am rather indifferent to this game in all honesty. It does have positives which deserve recognition and it also has negatives which need a l
Well now, ain’t this a surprise, when one thinks ‘Atari 2600’ they usually think low resolution graphics, E.T., arcade ports that rarely stack up to the original, but not a top-down turn-based RPG, never that. Clearly Starpath saw what was going on over in the land of PC’s and was like ‘yeah we can do that on the 2600, easily’ and they did it, and the outcome was Dragonstomper, the only turn-based RPG ever made during the systems original run. The story is classic, there is a picturesque peacefu
Despite how limiting the 2600 hardware was, there were several companies who attempted to create first-person maze exploration games, some were pulled off rather well, like Tunnel Runner from CBS. There were also maze exploration games that were a little crappy, games like London Blitz from Avalon Hill and, Fox’s Crypts of Chaos were slow moving clunky and were either too easy or too difficult. I’m excluding games like Milton Bradley’s Survival Run, while being a first-person game; it’s not the
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 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
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
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.
Space Jockey is... a game... I think that's truly the highest praise I can give it, It does nothing new, it does nothing special, it is the most vanilla side scrolling shooter on the system. This is rather saddening since this game was programmed by Garry Kitchen... The same Garry Kitchen who programmed Keystone Kapers, Pressure Cooker, and Donkey Kong, I don't know what happened, but to see such creativity boiled down to something so basic is rather sad to see. Your first clue as to the basenes
OH YEAH! Now here's a game I can get behind! I love me some Demon Attack. This classic game from Imagic is regarded as being one of the best games released for the 2600, I'm tempted to agree with that statement, but but there's competition afoot. The 2600 wasn't the only console to receive Demon Attack, the Intellivision also has Demon attack in it's library and I think it might just be better than the 2600 version. There was also a version on Odyssey 2 but I'm not paying that much for Demon Att
Oh boy here we go! Star Ship, a game that was so bad when it came out in 1977 that It was removed from sale by Atari in 1980, and Atari almost never pulled games from sale so you know it's gotta be bad. I will be cutting this game a lot of slack in this review though, due to the fact it was released in 1977 as a launch title, and we all know that many of these games have not aged well at all, with perhaps the exception of Indy 500. This game is a first person space shooter, now that sounds aweso
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