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I review games... How original...

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Nova 9 (Dynamix)

I can’t remain in the world of the 2600 forever, I need to branch out and expand, then promptly fall right back on the 2600 when I tire of the new stuff. So, what’s new today? Well, its big box PC games, if the 2600 game boxes weren’t big enough then these monsters will scratch your itch. Standard console game boxes are absolutely dwarfed by these behemoths, but this can have some positive effects. The artwork on some of these boxes is absolutely fantastic, and there’s something so rewarding abo
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Bobby Is Going Home (Bit Corp.)

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
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Enduro (Activision)

Of all of Activision’s 2600 games I feel that Enduro is probably one of their best. There were very few games of this style released on 2600; you had Pole Position, Fatal Run, Night Driver (debatably), and Enduro, and the only one out of those four that I actually enjoy is Enduro. Unlike most Activision ‘Avoid-it’ games, in Enduro your goal is not to set a best time, your goal is to drive past a set amount of cars over a period of time, and if you do you continue the game. Graphically this game
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James Bond: 007 5200 (Parker Brothers)

James Bond: 007 5200 (Parker Brothers)

Confusing licenses are the bread and butter of obscure games. Very few companies in the early days of gaming actually tried to tackle non-arcade licenses, with only 20th Century Fox, Atari, and Parker Brothers doing it in any quantity. The names these companies took just boggles the mind, box office bombs like Mega Force and Krull, movies that have been out of the public eye for years like Fantastic Voyage and Planet of the Apes, and comic book characters like Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk w
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Xenophobe (Atari)

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
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Carnival Shooter/Sabtotage (PD/Ultravision?)

I have for you all today another oddity that I found in my ROM folder, actually its two oddities but they’re strangely related. When doing my Shootin’ Gallery/Carnival review I found a game called Carnival Shooter, it is a strange seizure inducing non-game where you just shoot a bunch of strange objects that are whizzing around the screen. There is no end to the game there are no lives and there are no points, giving the game no discernable play value. The graphics are horrendous and I would ser
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Space Panic (Coleco)

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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Monday Box Review! (Mythicon)

Mythicon was a pool of optimism for success in the videogame market that ran dry quicker than it took for me to type this sentence. These guys were a blip on the radar, they came, and they went and were never seen again. I suppose it is rather remarkable then that so many copies of their games can be found in the wild, perhaps it was due to how Mythicon distributed their games, it seems they were sold in non-traditional retail outlets like grocery and department stores. The prices of the games m
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Karate (Ultravision)

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
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Chase the Chuck Wagon (Spectravision)

When one has worked in a grocery store, as I have, they sometimes will just pick items off the shelf and read the back, sometimes to see the nutritional information, or just to see which mega-corporation made it. Monopolies and Duopolies are nothing new, they’re everywhere: Proctor & Gamble, Nestle, Disney, and Unilever own much of the business in the U.S. and abroad, sometimes a brand that you thought was independent is actually owned by one of those big mega-corporations. The brand that su
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Chuck Norris Superkicks (Xonox)

Uh… What!?! They made a Chuck Norris game? Wait… Xonox made a Chuck Norris game!?! Well I just gotta play it now… … … I vastly regret… everything. So, this game exists. This game was released in 1983, right around the time that ol’ Chuck was gaining mainstream popularity, but he was doing Westerns not Kung Fu flicks (yet), which is what Superkicks would wind up being if it were a film. It’s just a classic case of “we’ve got a license for a celebrity, or other IP let’s just plaster their fac
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Escape from the Mindamaster (Starpath)

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
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Fast Eddie (20th Century Fox)

The 2600 has several single screen platformers in its library. Some are excellent like Donkey Kong, others are decent but with flaws like Infiltrate or Tron, and others just suck like Miner 2049’er. There is one platformer that I feel doesn’t get enough attention though, and that is 20th Century Fox’s Fast Eddie. If I were to equate the gameplay other games in the library I would have to say it’s a decent mix of Tron and Infiltrate. Graphically the game is nothing special and sound-wise the game
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Dragonstomper (Starpath)

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
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Commando (Activision)

Commando (Activision)

Late Atari Activision was one of the most ambitious yet misguided… things that ever happened for the system. After petering out in 1984 Activision decided to release a string of games for the system, and don’t forget, the NES had been out for three years at this point and the Genesis was right around the corner, as was the Game Boy. Games Activision released were ports of popular arcade games that had popular NES ports, games like Rampage, Kung Fu Master, and Double Dragon. There was even a sequ
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Killer Satellites (Starpath)

Let us cast ourselves back to that dark room where the brains behind Starpath worked their magic. They have already taken on several popular genres of games and come out the victor, but it seems it was time for something a bit for traditional, a sidescrolling space shooter in the same vein as Defender perhaps, but since it’s Starpath it’s gotta have a twist. It was this line of thinking that has led us to what I think is one of Starpath’s weakest efforts ‘Killer Satellites’, a Defender clone. I
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You hate dust? We got something for that!

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
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Jawbreaker (Tigervision)

Anybody who grew up in the 1990’s remembers Tiger Electronics, the creators of numerous LCD games of varying quality, and of the Game Com. Tiger had a video game division that went by the name of Tigervision who ported many different games from different publishers onto the 2600 and the more popular home computers of the time, they are also responsible for the game I’m reviewing today. Jawbreaker was originally programmed by Sierra On-Line, but the job of porting it to the 2600 fell to Tigervisi
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Tutankham (Parker Brothers)

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
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Story Machine (Spinnaker Software)

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
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Monty On The Run (Gremlin)

I must admit, even though I’m not very informed in the world of retro computing I do have a small and burgeoning love for the Commodore 64. As I found out after buying mine though most of the games are either on cassettes or 5 ¼ inch floppy disks, I have no desire to buy and set up such bulky machinery in my room as I don’t have the space for it, so I cheated. I bought an SD2IEC SD card reader, and intend on loading it up with all of the best, and worst, games for the system and play my life awa
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Super Cycle (Epyx)

I have seriously underestimated Epyx, I honestly didn’t realize how many games they produced back in the 80’s, but I’m not gonna get ahead of myself listing every one the games they published since we would be here all year, instead I’m going to focus on one of my favorite games on the C64 (apart from Monty On The Run) and that is Epyx’ Super Cycle. I love arcade style racing games, games like Rad Racer, Top Gear, Enduro, Outrun, even games like Extreme G and Lego Racers on N64 are some of my fa
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Journey: Escape (Data Age)

When people look at high profile failures on the 2600 the list usually starts with E.T. and ends with Pac-Man with nothing in between, but there is a game that is oft overlooked by the general public and that game is the one and only Journey: Escape. This is the game that killed Data Age, the marketing for this game cost the company 4.5 million dollars, roughly adjusted for inflation that’s over twelve million dollars today, that may not seem like a lot for a game today, but think of it this wa
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Wall Ball (Avalon Hill)

Wall Ball (Avalon Hill)

Okay so… When it comes to video games, or ideas in general, Original doesn’t always mean good. Sometimes it’s down to the execution of said idea, or the idea was just stupid in the first place. The realm, pertaining to gaming, where you see this most often in with game controllers, we’ve all seen some strange homunculus creature in the hands of some poor child who thinks they’re just bad at the game, but it also happens with games as well. Back when video games were a new media anything was poss
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Star Ship (Atari)

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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