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About this blog

I review games... How original...

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New speakers!

My cheap desktop sound system has gained two new members!   I recently gave in to temptation and took a grand tour around the handful of antique malls and junk shops in and around Portland to get a general vibe on which ones I should keep an eye on in future. A few of them piqued my interest even though I didn’t wind up buying anything. One thing I did encounter more than a few times on my tour were old Realistic brand speakers, all for a bit more than I’d like to pay for them, especia

DoctorSpuds

DoctorSpuds

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

DoctorSpuds

DoctorSpuds

Finally Got A 7800 & Bootleg Enduro!

It has finally happened! I have finally gotten my grubby hands on an Atari 7800! Thank you all for your advice with this beast of a machine, the warning about the fragility of the case especially. I got this thing cheap, cheaper than usual. I got the system, power supply, two Pain-Line’s, a set of Paddles, three games, and a small storage case for about 71 dollars, and whaddaya know it was packed pretty horribly.  The rear left corner of the system cracked into several large pieces and many tiny

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DoctorSpuds

Lost Luggage (Apollo)

Alright, this is it, the final game from Apollo that I have yet to review. I have stated multiple times that I have absolutely zero interest in reviewing Lost Luggage on several occasions, but it seems now I have no choice. Honestly the only thing that spurred this decision was something that I saw in the manual, so let’s not dawdle and let’s just review it; I’ve done 10 of these already I have nothing to fill the first paragraph with at this point.     There are elements of

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DoctorSpuds

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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DoctorSpuds

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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DoctorSpuds

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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DoctorSpuds

Marauder (Tigervision)

I think we can all agree that Tigervision was an all around okay company, they published some pretty excellent games like Polaris and Jawbreaker, but they also had a few stinkers as well. But apart from their incredibly rare and expensive games and their incredibly terrible games there were a few in the middle that just seem to get no attention whatsoever, games like King Kong, Threshold, and Marauder always seem to fly under the radar. Perhaps there is a reason for that, today let’s just focus

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DoctorSpuds

Bachelor Party (Mystique)

Dammit Mystique! I thought I took you behind the utility shed and put a slug through your miserable skull a long time ago. As it turns out I’m a fool, Mystique never dies, it is a zombie of a company, shuffling around and vomiting its wares into any store that would take it. Mystique! What do you have to say for yourself? “It’s a joke?” My boy, this isn’t 2015 YouTube anymore that shit won’t fly, it didn’t fly in 1982, and it sure as shit doesn’t fly now, that being said I don’t care. Bachelor P

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DoctorSpuds

Infiltrate (Apollo)

Apollo presented the games market with a very mixed bag of games. Some were rather fun to play but not very original, like Space Cavern, others were original but not at all fun to play, like Racquetball. One game though seemed to rise above the rest, garnering a somewhat cult status in some circles, that game is Infiltrate. It’s impressive that a game company which appeared and vanished so very quickly even had any offering at all; Apollo was a flash in the pan even when compared to other third-

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DoctorSpuds

I'm giving Wordpress a shot

I've decided to expand my operation to Wordpress in an attempt to get my reviews in front of more eyes. This does not mean I'll stop posting here though, you'll keep getting your regularly scheduled dosage of reviews don't you worry. Starting off I'll be posting my old reviews a couple a day so it'll take a while for it to catch up with the blog here, the only difference between those reviews and the reviews here are a hefty amount of spellchecking and punctuation correcting.

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DoctorSpuds

Keystone Kapers (Activision)

You’ll likely remember how in Sunday’s review I criticized Barnstorming for being ‘style over substance’, well I think Keystone Kapers may have finally balanced these two opposing forces. The premise is fairly basic, you are a cop who needs to catch a burglar who is escaping through a shopping mall, you must avoid obstacles in order to catch the thieving fiend. Everything in this game screams effort, from the animated escalators, to the running animations of both the cop and the burglar, to tha

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DoctorSpuds

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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DoctorSpuds

Warplock (Data Age)

This game is just plain awful. Game-play , sounds, and graphics are just plain awful. I will attempt to make it more clear in this review just how this game sucks. Data Age weren't known for making the best games, or even average games, in fact they mostly made crap. Games like Sssnake, Bugs, Airlock, and Journey: Escape, tend to be on the bottom of the barrel when it comes collecting, apart from Frankenstein's Monster, for some reason that game has gotten rather expensive. But despite all of th

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DoctorSpuds

Thunderball! (Magnavox)

Remember the old saying “anything you can do I can do better”? Well when Atari is riding on the top of the world, there were a bunch of console manufacturers and game programmers saying that exact same thing, usually followed by failure. The Odyssey 2, we all know about the Odyssey 2, I’ve talked about it before, and how it was rather disappointing, never quite living up to the slogan ‘The excitement of a game, the mind of a computer’. It seems that Magnavox/Philips saw what Atari was doing with

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DoctorSpuds

Kickman (Commodore)

We’ve all heard of the famous Commodore 64, so I won’t be going into any extraneous detail about it. But if there’s one thing many people don’t know about the C64… and that’s just how many games were released for it, my best guess puts the count near 17000 games, with more being discovered all the time, this thing is a serious gaming powerhouse. Instead of delving into the weird and the strange, I’m instead going to delve into the downright freaky with Kickman. Produced by Commodore under licens

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DoctorSpuds

Survival Island (Starpath)

It’s time we turn our attention away from the Supercharger games that had the nice boxes and manuals, and look at the final two games released for the system. These games were not sold in stores, and were only available through mail-order, which as we know from other mail-order games increases the rarity and value immensely. Unfortunately these final two games are sometimes regarded as the worst games for the Supercharger, which is rather unfair since they are both as original and perhaps even m

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DoctorSpuds

Party Mix (Starpath)

I’ve said before that some games are difficult to review, but this may actually be the hardest game to review out of the lot of them, because it’s very difficult to review a party game by yourself. It’s mainly because I don’t know a single person in 50 miles that actually wants to play 2600 with me, and I only have a single pair of Paddle controllers to boot. This game is rather amazing, in both concept and execution, a four player party game with three minigames that actually engage all four pl

DoctorSpuds

DoctorSpuds

Rabbit Transit (Starpath)

Alright, so what genre of game is Starpath trying to improve upon today? We’ve already gotten FPS space shooters, Galaga, Breakout, Asteroids, first-person-maze-puzzle-solving, RPG, and Defender, out of the way, so what’s popular and doesn’t have a particularly amazing home port? Well Q*Bert of course! Yes, Starpath’s eighth offering, Rabbit Transit, is a Q*Bert clone, and a damn good one if I might add. I’ve already done a comparison review on the three most popular console ports of Q*Bert, so

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DoctorSpuds

Fire Fly (Mythicon)

Alright! I'm reaching for some low hanging fruit today. Fire Fly from Mythicon, oh boy what a glorious mess of a game. This has got to be one of the most hated games on the 2600, and is without a doubt one of the worst.This game has been drawn and quartered, beheaded, and burned at the stake, in a figurative sense at least, by the retro gaming community at large. But is this game's persecution warranted? Or, perhaps, is this game a misunderstood masterpiece, that transcends all known standards o

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DoctorSpuds

Front Line (Coleco)

You may remember how yesterday I commented that a top down shooter in the style of Ikari Warriors was impossible... Or was it? Well there is a game that gets this style of gameplay down, and it does it almost perfectly, that game is Front Line. This is the game that Ikari Warriors wishes it was. It works off of the same exact formula, but it does it well, unlike Ikari Warriors or even Activision's Commando. This game was released by Coleco, who had a decent but somewhat spotty record when it ca

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DoctorSpuds

Commando Raid (Vidtec/U.S. Games)

I would describe Commando Raid as a decent mix of Atlantis by Imagic and Atari's Missile Command, and is among the better games released under the Vidtec label. I will not deny this game's quality of programming since it is indeed high, at least when compared to other games from Vidtec. This was actually the final game I needed to complete my Vidtec 'collection', does that ever happen to you? You need a rather common game to round off a publisher set, and it's probably the most common one they p

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DoctorSpuds

Tank Brigade (Panda)

Tank Brigade otherwise known as Tanks But No Tanks falls under the same category as Strategy X as being so challenging that it's addictive. This game was put out by Panda inc.. Panda was definitely one of the lesser known publishers on the 2600, mostly because most of their games were either stolen or licensed from Sancho. Several of their games were later re-sold by Froggo, yeah this is the level we're at here. I don't know if this game was stolen from Zimag, or if Zimag stole/licensed this gam

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DoctorSpuds

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Mattel Electronics)

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

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DoctorSpuds

Flash Gordon (20th Century Fox)

This game shouldn't have been made. A game based on a 1980 movie that was based on a forty year old TV show, this should not have happened, and it's almost a crime for it to be this good. I've never watched the show, even though as I'm writing this I'm staring a a two VHS Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe set that I bought forever ago and still haven't watched, so I'm going to be remedying that soon. I've also never watched the movie, but from what I've heard I'm not missing much. But there is

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