The main thing that I find characterizes these ‘Avoid-It’ games is simplicity, these games are simple therefore anybody can pick them up and have a good time with them, and because they’re so simple I think I’d be forgiven for giving many of these a single paragraph review, so without further ado lets review Grand Prix.
I believe James Rolfe (AVGN) said it best “It’s a bunch of kazoos flying through a cabbage patch…”, and I rather agree with him. The cars, while simple in design, are colorfu
It's the next 'Week Of' and this week we've got some real classics for ya!
This week we'll cover (mostly) all of Activision's 'Avoid-It' games, games where the sole objective is to avoid objects to achieve the objective of getting either the lowest time, to the other side, or simply continuing the game.
The seven games I'll be reviewing are:
Grand Prix
Barnstorming
Keystone Kapers
Freeway
Enduro
Skiing (It'll be on a Monday since I've already reviewed it)
Sky Jinks
It seems we have returned to the realm of the obscure. I have reviewed a game from this company before, and ever since I have been yearning for another of their games. Commavid is one of THOSE companies, none of their games ever had a wide release despite their overall quality and are as such rather rare today, two more companies I would define as one of THOSE companies are Tigervision, and Avalon Hill. AS I was browsing through Ebay, as one does, I found a listing for Room of Doom by Commavid i
I’m going to try something a bit different today, I’m going to try and compress an entire review into one paragraph, let’s go. Spacemaster X-7 is one of the more original games released by TCF, and as far as I can tell it isn’t tied in with any known license. The main objective of the game is to destroy the star base in the center of the screen, by shooting it a whole bunch; this is made more difficult with an expanding and contracting shield that has ever shifting entrances. It’s not smooth sai
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
Children’s games are nothing new, just about every console has them and most of them suck due in large part to them being far too simple and condescending for even children to play, but that hasn’t always been the case. On many of the older consoles, especially the 2600, you had games made for both adults and young children at the same, the one that comes to my mind is Missile Command where it has a disclaimer printed on the box that it has additional versions for young children, even Draconian
Who here remembers Dig Dug? All of you? Well that’s good because I WAS gonna talk about it today but instead of doing that I actually just kept playing the game, and by the time I realized I need to start writing the review I was out of time to write it. So, instead of putting it off a day I’m just going to tell you right now, if you don’t own Dig Dug on 2600 you NEED to get it right away, no joke I just spent three hours playing Dig Dug. I have tested the 2600, Intellivision, 7800, arcade via a
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
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-
Style over substance, an unfortunate vice that seems to grip many games released nowadays, as it seems all of the budget for them went to making the game look good not leaving enough for a developed plot or characters. We’ve seen this most recently with the Star Wars Battlefront games from EA, which, while being absolutely gorgeous have some of the most lackluster gameplay I’ve ever witnessed. There are games that do the opposite though, games like Stardew Valley and Terraria have very simple gr
Once upon a time, this game was rare, I mean THE rarest, I of course am referring to the fallen angel that it Motorodeo. Once it sat at a kingly R10 on the AtariAge rarity scale, now it only at a modest R5, how the great have fallen. We can thank Venezuela for this influx of new old-stock, these days you can find almost all of the Atari Red Box/label games for a modest price brand new, as long as you can stomach the shipping times. Venezuela also has a large amount of Taiwan Cooper carts which m
Outsourcing is nothing new; almost all big companies do it. Many different industries outsource whether it be for assembly, manufacturing, or acquisition of raw materials. Outsourcing is fairly common in the videogame industry as well; games like Aliens Colonial Marines were famously outsourced to smaller less capable developers much to the chagrin of the consuming populace. Fox is no different, when first breaching into the new burgeoning videogame industry they licensed the initial lineup of g
We all have a cart racer of choice; some prefer Mario Kart, others prefer Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing, and others still prefer Rascal Racers. There are so many cart racers out there that it’s impossible to name them all. There are a few though, myself included, whose cart racer of choice is something so outlandish and awesome that it could have only come from Lego… Hands up for all of those who remember Lego Racers. This is probably the most recent game I’ve covered so far and only my second
Out in the wild lands of Canada, there is a magical place known as Zellers, and at Zellers they sold wondrous things at a low price. Amongst these myriad budget items there were video games, strange ones at that, they came in red boxes with ‘ 2600 compatible’ emblazoned on the front in bold white letters, and the artwork was horrible. Well, whilst trawling through the endless pages of Ebay I found one of these ‘2600 compatible’ Zellers titles, Challenge, I was immediately intrigued because of th
This review is going to be very different than what you’re used to, instead of just reviewing a game I’m going to review and ENTIRE console. Enter the Mattel Children’s Discovery System, a drab little computer that was meant for very small children. I thinks this is one of the ugliest pieces of hardware I’ve ever laid my eyes on, its microscopic screen (16x48 Matrix LCD screen), and awful membrane keyboard make using this thing an absolute chore. Now this is actually a cartridge based computer,
I hate to say it but I’m feeling a bit lazy, so how about we pick some low hanging fruit for our review today. I’m feeling like a crappy movie tie-in game, how about that? There aren’t many to choose from, especially on the 2600, the only ones I can think of off-hand are Krull and Alien, ooh let’s review Alien! Yeah this is going to be different, I totally haven’t reviewed a Pac-Man type game before… hah hah haaah… Oh wait I reviewed Pac-Man. Screw it! I’m going to review Alien and there’s nothi
Since I mentioned it earlier in my Skiing review, I feel rather obligated to review it now. The Intellivision also has a skiing game called ‘Skiing’ and in my opinion, despite being on a far superior console is nowhere near as good as the 2600 version. Despite most of the game being identical to the 2600 version, the Intellivision’s Skiing has some flaws that completely kill the experience for me. Just a note before I dive into the review, actually this is something that kinda confuses some new
And the award for the worst name for a game ever goes to… Tape Worm by Spectravision. Did they actually know what a tapeworm was? Awful name aside the concept for this game also doesn’t really make sense, especially when you compare it with the title. In this game you play as Slinky, a ‘Spectraworm’, who loves fruit but is unable to acquire it so he eats a bunch beans and then acquires the fruit with excessive flatulence, wha-? We all know this is a ‘snake game’ but this whole package so far is
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
Pinball games on most any console are plentiful and cheap; there have been some great ones, like Rollerball on NES or Crueball on Genesis, and some not so great ones like Pinball Dreams on SNES. You may have noticed that over the past couple of days I’ve been reviewing pinball games, and for the most part I’ve found them to be decent but with many flaws. I like pinball video games because they are trying to emulate and analogue type game digitally, and the results are always interesting to see a
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
CRAP I did it again... I go to edit the review and then I accidentally put in draft. Oh well... now I just feel dumb
Airlock is one of those games that you forget exist, until one day you look at your shelf and you see it there, you think to yourself "how bad could it be?". You play it and then you remember... This is one of the stupidest, shallowest, and unnecessary games ever crapped out onto the 2600. Data Age really outdid themselves here, this has got to be, in my opinion, the worst gam
This game is rather special to me, since it was the FIRST Atari 2600 game I had ever played, and it seems like a good time to review it since in about a week I’ll have something very special relating to pinball and the 2600 coming in, and I’m so very excited. Video Pinball is just one of those 2600 games, y’know the type, the games that sit on your shelf forever, but when you look at it you smile knowingly and nod your head, like “I know this game sucks, but I like it anyway”. And honestly, I wo
I have been debating whether or not to review this game for a while now, mainly due to how complicated is actually is, but I have steeled my nerves and clenched my buttocks and am now gonna review Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin on the Mattel Intellivision. This is technically a sequel to AD&D Cloudy Mountain, which despite being a very complex game in its own right, did not live up to the moniker of ‘Advanced’ Dungeons & Dragons, there were no classes no leveling up,
Copyright is a fickle thing, and many people do not understand copyright, in fact most people don’t, and as soon as somebody has an idea that is remotely similar to another more successful idea legal action is usually filed. This was the case with Magnavox/Philips K.C. Munchkin, a clone of Pac-Man that expanded upon the initial premise and modified much of the gameplay, which constitutes fair use. Atari, who owned the home console rights to create and distribute Pac-Man did not see things the sa
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