Dishaster (Zimag/CCE)
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Entry posted by DoctorSpuds
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Its games like this that simply make me wonder “Why?” Why did a company release this game, what could they have hoped to achieve with a game like this? The short answer is always money, these companies that had no experience whatsoever in videogames simply got into the industry for the perceived wealth it would bring. Enter Zimag, these guys were in the game industry for less than a year, and guess which year that was? Yep 1983… so you can bet they didn’t last long. They released a grand total of four games on the 2600 and six games on the Atari 8-bit family of computers, but here’s the thing, I actually wish Zimag was more successful since these guys were a link to both CCE and the legendary Bit Corp., amongst other weird publishers. If only Zimag had lasted longer, who knows what weird and obscure games they’d have brought to the U.S. market, in their one and only catalog it says they had planned to release a game called Pizza Chef and Immies and Aggies for 2600, you can find the ROM for Immies and Aggies and Pizza Chef, but it would have been cool to get them as actual cartridge releases here in the U.S.. But we need to talk about one of Zimag’s actual released games, and my goodness it is regarded as one of the worst games in the 2600 library, Dishaster, otherwise known as Dancing Plates. Stand back people, this is gonna get messy.
This game is very, very purple, and looks somewhat awful. At the top of the screen there are what I’m assuming are the tops of circus tents, but they could be radioactive rainbow pyramids for all I know. The bulk of the screen is taken up by purple with ten long light purple vertical lines interspersed across the screen. This game has about four moving parts, there is the girl you control who actually has more than two frames of animation, she actually has three frames of animation. The rest of the movement is taken up by the plates that reside on the tops of the long purple lines, first the plates will begin to wobble, then they will wobble more aggressively then they will transform into large blue squares and fall to the ground. That is all the movement you are given in Dishaster, how disappointing.
This game is quite barren when it comes to sounds, that don’t mean there won’t be sounds constantly playing though. This game has background music, a two measure long dirge that makes my eyelids feel very heavy. There is a three note walking tune, a light beeping noise whenever you’re spinnin’ those plates, and there’s an angry *DING* whenever a plate hits the ground. That’s all you get, a melody, a semi-melody, and two sound effects, utterly fantastic.
In the Zimag Catalog (Conveniently located on AtariMania) the blurb for this game says that “There’s nothing to it. All you have to do is keep a few plates spinning on top of some tall poles.” It’s amazing that the blurb trying to sell you this game inadvertently told you why NOT to buy this game, there’s nothing to it. All you do in this game is run around the bottom of the screen and hold the button beneath some poles every so often, sure there will be more plates to hold the button under, but you’re given so much time between you spinning the plate and it actually falling that I was able to take a bathroom break and come back to continue playing without losing a single plate. The score goes up at a fixed rate, which is dumb, there is no way to get the score to raise faster, which takes away any and all replay ability to this game, there is no challenge there’s no way to get good at this game. The first time I played this game I just sat there bored out of my mind moving along the screen in a pattern to keep all the plates spinning, it got to the point where I was unconsciously reversing the pattern because I was so brain-dead that a simple six step pattern became confusing, I finally turned the game off at 100,000 points having earned five extra lives for a max total of eight, and having wasted fifteen minutes of my time.
This game sucks, don’t buy it, seriously. I can find enjoyment out of games like Karate and Sea Hunt, but this falls in with games Skeet Shoot, games so barebones basic that they shouldn’t have ever been released, I know this game was made for kids, but this is simply insulting to kids. Prices vary wildly for this game, I snagged my copy for 10$ but there are listings for loose carts from 13-100+ dollars, and the only listing for a boxed copy is sitting at a princely 170$. Just do yourself a favor and don’t buy this game, I hereby chuck Dishaster into the Collector’s Zone with a vehement loathing I will only reserve for one other game.
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