So I'm inching ever closer to #350.* Today I got Chase the Chuckwagon in the mail. And what a surprise, it actually works! But in order to start the game, you have to press the game select switch like it was the reset switch. So there's this cute little dog in a maze with one obstacle bouncing around the screen, going through the walls. Sometimes it's a bone (which seems odd), sometimes it's this undiscernible orange thing. And then there's a gray man walking around. Touching the thing bouncing around makes you not be able to move for a few seconds (which sucks because sometimes it hardly ever moves in a vertical direction), and touching the gray man causes you to lose a life. And the walls are tricky to move through because you can get partially stuck in them. The goal of the game is to escape the maze where the Chuckwagon is.

If you do that, there's this bonus round thing where a food dish is falling and you need to stop it by pressing the fire button so the dog on the screen can reach it and eat from it. The dog has to face in the right direction too. If you stop it wrong or don't stop it at all, the poor dog gets no bonus. And then repeat over and over again with a few maze changes along the way.

It's a cute idea, but fails in execution. The walls are sticky, the thing that bounces needs to bounce around better, and the man thing is dumb because you hardly ever get near it. I kept wondering why my score was reduced to 60 when I got into a maze. Turns out they put the timer where the score is in the maze screen. Seems like they could have put in two extra digits because the score is only 4. But it works, so that's good.

* - I'm only counting AtariAge and games released back in the day.