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I think today I’m going to dial it back a bit; I’ve been fixated for too long on the graphically impressive or highly original. I think I’m just going to talk about an old favorite, I think I’ll talk about Night Driver. Night Driver is not a graphically impressive game, nor is it particularly astounding in the auditory department, but it has the one thing that trumps them all, fun. On a visual level Night Driver is seriously lacking, all you’ll really be seeing is a shit-ton of red-ish pegs whizzing by at incredible speeds, you’ll also see a tree and a house shooting by on the sidelines but you’ll only be seeing them for fractions of a second. There are also large blue cars that will fly by you while honking dramatically; they look quite a bit better than your… thing… I don’t know what that’s supposed to be. When you crash the screen will flash yellow, which is a bit startling when you’ve gotten used to the black background. If you crash into one of the cars (heavens forbid) it will get completely flattened. Sounds are nothing special just the standard fare of engine noises, tires squeaking, horns honking, and cars crashing, nothing special. The real meat and potatoes lie in the gameplay. A brief anecdote before starting though, I just really need to mouth off to AtGames for a moment, when I got into Atari I had a Flashback like many did, when I got to Night Driver though I was astonished at how horrible it was. The game was completely unplayable and I was shocked that the game was on the console or that Atari even released it to begin with. You see I was playing Night Driver with a joystick, this is not advisable. Only after getting this game and a set of working paddle controllers did I realize just how fun this game is. This is your fairly standard racing game, but instead of racing against the computer or other players it’s just you and a time limit. High scores are the name of the game here, and you get a high score by driving as far as possible as fast as possible, your score raises as you progress. For beginners there is game one and five, these tracks are incredibly easy only requiring a minimal amount of steering to get along. Games two and six are the intermediate courses, these are the ones you’ll really want to start off on as they require much faster reflexes and a small amount of course memorization. Games three and seven or the hard tracks, they’ll kick your ass no question about it, these tracks require a large amount of course memorization and you’ll even need to let go of the accelerator a few times the turns are so sharp. If you want a random challenge then I’d recommend games four and eight. The tracks are split up into timed (1-4) and non-timed (5- runs, the non-timed runs are perfect for practice but the real fun lies in finding out how good you are under a time limit. This is an incredibly common game; it’s so common in fact that I won’t even quote you a price on it, it’s an R1 you probably already have multiple copies of it. A bit of advice though, if you see a copy of Night Driver that is the Sears picture label variation for less than 10 dollars you should pick it up immediately, it is an R6 on the AA rarity scale and well worth the price, if only to show it off. No Collector’s Zone today, the game’s good, and cheap, a winning combination.

I worked on my brawler game today. In this demo, you can defeat all bad guys, they won't attack you. I decided to make the game scrolling and reworked on the backgrounds. If you think it's easy to make decent backgrounds, take a look at this code: It's a mess for some who are not familiar with programming in C. It took 30 seconds to compile and sometimes, the compiler freezes. Here the rom: ok 24.rom You need a colecovision or an emulator to play. Good night everyone.

Well, today was a big day package wise. My wife informed me that I "had a tower' on the front porch. This referred to 3 packages containing a total of 7 games. Package 1 @eBay Deadly Duck (2600) An enjoyable shooter that I had only played via emulation. Package 2 @eBay Thunderground (2600) Published by Sega (w/manual). Port of part of the Sega Arcade game Borderline. I already own the SG-1000 port, which contains more elements of the Arcade original (based on the catalog number and year of release Borderline must have been the very first release for the SG-1000. I play all of my SG-1000 and Mk. III games on my Japanese Master System). I had never played Thunderground until I tried it via emulation. I enjoy both takes on the same original game. Package 3 @Atari Age Demolition Herby (2600) Custom Reproduction. I'd played this game via emulation and loved every bit of it. S.BAZ currently holds the World Record at High Score for Demolition Herby: Game 3/Emulation. Game 3 is the toughest variation. http://highscore.com/scores/Atari2600Emulated/DemolitionHerby/49147 Flappy (2600) Homebrew. Very difficult for me to make so many rapid inputs at my age and with my health status, but I wanted to try it. A user posted a score for it at High Score. It is the current World Record holder with 917 points! http://highscore.com/scores/Atari2600/Flappy/80348 Galactopus (2600) Homebrew. Shooter. I really like this one. It kind of reminds me of Name This Game (aka Octopus), a game I also like (and own on cartridge). Currently not in the database at High Score. As soon as I post this Blog entry I'll submit requests for it with all of its difficulty options. Meteor Shower (Red label variant; 7800). Shooter. I already own the Blue label variant. This game reminds me of Astroblast, or a vertical take on Meteor Defense (aka Astrowar, Astro War, Astro-War, Missile War, War 2000, etc.) Rainbow Invaders (2600) Homebrew. Another shooter. I haven't tried it yet (give me a slight break here, as I received quite a few games today). Comment and be the first to do so on one of my Blog entries.

Is DoctorSpuds like a box of chocolates; you never know what you're gonna get?

When I got back into the Atari my sister & brother were both extremely interested in it. So I gave them systems with a bunch of games (divided up my duplicates) for Xmas. I also gave them a CIB copy of their favorite game, which for my sister was Night Driver.

Huh, I had assumed all this time you were an O.G. Atari guy with your high level of interest and knowledge of these games. That's actually really cool that you picked it all up so many years later! Had you really not played much Atari at all until the Flashbacks? Night Driver is one of the eight older games that I know EXACTLY what date I first played it on... December 25, 1981, when my family first got our Atari. It is indeed a fun game!. I actually even like the sounds... the horns especially give the game an extra bit of tension.

While reviewing London Blitz I recall mentioning Tunnel Runner several times as a maze game that did it right, so it seems only fitting that I go in depth as to why I think so. Tunnel Runner is the hardest game to find from CBS Electronics but is well worth it. I found something quite touching actually with this game, I got lucky and snagged a cart with the manual and on the back of said manual there are a couple paragraphs about the programmers themselves (probably written by the programmers themselves), it’s very charming so I’m going to type it out for you. [TUNNEL RUNNER is Dick “Bucko” Balaska’s first game for CBS Electronics. Married, with a finite number of children, he makes his home deep in the crustacean layer of Connecticut. DB graciously thanks Cindy and Isis for their countenance while he lived inside “TR”. (It’s rumored that his flat is still somewhere in there.) His hobbies include fast bikes and fast chips. Kudos also go out to Trevor Marshall and Lou Abbagnaro for their support and to Col Stone for his outstanding computer graphics. A round of applause to Andy Frank, the man responsible for the eerie sounds of Tunnel Runner. And a special note of thanks to Rich Eckerstrom and Dan Rappaport for keeping things going when the going got weird.(Can we go now rich?) That’s just downright wholesome and I feel better now after reading it. If any of you guys are around just know that you did good. Let’s get going with the graphics. Tunnel Runner starts out strong with an excellent eye catching title screen that wouldn’t look out of place on a much more powerful system. When you start the game you are treated tone of the most satisfying things ever, watching the computer build the maze for you, I don’t know by what process it does this it’s just really cool to look at, as far as I can tell it generates the same mazes every time you start the game, so it’s not randomized that’s what game two is for. The actual maze screen is okay, it’s quite advanced for the 2600 but it still ends up looking a bit bland, but the game has ways of shaking things up. The floor changes through color gradients as you move through the maze imparting a sense of motion; you also don’t feel as if you’re moving on a grid since everything scales pretty well, it doesn’t feel fluid like in Escape from the Mindmaster but it’s still big a step up from London Blitz or even Crypts of Chaos. Another nice touch that you’ll notice is how the color of the walls changes with the level, the same thing goes with the color of the maze/map screen. You have pretty good visibility so you can see pretty far ahead so you can plan your route as you avoid the dreaded Zots. These things are scary looking; I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. Alright, so we have a graphically impressive looking game, usually if the standard formula is followed one of the subsequent categories, sounds and gameplay, will suffer greatly due to it, which will it be? Well it ain’t the sounds! This game uses sounds perfectly. I must refer back to Escape from the Mindmaster again, when in close proximity to an enemy a tune will play otherwise it’s just you with your thoughts and footsteps echoing through the endless mazes. When in close proximity to a Zot a tune will begin to play, this tune is actually quite jovial and bouncy unfortunately it’s attached to a Zot, and when you hear it it’s time to panic and run away as fast as you can! Since the sounds haven’t suffered it seems that the gameplay must now suffer. The gameplay does not suffer! This game is great fun! The premise is simple… escape or be eaten, well actually it’s a bit more complicated than that. You are stuck in a great big maze and you must evade the evil Zots to escape to the next maze, and then the next, and the next, repeat ad nauseam. The key to your success is the key to your success, you must collect the odd triangular key and then find the exit door hidden somewhere in the maze. There are three and a half kinds of doors, there are the up and double up doors which will bring you up a maze or two if you have the key for them, the transport doors that will take you to a random point in the maze, and the down door that takes you to the previous maze (you really don’t want to do that.)Since the 2600 was incapable of displaying doors on the walls whilst you are moving the programmers found a clever workaround, just make the floors go al disco and flash through a rainbow gradient. When you stumble upon one of these disco floors simply turn to the side, or the other if you faced the wrong way the first time, and you’ll be faced with a door, just be careful of which one you pick. As you progress through the game you’ll be faced with new challenges the hardest being the invisible mazes where you cannot see the maze layout from the map screen and can only reveal parts of the maze by running through it. The Zots will also increase in difficulty, you’ll start with mainly grey Zots, which are dumb as bricks and about as fast. You’ll start to get a white Zot or two which are faster and smarter culminating in the red Zot which has the equivalent IQ of an evil Einstein, he’ll kill you dead. Overall Tunnel Runner is a very fun game, a bit repetitive at times but I never found myself getting tired of it like I do with many 2600 games and with the addition of game 2 you get randomized mazes which simply skyrockets the replay value. I did find an issue or two with the maze generation, mainly being started on a dead end with a Zot, though the programmers knew about this and game the player an emergency transport, hold the button and swirl the joystick, you get one per level so use it wisely. I would also recommend mot using a particularly sensitive joystick for this game and getting stuck in a loop of moving forward and backwards trying to stop can get a little annoying, especially with a Zot hot on your heals. This is without a doubt CBS’ most expensive game; you can find loose copies on Ebay for 25-60 dollars and CIB from 50-120 dollars. I got lucky and got my copy loose but with the manual for $17.50. I would consider $15 to be a fair price for Tunnel Runner, no Collector’s Zone today; I feel the game justifies the price (for once.)