godzillajoe

The reason I LOVE the Atari is because you can play a quick game and you don't need to invest 8 hours or read a Yellow Pages sized manual just to get the basics. If I can't tell what to do in a game based on the attract mode, I don't really wanna play it. And as a hipster doofus, I also listen to indie rock and once in a while will buy a 7 inch single or an album on vinyl. There are still people who obsess over that and will ONLY buy albums on vinyl and hate CD technology. But like the 2600 fanbase, they're the minority. Try explaining to a kid today how cool albums were because you get the artwork and all that junk and it's not postage stamp sized like on a CD and they'll look at you like you're an idiot while they go off to DOWNLOAD more music. I'm gonna go play pong and crank up the Victrola now.....

Yeah but by then "old video games" will mean PS2 and such. Unless you grew up with a 2600 you probably won't care about the games and if you ran across a system in the garage you'd probably just throw it out, laughing and saying "remember when people used to play Atari?" Even people my age now think I'm weird to still play and collect Atari games. They've long since thrown away their systems. Not even GIVEN them away. They went into the trash. Imagine your grand-kids going through the attic some day, they probably wouldn't even know how to hook it up to whatever TV will be around and probably wouldn't be bothered to find out. At best it would end up at a thrift store, at worst in the trash

Nothing happens on Beamrider, you just keep playing at Level 99 until you lose all your guys

I thought the only thing to turn up was the sound effects. You're saying out there somewhere is a 100% complete game? Let me add Mappy to the list

...would you have liked to see for the 2600 and which ones could they have maybe really justice to given the tricks that seem to have been learned by that time? I was always hoping that Zoo Keeper would have made it, though I can't see that many moving objects being done realistically. Even the arcade game freaks out when too much stuff happens but they DID mention it in a catalog so I was drooling for it. I think a Blades Of Steel port would have been fun and doable Also, Dragon Spirit, Star Force, 1943, Bubbles....for starters

Donkey Kong himself looks pretty bad. Donkey Kong Jr. looks worse.

geez, it's just like that girl I dated one time

Well after my "maximum number of spiders in Millipede?" adventure was completed, I decided to play Nexar in Stella and throw it into the debugger. I bumped the level up to 98 and played for a bit. here's what happens when you clear level 99...stop reading now if you still wanna be surprised ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** ** spoiler ** NOTHING! It rolls back to Level 0 and keeps going. Now maybe cheating like this takes it down a different code path somehow but I don't know how that would be possible. So, in short, this was crappy and I'm glad I didn't actually try and PLAY it all the way through. So much for "To become a SPECTRA-WARRIOR you must survive all ninety nine levels. Those who can go beyond all will receive their due recognition." Where's my @^%$#! recognition?!

Ha. I did spend a couple of days trying it the hard way so I have more practice.

Cool! Thanks! I didn't realize they kept the score that way. I was looking for 30,000 in hex. No wonder I couldn't find it. Anyway, I bumped up the score to 990,000 and managed to stay alive long enough to see that 5 is the max # of spiders. If you roll the score back to zero you're back down to just 2, so the game actually gets EASIER Not like there's a chance in hell anyone could roll Millipede without cheating. Next up, starting The Challenge of Nexar at Level 98 to see if it has an ending. I'm gonna have a lot of fun with the debugger!

So any of you coding whizzes know how I find this out in Stella using the debugger? I'm sorta blindly trying stuff and all I've managed so far is to screw up some graphics Back in the day I could give myself 255 guys in some C= 64 games by finding where they store the value and changing it. But that was a loooong time ago

Too many to mention. Wish I had kept them all. I would pretty much buy any game in the cut out bin if it was a buck or two. Even got a 7800 when it came out just to play Galaga. Then I kept the 7800 and gave the 2600 to my cousin with a mess of games. Never saw them again. I sorta abandoned the 2600 for the C= 64 in my teens

Anyone else have any of these? Are they worth anything? I dunno about other areas of the country but here at the Bradlee's dept. store when Missile Command came out they had a mini Missile Command arcade machine set up and you asked the guy behind the counter for a token and you could play Missile Command I still have a one of those tokens around somewhere. I kept it because it was "cool" and was sorta my "good luck" charm when i was a kid How common are these? Should I find it and eBay that puppy for fame and fortune?

At least I managed to grab a Pac-Man Arcade while they were still around.

Ha. Fairly new. Sorta. I know about the hack but it's not as much fun to play on an emulator. I need to get me one of those USB to 2600 joystick thingies. That might help. I did start on level 9 and if it was moving I was shooting at it because games like Galaxian I tend to play for "levels" and not score. Is level 9 as hard as it gets, or if I had played to level 25 or so, it would have got crazier? I guess there's one easy way to find out....

I didn't really think much of this game when I bought it way back when but playing it for a bit today, it's actually not that bad. Why the "boxed in" playfield though? You're supposed to be out in space so why not leave the screen black and without borders? Also, I only played till level 15 or so but it never seems to get harder. Like if I wasn't screwing around I could have played as long as I wanted. Still, for a 2600 version, it's not bad. I may give it another go later today. It *DOES* get harder though right?

Combat or Space Invaders. Not sure which one I plugged in first when I got the system hooked up for the first time. Probably Space Invaders

Yar's is more tense than frantic like Millipede where 100 things happen at once. What is the hardest Yar's Revenge game? Game 6 with both difficulty switches on 'A' or am I remembering incorrectly?

The only system I ever bought after my original 7800 was a Sega Dreamcast. Still play that one quite a bit.

I guess I should have been more clear, what "decent" games could have been made better. Pac-Man cleary sucks because of a rush job but take something like Moon Patrol which is a damn fine port for the ol' 2600, could that have been ever BETTER if they tried a bit more?

Played Ice Hockey just the other day. Two player even. Great game. Like the other guy said, what's with the "Americans" thing?

Two player mode where one player is the bomber and one player is the buckets

Let me preface this by saying I probably don't have ANY idea what I'm talking about but as we have seen with homebrews, a much more playable Pac-Man was cetainly a possibility on the 2600 so what other games could have been "better" designed but for whatever reason were not? Is it technically possible for Ugg and Wrongway to appear in the Q*bert cart? Could 2 more levels have been done for DK? Maybe with some more RAM? Up/down hill and boulders for Moon Patrol? A better Zaxxon? Surely Desert Falcon simulates the 3/4 scrolling as a possibility no?

Cool, thanks guys! Knowing the state of my collection, I probably already have one in a box somewhere. I have a whole box of games but didn't have a working controller till recently, now I gotta rumage around a bit! What's the game worth in the open market? How much should I expect to pay on eBay or from a dealer?

I didn't own a 5200 as a kid but my uncle who lived a few doors down bought one and we spent many hours playing games on it. I always liked Countermeasure but haven't played it since way back when. Will I be sorely disappointed if I pick one up somewhere? Is it considered a good game? I realise it's all subjective but wanna get a general idea.