WatchVenusSpa

Game girls in spandex are so addictive that crack looks like Folger's Crystals!

If I gave you definite answers you wouldn't have to watch next week's episode would you?

Nuff said!

High scores aside, what was your greatest game ever. Was it a head to head battle with friends? A major tournament win? The rush to get scores high enough to get an Activision merit badge? What was your finest 2600 hour?

Here's the first video from the series and our most popular to date!

In my opinion, the biggest mistake Coleco ever made wasn't killing CV, (which in hindsight was a dumbox move as they had the most respected and critically acclaimed system in the biz when the crash happened,) it when they scrapped their tabletop hockey line. (The last being released in about 1988 I believe before either they scrapped them completely or the NHL simply stopped licensing their name to them.) That and pouring damn near all of their remaining resources into Cabbage Patch Kids. This was a scene remenicent of Vita Pack, (a juicebox company that was popular in LA back in the 60's,) when they shut down the juice plant and bet the ranch on the skateboarding fad of the early to mid 60's, (which died for about a decade starting in 1965.) By '66 they had 6 warehouses full of unbought skateboards and went under. When the CBK fad died in 86, (combined with the Care Bears' fad of the same era,) guess what happened? Ultimately I wish ColecoVision had kept the afterlife service around because their system was strong enough to compete head to head with the NES in the first couple of years of the system's life. The upside is I was snatching homebrew games for 5 bucks a pop for the CV even as late as 1991!

Ha ha, see, I never even heard of that entire genre until just now. Shows their wisdom. Yes, this is likely the video games you'll play at the arcade in hell...

What's amazing about all of this is that the toy and computer stores decided between 1984 and 1985 that VCR board games were the way of the future and invested heavily in that. Today we all play video games but when was the last time you played the Clue VCR edition?

Definitely something to think about. Thanks for the feedback.

Another problem was the lack of press reviewing games so you had a decided lack of "buyer beware" which was worsened as Atari's level of quality for in house games deteriorated.

It can definitely be done but we don't want to mess with copyrights if we can avoid it. If anyone has any video clips of homebrews to donate, we'll give them full screen credit. (Personally I'd much rather help out the homebrew community than have to pay Nintendo or Sega for 25 year old game clips.)

Another thing to remember was that at the time of the interview the Big N had a virtual monopoly with Sony and Microsoft being so powerful that if they didn't dis the little guy, they'd lose all relevance because the powerhouses would simply ignore them come press time. That and pull all advertising from their magazine. Sega and Atari were such little fish that the arrogant gaming press really didn't care if their systems were good or not, they sucked and would be put out of business, simple as that. Give Tramiel credit, he tried, something more than Playstation has done in the most recent generation...

Thanks for watching!

The best kind!!

The one line that rocked the entire interview was when he said "Saturn sadly, is a pooch!" The best gaming smack this side of id Software!

Back in about 1983-84 or so an epic kids movie called Cloak & Dagger came out and it was centered around a kid, (Elliot from E.T.,) who found a video game that had nuclear secrets in a microchip in the game. If you hit a certain score, it was the code to get these plans. Awesome movie but the game itself that you saw was even cooler. Unfortunately in spite of TONS of Atari product placement all over the film, the game was never released commercially. There is more than enough evidence to suggest that Cloak & Dagger was indeed made as an arcade or 7800 prototype but I have tried for years to find it and have been unsuccessful. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Thanks again and hopefully you'll enjoy the show!!

Since I'm new to AtariAge, (over a decade of regularly viewing the goodness at AtariHQ though,) here's my long strange trip home: I originally got into retrogaming back in 1997-98 and owned quite an impressive collection of ColecoVision, Atart2600 and Intellivision games, systems and expansion modules. Unfortunately I had to give away or sell my systems and games when I moved to Asia. There I fell in love with vintage Famicom games that I never saw in America before. After a few years of gaming the Japanese way I returned to Canada and played NES emulators like MAME. I also dabbled in newer games and systems and hit the odd convention while I was at it. I'm a big John Romero fan, (for many of the reasons why many gamers hate his guts oddly enough, I always found his antics amusing,) and was a regular player of id's stuff up until he left the company. Then the games got more and more mindless and boring. (ANY id game post Quake I and Doom II is not worth your time.) While Ion Storm was crashing and burning, I was in Japan and getting lost in their immersive baseball video games, (which were innovative at the time.) Upon my return to America I saw the new generation and most notably the demo for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and the new generation lost me forever. What the hell happened to game play? It was all one big, boring as hell, movie with extended load times and then a little bit of gameplay. Then I tried some more games and they ALL seemed to be like this. (Final Fantasy, Rock Star Games, etc, I'm looking directly at YOU!) Add this to the arrival of the Video Game Awards on SpikeTV that only honored games that did this. (That and mindless FPS games.) Once again I longed for the simpler pleasures like high scores and games that were addictive and hard to master yet fun to play and didn't have long storylines that Speilberg directed mixed in. Enter Atari yet again! I've been back in the game in a big way since then. One thing I haven't done though is tap into the homebrew games. I remember buying a few at Compucenter back in the late 80's, early 90's for ColecoVision but I have never checked any out for Atari2600. That is my mission now. If anyone has some cool homebrew games, PM me because I want to try them out!!!

Thank you SO much for posting this!! We appreciate all of the support!!!