SpiceWare

That's good to know - I played a bit yesterday and turned it off as it was numbing my mind

Speaking of which, did the Crazy Balloon Helium Heroes! ever come to be?

Wiki mentions for the original game.

Your welcome. I submitted it yesterday, I see it's up in the store now. I've gotten to level 10, the reverse gravity really throws me off.

Star Fire, by Manuel Polik 5/5 You're a rookie pilot who is Earth's last hope against the Exidy Armada. Hidden amongst each attack wave are a few Exidy Freighters. The freighters are visible to the naked eye, but not to your instruments, so be on the lookout for them. Star Fire starts out with a slick title screen, which once again has excellent music by Paul Slocum of Tree Wave. From here you can use SELECT or your joystick to choose the starting wave of 1-9. Hit Fire to start the game. Oddly enough, RESET only returns to the menu, it's not used to start a game. Once the game starts use your joystick to fly around the sector and pick off the alien ships. The game uses standard flight controls, where pushing the joystick up causes your ship to fly down. You can change this if you wish by setting the Right Difficulty switch to A. Your laser generates a lot of heat, rapid fire can cause your laser to jam until the heat dissipates. It's not an issue in the first few rounds, but to do well in later waves you must learn to only shoot when you're guaranteed a hit. The Left Difficulty switch is used to control the amount of heat each shot generates. Setting to A causes the laser to heat up twice as fast, but with the added bonus of higher points for each enemy ship destroyed. The game play is excellent and keeps you coming back for more. The graphics are very well done. The enemy ships are very detailed, so detailed that they use both of the Atari's sprites to draw each ship. The only downfall to this is there can at times be a lot of flicker. There are a number of different ship graphics, mostly inspired by Star Wars. The Tardis does seem out of place. Your ship can take 6 hits before the shields give up. Pick off an Energy Diamond to reenergize for one hit. Surviving the wave will also add back a hit. When you die, there's a really neat death sequence, along the lines of Battlezone. The manual artwork by David Exton is top-notch. Note: The letter and patch are for being the fourth member of the Star Fire Elite Squadron, a distinction earned for scoring over 3500 points. Next up, Saboteur

wow - that's a big shopping list! Stewart Copeland of the Police did the music for the PS1 Spyro games, there's a bit about it at wikipedia

Congrats keilbaca! I do see a typo in your score - the photo has 39,770 12,340

The Spyro The Dragon series by Insomniac is very well done on the PS1. The Spyro series on the PS2 is pretty crappy. Each PS2 version was made by a different company as Insomniac decided to do the Ratchet and Clank series(which is a must-get if you get a PS2).

Quite tired today - didn't get home until after 2am! Joined some friends last night to see The Spazmatics at Sammy's in downtown Houston. They're an 80s cover band out of Austin who also make appearances in Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth. I knew most of the music they played, and they played it well. What really made the show though wasn't the music, but their on-stage energy, personas (be sure to read their bios) and interaction with the crowd. An example of the later is whenever lead singer Al would high-five an audience member, Geoffry would trigger a sound effect that could have come from an old karate movie. I noticed Al had a pocket protector with binary on the front of it. Couldn't get close enough to decipher it. If you get a chance to see them, do so! They put on a great show and I plan to see them again.

I'd play more - but about to go see The Spazmatics.

almost got the Dangerous Intruder bonus!

That should read "as if those buttons were pressed"

The CBS-Booster Grip wires in as the analog dials. Basically a pressed button reads as if the paddle is turned all the way one direction, a released button reads all the way turned the other direction.

Great! Much more fun with the voice. 7,580

Thrust supports the CBS Booster Grip, which adds 2 extra buttons that are wired to the paddle inputs. Thrust uses the extra buttons as Fire and Thrust. I bet the paddle readings are coming across if those buttons were pressed. There's also http://www.ataritimes.com/jstella Also the Atari's pixels are fat compared to other systems. The applet width x height should normally be set to 320 x 192 or 640 x 384 instead of 480 x 480.

Game 9 is pretty tough 5,930

S-Video mod all the way.

Nice article! I recall playing a Channel F a few times at one of my grandma's neighbors, though what I mostly recall was the bright yellow cartridges.

Hmm - looks like I have Berzerk VE - is that OK, or do I need to load up my Krok Cart and miss out on "Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!"?

I found them interesting, though the ironman award seems to indicate I need to get a life Anyway, thanks for your efforts and I'll dig out Berzerk for tomorrow.

No problem- make those myself I've updated my site, looks good w/out the white stripe The screen flashes in MM are accompanied by sound effects - is it possible that rapidly changing audio and video cause the slowdown?

Check out ColEm. I used to maintain the OS/2 port, until I migrated to OS X.

Yep, the Booster Grip slips over the joystick and adds 2 fire buttons, giving you 3 total. The 2 additional buttons are read via the paddle inputs.

yes, Cybergoth posted a test of Colony 7 in his blog. It can read 2 buttons on a SMS SG Commander(NES-Style SMS controller), Genesis 3 or 6-Button and an Amiga CD32 Joypad.

That's pretty cool. The music is Druid Chip by Modern99. I think I'll put the MP3 on my phone when I get home.