CaptainBreakout

Nice review! I feel just about the same way regarding this game. Thanks for putting the whole experience into words.

I'm good. I just have to wrap everything and ship. I was thinking of using priority mail international flat rate. Does anyone know if it's cheaper to use weight and a custom box to go overseas via USPS, or is it better to just use flat rate? Can anyone recommend another carrier?

I have to admit I learned to like this game. One has to be an impressionable youngster... Very impressionable. Also it helps if one spends their hard-earned allowance money on it ($1 a week), so there is a vested interest. Also when one's older brother looks at the box (after bringing it home from the liquidation bin at the light of the first video game crash) and sneers and says something like "oh... This is one of the bad games." - that provides incentive too. Anyway there's a lot of game varients that can make the game a little more interesting. There's one where the aliens die when they crash into YOU, which turns the game on it's ear. Also the game starts in the demo mode varient, which makes the game go on forever and seem pointless. A bad choice on the programmer's part. Overall I'd say the game can be enjoyed, but requires a manual, effort, and special circumstances. PS... If you have an original manual for this game that you'd trade or sell, please PM me!

"S is for sucks!" -strong bad. Yeah. This game is torture. It would fit snugly onto Action 52. Except it would be considered one of the more playable games on that cart, and it's the wrong platform. Anyways. Maybe the cart art would look ironically hip on a t-shirt? I could go for that. Especially if it said "S is for sucks." on the back.

I had my heart broken by this game. Garage sales, I was convinced, since my mom dragged me to them most good weather Saturdays, were really a video game bargin store in disguise. Sometimes that was true, but sometimes... One could get their hopes up based on cart art and expect to be playing something wonderful for the rest of the afternoon. Here's a good example of that. Except it was somehow almost criminally terrible. Good thing I once bought HERO under the same conditions or I'd have no hope in humanity.

Totally know the feeling here too!!!

Ah-HA!!!! Had a breakthrough last night on the perfect (maybe?) gift. I almost shot out of bed at 1am with a "Eureka"! Good thing I didn't. Takes an hour to get the kids back to sleep. Hehe... There's a certain satisfaction knowing yer giving the right thing to someone, right?

If this device had hardware emulation for Gravis Ultrasound, Roland Sound Canvas, and perhaps a Voodoo card, I would be rather interested, but that would also depend on whether I could hack into it. Another feature that might actually win me over would be built in support for deathmath for Doom/wolf3d/heretic/quake. Two hdmi outputs would be required. And while I'm dreaming, why not null modem / IPX support for Flying Carpet, Command and Conquer, Hi-Octaine, Dungeon Keeper, Descent, and Death Rally? Something like that, and a nice GUI, would definitely shift it to something I'd rather buy than build.

Just to weigh in, I thought I should offer some memories of the time...which 16-bit community to get into and be a part of was a big question for both me and my parents. I was about 12 or so. We looked at all the options. Amiga had the nicest screen shots on the boxes, but we didn't know anyone else with one. Atari was already a has-been word. Both of these were relatively cheap options, but it bothered us there was no backwards compatiblity (Amiga wouldnt touch a C64 program, and Atari same thing with 400/800 software). To us, it looked like those companies weren't interested in supporting their user base for the long term. PC was the one that looked the most 'serious'... And probably would be the best choice for a bunch of reasons... But fell short for us with at least two... It was VERY expensive, and unless you bought several cards and hardware (all also very expensive) and shelled out for the fastest CPU and memory you could afford... You were stuck with something underwhelming, and couldn't keep up with the newest stuff in the boxes at the software store. Plus there was a myriad of graphic, sound, and memory standards that seemed to go in different directions for compatibility. Also, the PC was a bear to learn how to use. MS-Dos was cryptic to say the least. The whole thing, even with "clones" (which added to the platform uncertainty and forced one into another camp) was all very expensive. My family went with the Apple IIgs. Backward compatibility and standard competitive features lead the choice. What worked against it was the price tag. Still expensive like the PC, but you supposedly got everything in one shot with no questions about whether your particular hardware choice was going to be abandoned or not. I seem to remember it was something like $1,850 (which equates to about 3.5 billion in today's currency). It suffered from the usual Apple price snob factor... Meaning it was roughly 3-5 times what it really could cost, but back then the product loyalty wasn't at the fervor of today... Also thanks to Apple Corp having a split personality between their venerable and education-community standard Apple II line head to head with their own slick-as-(black&white)silk Macintosh line. Anyway the price tag and half-assed company support naturally cut its market share down significantly. I was one of the many IIgs users who would get excited about practically ANYTHING announced for the platform, software developers being so understandably reluctant to enter the market given the relatively small user base. Oh, and the CPU was underpowered. Apple made the choice to NEVER offer faster CPU models... Which should indicate Apple's desire to doom the model to failure all along. I mean, what other computer company has ever done that? A good indicator to 3rd party developers to stay off the platform, right? It's odd that 3rd party developers took it upon themselves to actually develope the hardware and take the platform into their own hands... Transwarp and Zipchip come to mind. My family and I stayed die-hard IIgs fans long into its twilight. Big Red Computer Club had lots of weird mostly unfinished demos and games available, which we would order every few months. We watched the magazines that supported the IIgs die off one by one. Eventually we got a compaq 486. By then the PC hardware configuration was mostly standardized. What can you take away? At the time, unless you were rich and crazy, you could only get behind one platform. There were plusses and minuses. A major factor was who you knew who also had your platform. There was no internet, as we know it. Platforms didn't talk to each other until the very end. One could find great games and software on any of them, or at least learn how to enjoy them. My favs on the IIgs were Silpheed, Rastan, Gnarly Golf, The Immortal, Crystal Quest and several more. I also managed to do the layout and publish my middle school "newspaper" on Publish-it! - making me very l33t at the time and king of the 8th grade computer science class. Did that make the IIgs the best? Um... Well, I thought so then anyway. Stats be damned. Still, when I saw Star Control 2 on my friend's 386, I was ready to pitch the whole rig just for a shot to play that game at my house (Xenocide didn't cut it). Allegiances can change suddenly.

I'm in!

I might be mistaken, but I don't think there was a box for this game. And the instructions were just a b/w card with typeface. Just noting this in case collectors see this (and would otherwise be dupped by a "boxed copy" on eBay). Also, my the end label is upside-down on my copy. This isn't uncommon on Spectravision games, but annoying if you are a loose cart collector like myself. On thing I'd like to add, to this game's credit, is that it's approachable. A lot of rare or obscure games also have the added burden of being hard to understand, or at least require a read-through of the instructions. At least with CTCW, one can pick it up and play it kind of intuitively and have about as much fun as can be had with it in a session.

Nicely reviewed. I like the parallel to Infiltrate. Fortunately it's not a too-simple-that-it-sucks game like Space Jockey. But at the same time it doesn't hit that magic spot that Kaboom nailed. I like to think of it somewhere in between in feel.

What a write up! I have to admit, the specifics for what modems did what in my meatspace has gotten a bit blurry since the time. After returning from a computer show, the big take-home highlight was a 2400 baud modem for the IIgs. I don't recall details like model numbers. But I do remember hours with Delphi, GEnie, and early encounters with AOL. Was there an Apple II version of AOL or am I imaginging things? I remember GSOS 6 looking promising again... For a minute. Lots of neat things like online MOD music, some nifty demos from FTA and Brutal Deluxe, and shareware from Brian Greenstone and a few others. Good times. I'm surprised I don't remember my hardware setup. I haven't given much thought to the primordial world of pre-pc online um... "Internet". It seemed so chaotic and fleeting. I do remember one had to be careful that one never dial up during "prime hours" or you faced outrageous per minute charges. Parents would shut down yer ops.

Here's another one then! This was also on compilation Vol 1... but I remember it being one I had to hunt down, so it was pretty hard to find. (This was one I typed in back in the day, so it might be from an ADT image of my own disks, can't remember now.) Anyway, here it is with a proper title screen, instructions and self-boot. Nice little gem from the time. Galaxy Defender.dsk

Thanks! I've had to deal with a lot of family stuff this past week. I'll post another one soon. Several are close to finished state.

I use a light sixer... And it runs everything... Almost. There is a compatibility with River Raid II (and possibly a few other very late Activision-ish games) that got me stuck. It was discussed in the thread below... http://atariage.com/forums/topic/275905-help-me-fix-a-flaky-river-raid-ii/ I did the mod linked in the thread. Happy to say that it worked, and I've experienced no adverse results with any other games thus far. That includes a Supercharger, many unusual games, and lots of homebrews. So I'd say if you have a 6-switch and you do this mod you are pretty much 100%. Fat red label Atari brand carts need to be massaged into the slot, but that's the only gripe I have.

Hehe... Glad I can save you some heartbreak there. Tried that... Due to Compute's choice of typeface, all the OCR attempts had... Err... Issues. I mean, they'd work for 99% of the text in terms of accuracy, but that last 1% was enough to drive me crazy... For example... The ('s would sometimes come in as C's, the 5's as S's and the worst was 8's would show up as 3's (usually in a POKE or DATA statements). Spaces and carriage returns all had to be manually fixed. : And ; would be randomly wrong. Also D's, O's and 0's would mix up six ways from Sunday. Wouldn't be so bad if only there was consistency, but well, no. All is all, debugging the result was as time consuming as typing it in straight, but way more cerebral. I did do it this way a couple of times tho- with Caves of Ice and most of Spiders. Hex entires with OCR? Forget it. Attempts at doing this with Canyon Runner almost killed me. My dance with sorting 8's 0's and D's could get me a heavy perscription. (Dramatic? Sure! Really frustrating? Also sure!) Anyways, I got a much faster method I developed. If anyone wants to know my technique, just PM me. I'm almost out of Apple II type-in material that's still lost, but there's still some for other platforms.

... anyway, back to Compute! Just got Vulcan Mines typed-in. Confusing as crazy. Game seems to work. In these days where we spend more time to type-in (tech-support, install, bugfix, take yer pick) a game then actually play it, this is not a surprise that I didn't actually have a few minutes to figure it out. I plan to make something that will let us launch the game, or edit levels. Plus have instructions. Working on it. Haven't typed in the level editor yet.

Got some great pic of the original Formula Nibble article. I sent an email to Mike Harvey to make sure my tinkering was okay with him before I post. We'll see.