Butt_Rogers

No love for Dungeon? I haven't played all the games in this thread but I had a lot of fun beating Dungeon. Really cute game.

One issue with randomized item & exit locations... Dark Chambers maps were made to be beatable even if you have to restart them with no extra keys, no powerups. If you're forced to take damage from traps/poison, the level always has at least one health potion. It's a very fair game that way. Now take Level T. There's something like 8 traps/poison and only one health potion. There's a whole gaggle of booby trapped rooms. However, you don't need to explore all these rooms, and the exit is easy to find. It's a case of "Lets trick the player into going and looking for treasure then kill him!". If the game randomized the Exit into the wrong room, it might be impossible to complete the level with default items & health.

I agree that some way to randomize rooms, items, or exits would have been a very welcome addition to Dark Chambers. I'll have to check out the speed hack. I found the Gauntlet hack a while ago and that's fun. I was thinking of completing Dark Chambers without the Gun, Dagger, or Shield. In later levels taking down a spawner with your basic attack can be challenging and I find myself avoiding crowds of enemies or ducking past them, as much as killing them, course then you miss out on some loot. The number of enemies on the screen at one time is another point for Dark Chambers. I definitely felt like I was mobbed several times. In Secret Quest enemies appear one at at time, perhaps as a caveat to the difficulty of combat as implemented.

I've been interested in a RGB modded 2600 with an HDMI adapter, preferably a Six Switch for playing Phaser Patrol and some other games that require heavy use of the difficulty switches. However every mod site requires I send one in to be modded. I don't even own one yet. If there was a site that had RGB modded units in stock, I'd swipe one. I know it'd be expensive. Maybe I could work out a deal to PayPal someone the $ to swipe one off of ebay, mod it, then send it to me? Honestly I don't even know what to look for in an Ebay Listing. I'd probably get hosed with a barely functional unit if I got one myself.

I set out to play and beat both Dark Chambers and Secret Quest and try to enjoy them to the best of my ability. This will be a very long forum post. Forgive me. Dark Chambers Dark Chambers is a game programmed by John Palevich for Sculptured Software and published by Atari in 1988. I had dabbled with Dark Chambers before but I never gave it a serious shot because you really need to map the levels, and I hadn't been up for that at the time. Then it hit me that I could mass produce map templates of all the levels, A-Z, because the maps have the same height & width, and always have 4 doors on each side - only the dividing interior walls are different. Thus I traced an Altoids can, one trace next to another, and drew in marks representing doors. Levels A-F are two screens wide. Levels G-P are three screens wide. Levels Q-Z are four screens wide. Tracing an Altoids can, you can fit 4 two-screen-wide levels, or 2 four-screen-wide levels on one sheet of paper. http://i.imgur.com/x5lwvlO.jpg http://i.imgur.com/oZKdsxS.jpg Templates for all levels constructed, I set about to reach Level Z. In Dark Chambers you play as an adventurer who can travel and fire in 8 directions from a top-down 3/4 perspective. Enemies can travel in any direction or angle. You're armed with a projectile weapon, presumed to be throwing daggers. You have unlimited ammo. Your foes are Zombies, Wraiths, Skeletons, Wizards, and Grim Reapers. Each enemy takes two standard hits to kill, and each monster devolves into the previous form upon death. Killing a Skeleton turns it into a Wraith, killing the Wraith turns it into a Zombie, killing the Zombie makes it explode. The combat is intuitive and fun, and you'll find yourself using every direction of fire. Spawners are piles of bones that create monsters. As the game starts throwing you more Wizards and Grim Reapers, and the Spawners seem to fart them out faster, you'll find your regular attack simply not capable of defeating them fast enough - a single Grim Reaper takes 10 hits to kill, and the Spawner more still. Spawners may drop Potions, Treasure, Traps, or Poison upon death. To aid your quest the game gives you three powerups, each of which can only be picked up once. If you die, you can restart the same Level by pressing Restart, although your Score and Items will be reset to nothing. The Gun increases your rate of fire. The Dagger gives you x2 damage. The Shield reduces monster damage. Of these the Dagger is by far the most useful as it decreases the hits needed to kill a Grim Reaper from 10 to 5. Indispensable and the first item you should try to find if you have to restart a level. Further aiding your quest are Potions, which increase your hit points. Attempting to derail your quest are Traps and Poison. These are items that reduce your HP substantially and are often placed in doorway exits. You enter a room through a clear door, find yourself in an empty room with a Trap in the doorway, necessitating you take the damage in order to escape the dead end. Some later levels are absolutely chock full of these dead end traps. Ostensibly the goal of your hero is to collect all the treasure in each level before finding the stairs down to the next. Treasure consists of the Gold Chalice, Amulet, Silver Chalice, or Strong Box. However, it is not necessary to acquire every treasure or even explore the whole level to advance to the next. Frequently you require the use of Keys in order to open locked doors, which may lead to the exit, or simply an empty booby trapped room that injures you when you leave. Not every key must be used on a level, allowing you to maintain a small stockpile of keys which may be useful for levels which require you to endure several Poison/Traps in order to secure the key for that level. Some say this game is a poor mans Gauntlet but I disagree. I would say Dark Chambers for the 7800 is a poor mans gauntlet. Dark Chambers for the 2600 has a much higher emphasis on pure maze exploration and solving and feels like a much different game. In Dark Chambers 2600 it is imperative that you map your progress, and this is easy to accomplish and even fun. Looking down at your map and seeing how you need to go over two screens, up a door, left a screen, down a door, and right a screen in order to reach your objective is very rewarding with a map, and likely infuriating without. Mapping it out takes very little time and adds a whole new level of enjoyment to the game because you never feel lost and always have an idea of where to go. Furthermore, if you die and have to restart the level, you may have jotted down if there is a Gun, Dagger, or Shield on the level, making the restart much less painful. One fault with the game is that the treasure is purely for points, and you don't need to pick it up. I would have preferred a mechanic that didn't let you go to the next level until you had acquired all the treasure. The treasure is why you're exploring these Dark Chambers in the first place! Forcing you to find it all would have been a welcome gameplay mechanic. However, you can sidestep this by simply making it a house rule. I believe I acquired every treasure in every level on my trip to Level Z. If not, I came very close. The biggest fault with Dark Chambers is that it's easy. In the whole game I died two or three times. To be sure, dying sucks, and later levels are very annoying without your Gun, Dagger, & Shield. However, if you persevere you will obtain those items again, although it might take a few levels. You're gimped without your items, but it's not impossible by any means. Dark Chambers is a long game anyone can beat on a system known for short games of medium to high difficulty, and it is perhaps because of this that a lot of reviewers dock the game points for being "easy", "boring", and "plodding". However, I found this game to be both fun and relaxing. This is the epitome of a game to be enjoyed with snacks and a beer. You can unwind with this game. Draw your maps, grab that treasure, have a good time. You'll probably lower your blood pressure. Secret Quest. Secret Quest is a game designed by Nolan Bushnell and programmed by Steve DeFrisco for Axlon and published by Atari in 1989. A very ambitious game, Nolan wanted Secret Quest to be the 2600's answer to The Legend Of Zelda for the NES. The game features a familiar top-down 3/4 view perspective as seen in Dark Chambers and Legend Of Zelda. The game features a Status Screen which can be accessed by toggling the TV Type switch. In this screen you can see which Space Station you are on, which weapon you have equipped - and even a set of 12 symbols that function as the games Password/Passcode system. Yes, at any time you can access the Status Screen and write down those symbols, then turn off the game & walk away. When you return, you start a new game using the same 2 initials entered previously, and from the first room on the first space station you can enter the Status Screen, press the Select switch and enter your symbols at the bottom of the screen then press the Select again, and bam. Your previous game has been loaded. Magic, and 100% necessary for this game. In Secret Quest you have two health bars: Energy & Oxygen. Your oxygen goes down by 1 unit every minute. You use 1 unit of energy per Laser Sword attack, two units per Sonic Blaster, and four units per Particle Beam. Enemies drop either Energy Pods or Oxygen Bottles, sometimes as many as four, providing you with your only way of restocking your energy & oxygen. If you run out of energy, you can't attack. If you run out of oxygen, you die. You start out on a space station consisting of a 4x4 grid of square rooms; 16 rooms on one floor. The second room you enter gives you the Laser Sword, and this is your only weapon until Station 4. Your goal is to kill or avoid all enemies, and find the Symbols needed to input into the stations computer to activate the Self Destruct, after which you must run to the Teleporter and transport to the next station before the one you're on explodes. The stations computer appears as one or more blinking prompts and you enter symbols by pressing up and down, pressing the button to activate the self destruct. The second station has two 4x4 grids of rooms (two floors, 32 rooms total) and two symbols to input. This continues until the eighth station has eight 4x4 grids of rooms (8 floors, 128 total rooms) and eight symbols to input. We can contrast some aspects of Secret Quest with The Legend Of Zelda. They have the same perspective, they controls are similar, and your first weapon functions similarly. In Zelda Link and almost all enemies he face move Left, Right, Up & Down. Barring bats and a few others, they do not move diagonally. This is fine as Link can only attack L/R/U/D with his default attack and the enemies don't move that fast. Combat is easy and intuitive. In Secret Quest your character can move in eight directions, but only attack in four. Enemies move in all directions and are very fast, moving with no pattern, bouncing this way and that unpredictably. At first I thought you could rotate your character as he swings his laser sword to hit diagonally - but no, the laser sword will switch from Left, to Up, but skip the Upper Left. This really gimps you and seems like a huge oversight. Clearing a room with 4 enemies (appearing one at at time) that require two hits each to kill can be very challenging to complete without taking any damage or wasting a dozen energy sword charges when you fail to land hits. Things don't get better with the Sonic Blaster which shoots out two bars of slow moving propagating energy that only reach a short distance from your character. This isn't a true projectile weapon, and could be thought of as more of a wider, slower, laser sword. It does kill enemies in one hit that takes the Laser Sword two though, so that's nice. But now we get to the biggest problem with this game. The mapping. You might be thinking "All the rooms are square. Even if there are a lot of rooms & multiple floors, that's going to be easy to map. What's the deal?" the deal is that starting on Station 4 one 4x4 grid floor might have 4 or more Up or Down stairways. Some of these stairways TELEPORT you to ARBITRARY parts of other floors. If you walk up a flight of regular stairs, you'll find yourself on the floor above and you know exactly where you are on that floors 4x4 grid. When a stairway teleports you to another floor, you have no idea where you are. And it doesn't end there. You'll get teleported to an arbitrary part of another level, a part of that level only accessible by teleport, which then leads you to another stairway which teleports you to another arbitrary part of another level. In short... It's infuriating. There's one FAQ/Walkthrough for Secret Quest on GameFaqs and the walkthrough for Station 4 states: "What a pain. My maps probably won't help, because most staircases are one-way only! You'll be going around a lot of circles. I haven't completely finished the level 4 map, but may not anyway because of how much of a pain this level was to begin with." The FAQ says Station 4 is an 8 out of 10 in difficulty. Later stations are even higher. As you're struggling to land hits on fast enemies bouncing all over the screen, if they hit you, they'll steal your Energy, or Oxygen. But that's the only way to replenish your Energy or Oxygen. Meanwhile, every minute you spend trying to figure out where to go your oxygen goes down by one unit. You only have 15 units of oxygen. During all this you have to desperately try to map your progress taking as little time as possible. Meanwhile you're getting teleported to areas which teleport you to areas which teleport you to areas that are frustrating to map and completely not intuitive to explore or understand. Furthermore, you can't just complete a space station and move on to the next. You have to do WELL and keep as much Energy & Oxygen as possible, because on the next station you're going to write down your passcode, and that's going to be how much Energy & Oxygen you start off with on that station when you load your game. If you start Station 4 with 2 units of oxygen and 3 units of energy, you're very likely going to die. You never have a chance to breathe. You never have a chance to relax. I gave up on Station 4. I could beat it, but I don't want to, and I absolutely 100% refuse to beat the later stations which are 9/10 difficult, or 10/10 difficult, with as many as 128 rooms on 8 different levels. This isn't a dig on a 2600 game trying to do the best it can. Secret Quest pushes the 2600 to its limit. It's wildly ambitious. But is it FUN? If Zelda had the "you are constantly losing health and the only way to get more is to fight enemies that zoom around the screen in all directions but which can't be attacked on the diagonals" mechanic people would be pissed. If one Zelda dungeon had 128 rooms people would be pissed. Zelda has 9 dungeons and 236 dungeon rooms total in the whole game (plus a huge over world). Secret Quest has that many rooms in Station 8 and 9 alone. Secret Quest has 576 rooms total. All that while you're running out of air. I'm not going to lie. I hate Secret Quest. I hate it because I've tried so hard to like it. A 2600 game could never usurp Zelda off its throne, but for a 2600 game, I feel Secret Quest could have come surprisingly close. But bone headed design choices ruined it. I like mapping some old school dungeon crawl RPGs, I really enjoyed mapping Dark Chambers - but I hate mapping Secret Quest. I hate the combat. I hate the constant stress of running out of oxygen. I can't have fun in this game. All it does is stress me out, and not in the good "Only 5k more points to an extra life!" way. There's no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Just more suffering. Conclusion Dark Chambers is too easy, but it's easy to map and it's a good relaxing time. You can make an evening of this game. If it were a television show it'd be something simple and inoffensive like Cheers. Dark Chambers didn't blow my mind but I spent a solid 5 or 6 hours on this game and I had a really good time. How many 2600 games can you play for 6 hours and still be entertained? Secret Quest is beyond difficult, and nigh impossible to map. The design choices in this game make it very stressful, the combat provides no sense of satisfaction or catharsis, neither the Laser Sword or Sonic Blaster are remotely as fun as the starting sword in Zelda - or even the basic dagger/gun projectile in Dark Chambers. And they clearly could have been. Graphics aside, Secret Quest very clearly could have emulated the hit detection, movement, & fighting mechanics of Zelda but chose not to. Saying "The combat sucks because it's a 2600 not an NES!" is a slap in the face to the 2600. The combat sucks because it was programmed that way. The game is stressful, frustrating, and tedious, because it was programmed that way. I wanted to write my feelings on these two games because they came out around the same time, they're similarly expansive, have similar game play, yet on game critics websites Dark Chambers is consistently rated a C or even D-, while Secret Quest gets a B or B+. It makes me wonder. How many of these reviewers have actually beaten Secret Quest? Yes it's wildly ambitious. Yes it's a phenomenal feat of programming for the 2600. But did anyone beat it? Did anyone have fun beating it? I would argue that as Dark Chambers levels get larger and more difficult they get more fun. They're always very easy to map, you always know where you are, and you can take all the time you want. Unlimited time, unlimited ammo. On the flip side, as Secret Quest levels get larger and more difficult, up to a maximum of 128 rooms on 8 floors with 8 symbols to acquire, the game turns into the most torturous grind possible, and this is exacerbated by the limited ammo, limited health, that requires you to go as fast as possible while avoiding damage from enemies. Anyone who has actually beaten Secret Quest has my admiration. You're a stronger gamer than I, with much greater stress and frustration tolerance. Too Long, Didn't Read Dark Chambers is a good relaxing time. I think critics are way too hard on it. Secret Quest is simultaneously ambitious & awful and will give you high blood pressure, hemorrhoids, nightmares, bouts of rage.

The slower meteors hack definitely helped! I thought what I had been seeing was "PacMan Planet". Nope. There's an actual PacMan Planet where the beasties look exactly like PacMan. That's amazing! But by that point the laser defenses are pretty much one continuous bar of death that never stops and getting past them is pure luck... I tried again used save state (I don't usually like to use it) to get past the PacMan Planet, just to see what's next, and the next beastie is the first beastie you encounter in the game, so the game does "wrap around", with the PacMan beastie being the final one before it loops. The terrain colors do seem to change though. And replying to a few of the other comments, yes I know arcade games are supposed to get harder, a lot harder, perhaps to the point of being unplayable. But for me this just happens too fast in Cosmic Ark :/ ... If you can beat a level, the next speed/difficulty level should make you go "I bet I can beat this with enough practice!" not "WELP. No mortal being can get past this." Of course that's just my opinion though...

I'm a big fan of flying saucers. I've watched the entirety of Lost In Space, I love Forbidden Planet, my favorite Twilight Zone episodes are the ones where they reuse the C57D saucer props from Forbidden Planet. So basically I'm just extremely drawn to Cosmic Ark, and I like the game play that's there, but it's broken. The Game: You start out shooting meteors approaching the fixed mother ship from 4 directions. You point the joystick/d-pad in the direction you want to fire. Very simple. Next screen the mother ship is above the planet where two little beasties roam about. You depart from the mother ship in a smaller flying saucer to abduct the beasties, trying to make it back to the mother ship before more meteors arrive, and starting in the 2nd world, avoiding planetary laser defenses. You use up your fuel when firing in space, and when hit by a meteor. You regain fuel by abducting beasties. Your mini saucer can get destroyer without a loss of fuel. Ok, well that sounds pretty fun. The Problem: The problem is that the meteor shooting stages get way too fast, way too soon. By the 6th or 7th world (known as the PacMan Planet because the beasts look like pacmen with eyes & legs), or soon after, it becomes quite literally impossible. The only way to get an impressive high score in this game is to cheat. You pick up one beastie on Planet 2, defend against meteors in space, then when you're back on Planet 2 to try and pick up the second beastie, you let your mini UFO get blasted by the planetary defenses thereby releasing your beastie back onto the planet - after already gaining fuel from it. Thus you can enter a never ending loop on Planet 2 where you derive most of your points from shooting meteors and the difficulty never increases. This is mind numbing tedious but it's the only way to a really impressive high score. If you see any really high scores listed, this was the trick they used. I refuse to do this as it's just tedious and not fun at all. The Solution? The meteor stage should get capped in difficulty/speed when it gets going really fast. Human reflexes simply don't scale the way the difficulty does. To up the difficulty, the speed of the planetary laser defenses should increase. In fact, they already do, but I have no idea what they do after the PacMan planet so they might need to be tweaked. I feel like with a little experimentation you could reach a level of difficulty where there was an ever present challenge, that sweet spot where you can rack up impressive scores and have a lot of fun but inevitably reach game over. As it is, without using the cheat, my high scores will always be around 10500. Forever. This isn't just about high scores though. I think the abduction stage likely does get more challenging, and more fun, in later worlds that are simply unreachable due to the scaling of the difficulty in the meteor stages. Would it be feasible to fix Cosmic Ark? I think this game could get a whole new lease on life just by capping the speed of the meteor stages. That might be all it takes to make this game far more enjoyable. But is that sort of hack feasible?

Thank you for the feedback guys, I know it was a long forum post but I felt the need to articulate my experience. I don't feel the need to beat my high score every time, but I want to do good. Good is completely subjective. My high score in Bank Heist is $10338. I think I can beat that with a little effort, but if I play and get $6K, $7K, or $8K, I'll know that on my own personal scale I did pretty good, and practice makes perfect. If I only get $3K then on my own personal scale I'll have done pretty bad. Playing this way the score record is mostly for reference so I know when to pat myself on the back, whether i had a bad game, good game, or great game (high score). I think a lot of people here probably instinctively know when they had a good game, on their own personal scale, and don't require checking their high scores. For me just starting out it helps a lot though.

My much older brother had an Atari 2600 when I was a kid, but he kept it in a box and never let anyone play it. My first video game system was a beat up Nintendo NES I bought off a classmate when I was 13 or so, around when everyone else was getting an SNES. I remember knowing about the Atari 2600 and that it had simple games that were fun. I was a big fan of the DOS retro remakes of Galaxian, Pac-Man, & Donkey Kong, by Champ Games. So despite growing up in the middle of nowhere I thought I had a good idea of what arcade gaming and single-screen-games in general were all about. Despite some effort I was never able to track down a 2600 for myself and even if I did I would have had no idea what games were good. My friends and I downloaded a 2600 emulator sometime in high school and tried out random games, but were thoroughly unimpressed. We had no idea what to look for in the vast library and clicking a game, playing it for 2 minutes, then trying the next, is not the way to appreciate anything. Furthermore, quite a lot of 2600 games make absolutely zero sense without the manual. Well, in the last year or two I decided to give the 2600 another try. I downloaded Stella and the complete library of 2600 games. I used the AtariAge "Top 100 2600 Games Of All Time" forum page to start a TXT file list of "Good Games". I cross referenced this with the Video Game Critics website and added any game that got a B- and up. So I now have a list of around 150 games. But something was still missing. I'd try these games, check them out for a bit, and then move on to the next without appreciating them. Something wasn't quite clicking in my brain for me to enjoy them. In the last week I've set about trying more games on the list, and I'm having a ton of fun because I'm doing two things I didn't before: 1.) I record my scores for each game, and try to do better every time I play it. 2.) If a game doesn't make sense, I go on AtariAge and read the manual. Suddenly everything clicks. I can't tell you how much fun I've been having. It's been a complete epiphany. I've been aware that people that grew up with the 2600 love it, but I'm a guy that grew up in the 90's. Most 2600 games were made before I was even born. So I wanted to like the 2600, but part of me thought that maybe a lot of what people say about it is pure nostalgia with no basis in reality. I can now say that's not true at all. Good 2600 games are amazing. And it makes me wonder exactly why keeping track of my scores has suddenly made the system so much fun. I grew up with games where scores in general were irrelevant. The object was to beat the game. Reach the final level. Rescue the princess. There is no objective like that with 2600 games. But a game needs an objective. In fact, I think that without an objective something can't even be considered a game. So what's the objective of 2600 games? To get better. That's it. That's the whole enchilada. And how do you know if you're getting better? You keep a little TXT file or notebook and keep track of your progress in your never ending journey to get better. I feel like if you try to get someone into 2600 games you shouldn't just say "Look. It's got really fun challenging game play despite the simple graphics!". You can say that all you want, and most people who grew up with NES games, or gods forbid Call Of Duty, just won't get it. "Ok. I beat 3 waves in Galaxian. Now what? Is that it? Ugh." You need to explain the philosophy of how to enjoy these arcade games. That somehow, magically, a game gets more fun the better you get at it. If a game is good, then your brain has to have time to wrap itself around it, figure out the nuances and, indeed, gain satisfaction by surpassing previous scores. 2600 appreciation has to be personally cultivated. You can't go to the supermarket and buy it, so to speak. If you try to get someone into 2600 games, I think the most important part would be to buy them a nice little notebook solely for high scores. That notebook would become a tome of memories, each time they beat their previous score in Dark Cavern, Joust, Bank Heist. In some ways that notebook would become more important than the games or the system. The games & system could be repaired, replaced, or emulated. Knowing your current high score in Bump 'N' Jump is priceless. I would go so far as to argue that your score book is absolutely necessary to enjoy 2600 games. Without one you won't understand what all the fuss is about. It's the key that lets you enter the city rather than gazing at the walls from outside.

Hello, I was wondering. When was the last time someone tried to secure the rights to any of the Starpath games? Bridgestone Multimedia Group, the current rights holder, has a mailing address and I was considering writing them a letter. My goal would be for them to freely release Dragonstomper under a GNU General Public License. You have to start somewhere. I figure getting a single title released might carry a higher chance of success than a full library release. I believe they could get some positive PR from gaming websites if they/we did a little groundwork and I might play this up. As Dragonstomper might be the first console RPG I believe it to be the most important Starpath game, but it is routinely overshadowed by The Official Frogger and Phaser Patrol, titles that Bridgestone is more likely to make money off of in the future via Atari compilations and the like. Having them keep these titles might make a solitary Dragonstomper release more likely. If this initial goal fails, the goal of my second letter would be for them to name a price to sell the rights, again for the single game. To the best of my knowledge they haven't made a penny off the Starpath rights the entire time they've owned them, so I feel that getting them to release one game for free as a good will gesture might not be that far fetched, and failing that, that the price for the rights to a single game might not be too steep. What do you guys think? Is it worth a shot? Are there any lawyers in the audience who could provide any insight as to the best phrasing and terminology for making a pitch like this, or what the rights might cost if the initial pitch fails? Also, do you think they have the source code for these games or would that more likely be held by the original programmer? Best wishes and thank you for your time.

I've read a few places that Dragonstomper is the first console RPG, ever. Some sources say the Intellivision RPGs like Swords & Serpents also came out in '82, but others say '83. If Dragonstomper really is the first console RPG, it's a shame more people don't know about it, and I think the reason for that is that it's never been released for free. What do you think it would take to buy the rights for Dragonstomper from the current IP holders then freely release it, along with the source code if it still exists...? It seems like that could be one of the last holy grails for the Atari. And after that, hacks to increase gameplay content and really build a PC RPG length game could come to fruition.

I've just recently gotten into Atari 2600 games and have been totally blown away by the Starpath titles like Dragonstomper and Phaser Patrol. Dragonstomper in particular is just amazing. The simple and easy to navigate menus, the consumable items with random attributes each game, the multiple ways of solving problems, etc. It's just brilliant. I've beaten it 3 times just trying to figure out all the cool stuff you can do. It's a lot of fun to this day and I've recommended it to a few friends. That bridge guard is as hard to kill as the dragon! Also, I still have zero idea what the Lantern, Chain, and Flash spell are for. However, the Starpath cassette loading had limitations. You start out in the Wilderness. Then you make your way to the Village. Then to the Dragon's Cave. There is no backtracking. I reason this is due to the cassette loading. Having to rewind the tape and reload a previous zone would have been very unwieldy. But this was a flaw only of the cassette loading, correct? If someone made a Dragonstomper II as a Harmony Cart/Emulator exclusive, couldn't backtracking be workable? Loading previous areas while retaining your current inventory and stats and all that? And if this is true, what are the limits to how many loads/zones would be possible? Could a hypothetical Harmony Cart Exclusive Dragonstomper II incorporate as many areas and towns as we wanted, creating an Atari RPG with PC RPG length?