WildBillTX

That's what I thought. With all the 80's arcade revivals going on here at Atariage a new 2600 version of Centipede or Millepede with mushrooms and trackball support would be great.

Is there any way to change the shape of the Mushrooms from blocks?

I remember playing that version in a freinds dorm room, frustrating. The 7800 version is awesome though. With some of the later 2600 hacks (like Sadisteroids or Asteroids DC+) some larger rocks move diagonally in fast mode. I dont know how they reprogrammed it to do that. The #1 thing I hated most about the 2600 version was that there was no short pause after you cleared the screen of rocks. Another batch suddenly appears, many times nailing your ship with no time to respond. That's something that Space Rocks fixed (thanks Darryl!).

I never liked Asteroids in the arcade with the button controllers. It was a lot more fun to play on the 2600 with a joystick. I liked the fast mode with the shields. I never like the "cotton candy" rocks either. It would have looked closer to the arcade if the rocks were hollowed out like some of the graphics hacks or Space Rocks. In the early 80's it was a miracle of game programming to get the 2600 to play something as complicated as Asteroids or Centipede. I think by the 80's Atari was paying more attention to families with young children than the die-hard gamers.

I remember playing it first at an Atari kiosk back in '83 and being super impressed with it. I didn't buy it until a year or two later when it was discounted. It's a great game, but now I find it's too easy, the ghost AI isn't tough enough. Had Atari released an awesome Pac-Man like Dintar's, or PacMan 4K or something close to Rob Kudla's graphics hack ( aka Pac Man Arcade http://atariage.com/hack_page.html?SystemID=2600&SoftwareHackID=5 ) it would have been a big hit. But I dont know in the long run if it would have saved the 2600 and Atari. From my own experiences it was still home computers that caused the videogame crash.

Growing up in a small city (Bartlesville) in Oklahoma that didn't get a mall until 1984, the Atari section at my local Wal-Mart (we had one of the first 50 stores in the country), K-Mart, and TG&Y looked like this.

I agree. I remember trying it at a store in 1982 and hated the controllers. My dad bought my family a 2600 in 1981 and there was no way he was going to shell out for another video game system the next year. We did get dad to buy us a Vic-20 and later a C=64. Computers made more sense to him since he was working with them at his office. "You can learn to program on it". Anyway, I think it was a corporate boardroom's idea to intentionally release a bad 2600 version so they could force gamers to buy a 5200 if you wanted to play "real" Pac-Man.

I totally agree. Atari had an opportunity to release a great game and blew it. People were expecting another Asteroids, Centipede, Missie Command etc. 2600 fans were already getting that "you got suckered" message from all the bad games that were glutting the market. But a LOT of people finally got the message was time to abandon the 2600 when Atari did the same.

I think Pac-Man was the first time a bunch of gamers united together and told a game company "Your Game Sucks!".

My parents own rental properties and we've had many water heaters go bad and leak all over because the bottom had rusted out. Best to keep everything off the floor or stored in plastic boxes.

Very Nice. I wouldn't have the games and TV next to the water heater.

LOL cool. I still have my Taco Bell plush dog that says "Happy New Year, Amigo!"

I remember a few years ago some programmer here on the forums said creating the "wocka wocka" sound was impossible with the TIA. I thought that was true, because most of the other 2600 versions and hacks sounded annoying like a duck with a sore throat or spacebar on a old typewriter being held down (thump-thump-thump). BTW I love the low notes on the opening theme, I never believe the 2600 could nail such low notes. Sounds cool on Stella in stereo mode. I hope Dintari adds a low bassline on the music for the intermissions for the 8K version.

Looks nice, I would just adjust the E and R letters in "Game Over" so it looks more balanced. (I did this with bithacker) I had a friend come over and play it last night - he was very impressed. He also mentioned this the first 2600 version of Pac Man that got the "Wocka Wocka" sound effect right!

And all of Spiceware's games have well thought out menus too. In 1982 my first Radio DJ job was in Pawhuska Oklahoma. I remember my station did a big promotion for a local downtown TV dealership who sold 2600 games for the new Pac Man cartridge. We put together a cute radio commercial using the 45 of "Pac Man Fever" and played it a lot. So I went over to the store and checked out the game. But the 2600 version was so disappointing and I really felt bad that we were promoting such a sorry game and ripping people off. But it was a small town AM radio station and we needed the money..

I've thought about buying a Linux based handheld like the GP2X, Dingoo, GCW Zero (or is there something better now?) just for emulating old games. But I still think a 2600/7800 dedicated handheld using a SD card, built in memory or cart port would be awesome. If that company promoted it heavily online, gets a lot of buzz via gaming sites and sells it on Amazon, Thinkgeek etc like the Retro Duo or SNES Supaboy I think it would sell well. Those NES/SNES collectors haven't dumped their carts for emulators either.

I'd love to have one. What's keeping the Chinese or Taiwanese companies who make the NES/SNES and Genesis clone systems from making one?

Looking back, most of the kids and teenagers I knew in my neighborhood in the 70's and very early 80's only had a 9" or 12" B&W set in their bedroom, so a B&W switch was needed. It wasn't until the early-mid 80's when Korean-based companies like Goldstar (now LG) Symphonic and Emerson started dumping millions of cheap color TV's into discount houses like K-Mart, Target and Wallyworld that you could afford one. Now I wonder could the B&W switch be programmed as another option switch for a game (besides different colors)?

Or didn't have a two player or settings for kids?

Thanks for the pattern Nukey, I'll have to try it. I just dont remember the ghosts being this bloodthirsty in the arcade version. Blinky is almost psychic (psychotic?) how quickly he tracks you down. But thats what makes this version awesome.

I agree. I dont think you could have made this version of PacMan with the programming technology they had in 1982.

True, but besides him praising Raiders, the inaccuracies in his review are signs that he didn't read ET's manual thoroughly or he never got one in the first place and tried to figure it out by himself. Still I think this was the first review I read that bashed ET. I never bought it, I wasn't just interested in adventure games, just shoot-em-ups and action games at the time. And in 1983 I remember Atari's games getting worse with a lot of mediocre arcade ports and Activision and Imagic's games getting better. It was the glut of too many bad 2600 games, along with no improved consoles, and the rise of home computers that really did Atari in. ET was massively hyped, poorly programmed and universally panned on a worldwide scale. Because it was the first game to get the shaft, it became the poster child for worst game ever. I'm so tired of this kind of "it wasn't so bad" revisionism with games, movies and music. They're always written by somebody who was a kid that saved up all their lunch money to buy a horrible game, album or movie and learned to love it despite their flaws because they were stuck with it.

Awesome! Keep working on it! You may want to extend the bottom of "r" another byte down so it doesn't look like "neady". Also compared to the arcade version, the monsters dont slow down when they turn blue. But that makes it a big challenge on the higher levels.

Thanks for your detective work, I think this is the exact review I read in 1983. I dont think this reviewer was a moron. He probably did what millions of others did. He just plugged the cartridge in and tried to play it without reading the manual first, got frustrated with it and wrote a nasty review. Back then you expected to a videogame to be easy to learn in a couple of minutes just like in the arcade. If Atari was smart they would have put a big sticker on the box or cartridge saying "Please read the manual before playing". I bet Atari didn't even send him the manual. Still I bet even if the reviewer figured out how ET is played he still would have blasted it just because of its awful programming and gameplay. It's fascinating to me that nobody in the video game industry back then understood the impact bad reviews and the word-of-mouth of gamers would have on their sales and industry. They were setting themselves up so bad to fail..