Lord Thag

Or you could just call it 'Contemplation', and make it a kind of Zen meditation aid. Grass.....There is only the grass......

That's what I figured. It's a shame, really. The 5200 has so many good arcade ports. I'd certainly play. I never get upset if someone is better than me, I just keep practicing until that is no longer true

Me too. Something else I noticed the other day. I almost never play classic games when I'm tired. It's because they generally require a great deal more skill, concentration and focus to play. I mean, no one can play Kaboom! or Cosmic Ark when they're half asleep, you know? Final Fantasy PUTS me to sleep most of the time. The only new games that have that level of intensity are fighting games, and the occasional FPS, but those genres have been done to death, and I'm tired of 'em. Give me falling bombs and a paddle anyday! Plus, since most of the old games are score based, and therefore unbeatable, you never conquer them, and they are still a challenge after all these years. After I beat Halo 2, I have hardly touched it. That's why I don't have a problem payin $30 for a 25 year old game, if it's good. I've gotten two decades worth of play out of, say, moonsweeper. I'm lucky if I get two weeks out of a newer game. It's not nostalgia, it GAMEPLAY. You'd think developers would notice that.....

Is there a 5200 high score club? I've never seen one here before, so I was just curious. I tend to play the 5200 the most out of all of my systems, an it would be fun to have a friendly competition. Is there any interest in this?

Since I was told that no screenshots are required, I'll give it a go tonight. My net access is currently restricted to work, which allows no uploads or file transfer from outside the network. Love this game too!

No news yet. They are making sure that the 'piss off existing fans chip' is integrated with the 'sucks ass' processor. Seriously, I do hope it's cool. Don't have my hopes up though.

Sounds good. How about the Atari Appreciation Society? We could do a weekly column/discussion group, and rotate authors each week to get a broad spectrum of opinions. Sound good? Anyone interested in postion could PM me with their suggestions, and I will schedule when their turn would be, and maybe organise the actual submissions themselves. That way, there's no 'membership' hassles, and everyone can participate as they like. That sound good to everyone?

Yeah, my dad throws everything away too. Fortunately, back in 87, I got an NES for christmas from my grandparents. My parents, wanting to avoid a sibling squabble, bought my kid brother a 2600 jr to avoid hard feelings, as our old system was KIA. This enabled us to drag the old 2600 games out of mothballs. A year later, I traded him a bunch of MASK and Transformers crap for the system and all 30 games. Lucky me. I still have all of my original stuff, and now have about 350 games. I often think how I would have crapped my pants back in the day if I knew how many games I would end up with. I still think it's strange to play the same cart that I was playing when I still found sesame street enthralling

Years ago, my first cat used to sit with me while I played. He liked to watch most of the fast-moving games. Of course, he also liked to watch the Price is Right with my mom, so there's no accounting for taste. My current hellbeast bites my ankles when I play the games, to get me to pay attention to him.

Ditto for me these days. I think the reason we could back in the day was because the whole concept and technology was so new. One of the reasons I still love the old games is because you can play a game in 15 min and have a great time. Try getting anywhere on Halo or Final Fantasy in the same time. The newer games are fun over HOURS of time, but there are long, boring segements where little is happening. In the older games, the action is usually frantic and consistent. Try being bored while playing Kaboom! It's impossible. I actually play MORE classic games as I get older, since my life responsibilities keep increasing. It's hard to squeeze in 4+ hours to make a dent in Doom 3, let's say, when I have a 60+ hour a week job. 20 minutes of Pac-Man is usually more fun, and easier to fit in.

Yeah, lots of good memories for me too. The last memory I have of one of my Grandfathers, actually, was of him hooking up the Atari and playing it. When he died three days later, us kids basically got babysat by gtood ol' Uncle Atari while my parents dealt with the funeral. We got a whole week of Atari in (we're talking 5-8 hour stretches here, which my parents never allowed again). That was kind of the beginning of my love affair with all things Atari. I still can't believe I played 2600 Donkey Kong for five hours straight though

Yes, you can swap out INV I contollers, by taking the system apart. It's a bit of work though, as the system is a bit mazy once you pop the top. Has anyone ever experimented with porting other controllers to the intellivision? I haven't messed with it myself. Maybe I'll give it a shot after my 5200 arcade stick is done.

Dunno exactly, but a huge collector friend of mine has one, and I don't remember him thinking it was worth much, other than being cool. Ten bucks sounds a bit high, but if it's minty it might be worth it to have the box. All I care about is owning the cart, I'm not really a completist guy, so I couldn't say.

I hear ya on GoW. Fun game! Rescue was sure an out-of-the-blue experience for me. Impressive, and fun as heck. It's the game that made me really interested in the 5200. One year later, I'm seven carts short of a complete set. Crazy.

I'm not much of a hardware guy, but I wonder if it would be possible to make an adapter (say a cartridge) that you could plug a PAL cart into and have it convert it to NTSC, and there for playable on a US system. Is that even doable? It would probably sell pretty well...

Count me in too. It would be hella cool to have a stack of colecovision disks with custom labels and homebrews. It might even tempt me to program one myself....

Well, that's good news! I guess I'm used to all those cynical forums elswhere. Count me in, I'll certainly participate! I'm still not sure how everyone feels about the appreciation club thing though. If everyone just wants the HSC, thats perfectly ok with me too, though the idea isn't to detract or compete with it. Maybe I'd better restate my idea. Basically the gist of the appreciation club is to have a weekly or monthly column highlighting a game that either never gets played (Towering Inferno, Sky Skipper), is unsuitable for the HSC (Adventure, Warlords, Maze Craze etc), just gets a bad rep (Airlock, Wabbit), or is too rare to use (Waterworld, Rescue Terra 1 etc). The idea is to have more of a discussion about the merits of the game, thefun times had with it, rather than strategy or skill pointers. Sort of a collaborative discussion/review column. Like I said, no big deal, but I would like to hear a few more yea or nay votes before I go either way with it. Thanks!

Pitfall II was a great game for sure, but I do think it suffered a bit by having the 'unlimited continues' feature. I beat it a week after I bought it, so there was not a huge incentive to play through it again. Last time I popped it in, I beat it on one life. Pitfall I, while less complicated, still kicks my butt. Still, it's an awesome game. One of the best on the system.

Yeah, exactly! There are a ton of games that don't get enough press like that. The idea is to convince people to give an unpopular or ignored game a second shot. I can't count the number of times a post on these boards convinced me to pop in a game I'd written off, and then I ended up really liking it (Reactor, Wizard of Wor etc). Having a club would get input for lots of people, and give a lot of games publicity that might otherwise go unmentioned.

Most of his games have been there for YEARS. I know about the added costs because a friend worked there for a couple of months. The only time I've bought stuff from him is when he gets the wrong price on something, or doesn't know what he's got. I picked up a mint heavy sixer once for $25. Oh, and he goes on and on all the time about how smart he is. What a twit!

He's afraid of the key because it's yellow, and he has self-loathing issues. Deep down, Yorkle trully wished to be Rhindle, as red is something of a status symbol among dragons. or was it ducks? Whatever. When confronted with his true self, and the yellow object which symbolizes the key to his true identity, Yorkle becomes paralyzed with fear and loathing, and often flees. Unfortunately, most shrinks do not accept pixilated dragon-duck thingies with mental health issues. The bat took him to a public healh worker once, but Yorkle ate him.

It's called 'cheapass bastard syndrome' Seriously, I think there is a requirement that you have the condition to run a thrift shop. A guy near me charges high ebay pirces and ADDS SHIPPING because (he says) you'd pay that anyway if you ordered off the bay. Jerk. Needless to say, his shop is somewhat deserted......

Here's an idea I thought I'd throw out. I've used the high score club for awhile now to pick out games I might not ordinarily play. I don't compete, mainly because I don't have a digital camera, but I do use it to help me focus on games I might not necessarily pull out and play otherwise. So here's the idea: Is anyone interested in doing an 'appreciation club', where once a week a member picks an odd or offbeat title that most people don't play, and gives it a sell? No high scores or competition or any of that, just once a week someone saying 'hey, try this game out, I like it, and here's why', and then the rest of us can add comments or discussion, or intersting stories to the thread. It's basically an incentive to actually play that 2/3 of the collection that gathers dust on the shelf, and since score is not involved, it would open up a ton of games that the HSC can't use. Anyone interested? I'll start it off if I get enough of a response. Let me know what you all think.

I've never known ANYONE who got enough of a hobby they love. That's why it's a HOBBY. You know?

None. If I get good enough at a game so that I COULD roll it over, I generally get bored after an hour or soand turn it off. Zen and the art of Lazy Gaming, you know?