Jump to content
Have You Played Atari Today?
2600|5200|7800|Lynx|Jaguar|Forums|Store

DoctorSpuds

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1,884

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Blog Entries posted by DoctorSpuds

  1. DoctorSpuds

    Thank you AMD

    By DoctorSpuds,

    Thank you AMD for automatically updating the registry of my video drivers to the version before. Completely screwing up my screen and forcing me to manually update the registry with the proper driver versions whilst my screen is strobing, which meant I had to first find the drivers, find the version of those drivers, find the registry for those drivers and manually updating them there. Even after fixing the drivers the screen is still screwed up which means I have to daisy chain adaptors so I can use the weirdo proprietary Sony connector which I just so happen to have the proper adaptor for.
     
    In the end I came out on top since I’m getting full VGA (Actually it's RGB, I'm just bad at words) now versus the stripped back palette (Limited RGB) I had earlier but still. That’s wack yo.
     
    If you’re wondering I’m using an ancient Sony SDM-P232W monitor. The resolution still holds up and it’s built like a tank.

  2. DoctorSpuds
    It is generally understood that many 2600 game simply don’t hold up, especially the earlier ones.  Usually this was due to the fact that these were the first of their kind ever released on home console and the console itself was a very limiting factor. I initially wasn’t even going to review this game because I mainly try to steer clear of sports games on the 2600, usually because they’re nearly impossible to play and just aren’t that much fun, and I don’t like sports games in general. The only reason I’m looking at this particular game today is because a co-worker of mine told me they played it religiously on their hand-me-down Atari from their uncle. What game did this poor person play religiously as a misguided child? Well there can be no other… Home Run! Yeah when she told me that I cringed internally.
     

     
    There is so little to this game that I can’t bring myself to give it more than one paragraph so here goes. The field is made up of four squares that take up a total of a quarter of the screen the rest it taken up with empty green space and the scoring info at the top which details outs, runs, strikes, and balls, the usual stuff. You’ll immediately note that the field is incredibly empty with there being only the pitcher and the guy at bat, yes the field is so small and the players so large that having more than one would leave no room for movement. Frankly I wouldn’t even classify this as baseball since all you do is catch the ball when it is hit and go run over the guy and he’s out, they’re not out when you catch the ball because that would make the game unfair since you’re enormous, you have to go touch them for them to be out. The pitching is alright, you can steer the ball and it differentiates between balls and strikes fairly accurately, you can even hit the batter and he’ll automatically go to first. Hitting is a bit different than you’d expect, you don’t press the button to bat you waggle the joystick, which is far less responsive than just pressing the button. To get your runner to stop at a base so they don’t get tagged just press the action button before they reach the base.
     

     
    Baseball had to start somewhere, and here it is crammed into a tiny 2K cart. Even though it was beaten to the punch by both the Studio II and Channel F which had baseball games released in ‘77 and even the Odyssey2’s version which came out the same year, this was still the version that most people played. At the time this might have been acceptable but when Super Challenge and RealSports baseball hit the scene this game should have been left behind, and when Pete Rose Baseball finally rolled on the scene as the definitive baseball game on the 2600 Home Run should have been forgotten to the annals of history. If you really need a copy of Home Run, or Baseball as the Sears version calls it, it will cost you four dollars on the low end for a loose copy and nine for one CIB. If you want the Sears version it’ll cost you six dollars for a loose copy on the low end and eighteen for a CIB copy, which if you ask me is a bit too much. Only buy this if you need to complete your collection otherwise don’t bother, even though we already have several copies floating around anyway.
     

  3. DoctorSpuds
    This is going to be a comparison piece between the three most popular console ports of Q*Bert from the second generation of game consoles. We will be comparing the Atari 2600, Mattel Intellivision, and Colecovision ports of Q*Bert. Despite all being the same game there are a hefty amount of differences between the three. But the outcome of this review is not certain. since all the versions have their own strengths and weaknesses. Let's start with the graphics.
     
    Which console has the best looking Q*Bert?
    In my opinion the Intellivision has the best looking Q*Bert, the sprite looks far less scary than the other two, I think mainly due to the fact that his eyes aren't massive voids from which no light or life may escape. While the Colecovision Q*Bert has more pixels and therefore looks smoother, it seems a bit squashed and a little off center, I would have preferred the extra life icon as the playable Q*Bert. The Atari Q*Bert looks like the extra life icon from the Colecovision version, and I'm fine with that since the Atari can barely manage with the rest of the game.

    Which console has the best play-field?
    Colecovision.. Hands down, this looks the closest to the arcade out of the three, followed by the Intellivision, and then predictably the Atari. Every element of the arcade game is represented in the Colecovision version, including the interludes between levels, everything is also in the same place as the arcade version, which is a very nice touch. The Intellivision Q*Bert's play-field feels a bit squished, like everything is a bit narrower that it should be, but otherwise it's basically a more pixelated recreation of the Coleco port. Everything from the arcade port is represented in the Mattel version but not everything is in the same place, and not all of the text can be displayed. The Atari port looks very weak in comparison to the competition. Instead of having a darker color on the sides of the blocks to represent shadow like in the other versions, the Atari version opts to simply add some black lines to the sides to give the impression shadow. This works if you're standing twelve feet away from the 13 inch CRT TV and crossing your eyes,
    otherwise it looks serviceable bordering on rather crappy.

    Which console has the best floating platforms?
    Colecovision again, these cool floating circular platforms are represented spectacularly, even including the spiral in the center of the platform. The Intellivision also does rather well, the platforms are circular and have the four spinning colors like the arcade, but these lack the spiral in the center. Then there's the Atari... they're lines... The circular rainbow spinning platforms are just straight lines, thats it...
     
    Winner: Colecovision...
     
    On the subject of sound all the consoles put up a decent fight.
     
    Which console does that classic jingle best?
    I feel that the Itnellivision and Colecovision are on even playing fields when it comes to the opening jingle, both have a rich and harmonious sound that sounds very much like the arcade game. The Atari is off to a rocky start, playing only the final measure of the song and doing so with a rather high pitched beeping noise, it cannot compare at all to the others.

    Q*Berts Profanity?
    Both the Atari and Intellivision have Q*Bert swearing like a sailor when he gets hit while the Colecovision goes with a rather disappointing hissing sound very much like a lo-fi cat. The Intellivision has the better swearing when compared to the Atari simply due to the fact that the programmers could fit more weirder sounds into the mix, whereas the Atari's swearing sounds more like a low grumbling rather than shouting.
     
    General sounds?
    I would have to say it's a toss up on this subject, they all have the proper sounds, and all are implemented as well as they can be (I'm lookin' at you Atari). Concessions will have to be made for the 2600, since it only has two channels for sound versus Coleco and Mattel's four (I'm including the noise generator), so not every action will have sound based on what's going on on-screen, at least that's what I noticed.
     
    Winner: Intellivision...
     
    Game-play... This is where the winner will be decided... Everything up to this point will be rendered irrelevant if the game doesn't play well.
     
    Which game controls the best?
    There is no other way of saying this but, both the Intellivision and Colecovision's controllers are crap... Especially when it comes to playing Q*Bert. In order to play these games you have to hold the controller at an angle, this is what ruins it for Coleco and Mattel, those controllers have to be held a specific way just so your hand doesn't cramp up when playing a normal game, but with Q*Bert its downright painful when playing for periods of time longer than ten minutes. The Atari shines in the control department, since you're using a square controller, it doesn't feel like your hands are being twisted in weird and awful ways, even a Sega Genesis controller feels alright like this, in fact I'd recommend using one for this game since it feels SO good. The Atari does have some negatives though... When it comes to enemy movement you kinda don't know where they're going until they're already there, the enemies have no fluid animation when jumping between platforms, you can often tell where they are going to jump to next by the direction their sprite is facing so it's not all bad.
     
    Winner: Atari
     
    The Atari emerges from this battle as the victor, not because it has the best graphics, or the best sounds, it wins because it's fun. I don't think the other versions are fun to play at all, they were too caught up in their "arcade quality" graphics to notice that their games don't have the "Arcade Quality" game-play they were so desperately trying to emulate. Skip the others and play Atari.

  4. DoctorSpuds
    Alright ladies and gentlemen, the word of the day is satisfaction. What is the most satisfying game you’ve ever played? I think that I may have just inadvertently stumbled upon one of the most satisfying games in the 2600 library, and it’s from our good friends at Fox. Not at all based on the 1964 movie of the same name, The Earth Dies Screaming is a fun little space shooter and is an excellent example of excellent sounds and graphics overpowering subpar/standard gameplay to make something truly magical. So without further ado, let me elaborate.
     

     
    The graphics pretty much do everything right. Starfield? Check. Explosions that make your room light up like a Christmas tree? Check. Cool scrolling planet with bonus atmosphere? Check. Score that rolls up when you get points? Check. This is seriously a very advanced looking game, the fluidity of the planet scrolling is amazing, seriously, I can’t name a single game that does it better. The turret is also surprisingly well done the smoothness of its scrolling is rather hypnotizing. Apart from that it’s the little touches that make this game so cool. The rolling score is fantastic, the radar screen with a horizontal bar going down it, the flashing of the turret heads, the gentle strobe effects when you get damages or when an enemy slips past, it all compounds to make a very lively screen that isn’t at all boring to look at. So you take these fantastic graphics and then you couple them with the sounds and what do you get? Well let me tell you all about it.
     

     
    There is never a quiet moment in this game, you’re constantly getting bombarded with the sounds of engines the sounds of gunfire, explosions, alarms, the game is never silent. This is what I want in a space shooter like this; frantic, fast paced, energetic action and the sounds play a huge role in that. A big reason why I’m not too fond of Star Ship is because it was too soft and too quiet, though I probably didn’t say that in my review of it. In The Earth Dies Screaming it is a constant barrage of action that gets you pumped and hyped up even if you’re looking at an empty screen, atmosphere, that’s it, the game has atmosphere and I feel that the combination of the sounds and graphics totally make up for its rather standard lackluster gameplay.
     

     
    This is you’re fairly average space shooter with a few twists to help it stand out from the rest. Your turret will automatically track the vertical position of any enemy on screen, you still have to move and aim vertically but that could perhaps be seen as hand holding. I can understand why they did this because the game would be impossibly difficult otherwise because this game, even on the lowest settings, is pretty darn fast. You are attacked by three enemies at a time, they are trying to get down to the planet and sometimes back up again, your goal is to not let them get to the planet’s surface/breach the atmosphere. The enemy ships also move in three dimensions, another reason why your turret is automated somewhat, you need the up and down movements to move you forwards and backwards. Yes, this is one of the few games in the Atari library where the enemies can be behind you and you wouldn’t know it. It all sort of boils down to you just shooting anything that moves as the enemies move and shoot to quickly for you to do anything particularly strategic and you’ll get shot by just about every enemy you run into. Thankfully you can get hit plenty of times, I don’t really know what the game over criteria are as I usually button mash the whole time and have a crap ton of fun doing it.
     

     
    Who knows perhaps this game relies heavily on strategy and I’ve barely experienced any of it, I really need to read the manual, but still it’s a great time even if you have no clue what’s going on. Unfortunately this is where I come to prices, and due to this being one of TCF’s more obscure titles it will cost a pretty penny. I paid 20$ for my loose copy and checking on Ebay that seems to be about the norm, boxed copies are just ludicrously expensive at 250-330 dollars, but these are from a known scalper so they’re probably only worth half that new. Speaking of new, there’s a NOS box sitting at 65$ free shipping, so of you must own this game boxed then just get that one while it’s still here. Yeah, if you can get a loose copy for around 15$ then I’d say pick it up, otherwise just stay away or emulate it.
     

  5. DoctorSpuds
    Okay so I just played this and really feel the need to talk about it. Great Escape by Bomb Software is one of the worst things I’ve played in a long time. If you’ve never heard of Bomb I wouldn’t blame you since they’re one of the most obscure companies to release games, in the US. They had a slightly larger presence in Europe, but their American releases are almost nonexistent. They seem to have been just another ‘me too’ company, jumping on the 2600 bandwagon way too late. After looking at some of their international adverts they may have expanded into other games machines, the Atari 400/800 computers were mentioned and so was the Intellivision, but the 2600 games are all I know for sure about them. Back to Great Escape though, and no, I will not dignify this game with a full review, it’s not worth it.
     

     
    The graphics are subpar, even by 2600 standards, everything is just a vague lump, or was stolen from Asteroids. It’s probably one of the most empty games I’ve played, there is no starfield in the background to liven things up so sometimes you’re just stuck flying through the void with only the basic mini map to tell you that there are actually things in this game. I will give credit for how colorful the enemies and asteroids are, but that doesn’t excuse the rest of the game. Sounds? Where, all I can hear is the generic engine/rocket noise that’s used in every other 2600 game and not much else.
     

     
    From what I can ascertain from reading the horribly written instructions all you do is fly around and shoot asteroids and aliens while avoiding the super alien that will instantly kill you if it appears on the screen. When the super alien gets you, you are forced to sit through a ‘cutscene’ of a large flying saucer moving slowly up/down the side of the screen and then you die. A game like this wouldn’t be that bad on an idea if they didn’t somehow manage to ruin moving, yes they made controlling the game next to impossible. You are stuck on a grid, a large grid, if you want to turn or reverse you have to wait until you get to that invisible point and then you turn around. This means that if there is an asteroid in your way you might just fly into it without being able to turn around because the game is programmed so terribly. You can also accelerate if you want to die quicker, I don’t really know how it’s done, it’s explained in the manual but as I said before, it’s terrible. Sometimes you’ll just accelerate out of nowhere and hit something and die.
     

     
    The entirety of this game is frantically confusing, from the manual, to the gameplay, to simply watching it play out. Perhaps it is possible to learn this game and perhaps derive some enjoyment from it but as it stands it’s just bad. Don’t even bother trying to track down and NTSC copy of this game, you’d have better luck finding a Pepsi Invaders, in that I’ve seen more Pepsi Invaders on Ebay, 3, than NTSC Great Escapes, 0. You can buy loose copies from Germany from 40-70 dollars, but seriously, don’t, just emulate it and realize you have better things to do with your time.

  6. DoctorSpuds

    Bowling (Atari)

    By DoctorSpuds,

    I'm feeling lazy today, so I'm just going to review Atari's Bowling. This has got to be one of the most basic games on the 2600, both in game-play, sound, and graphics. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I find that the game gets it's message across rather well, that message being bowling. Sorry If this is a short review but there isn't much TO review... onto the graphics.
     
    Minimal doesn't even begin to cover this... This game almost has no graphics. Two lines for the lane... ten squares for the pins, another square-ish shape for the ball, and a super blocky dude. You also have your score in the top left with indicators for each frame played, twelve in all. That's it... I've just described he entire game's graphics in one run-on sentence. If there's something I missed, please tell me so I can make this review longer. PLEASE!!
     
    Sounds are ultra simple as well, just the sound of the ball rolling, which is a crunchy growling noise. The sounds of the pins being hit down sound like what many other Atari games used as lazer fire, so your hitting down lazer pins (patent pending). And a celebratory wolf whistle noise when you score a strike or a spare... Oh! I found something to add to the graphics, when you score a strike or a spare your blocky dude jumps up and down and flashes multiple colors. Well that was an extra sentence that was really needed. Will the game-play save this game from impending doom?
     
    The short answer is a resounding yes! This game is a fantastic representation of bowling on the 2600's hardware. This game doesn't get bogged down with throw speed or angle or spin, you simply throw it and it will go where you aimed. That's not where it ends though, you have different game styles. Games one and two have a ball which you can curve in the direction you move the joystick. Games three and four have a freely steerable ball. Games five and six have a ball that simply goes straight, no steering allowed. The way the ball interacts with the pins is also, I feel rather realistic. Unlike Bowling on the Odyssey 2 where i the ball simply plows through the pins, in Atari's Bowling the ball bounces off the pins changing trajectory and leading to a rather unpredictable game. It is unlikely that you will bowl the same game twice... ever... which keeps the overall game fresh and enjoyable.
     
    This is far from being the best game on the system, I know that many people couldn't give less of a crap about it, but give it a play, you can get through a whole game in just a few minutes, you may just end up enjoying yourselves.
  7. DoctorSpuds
    Okay so I know I usually do write-ups on games, not companies, but Panda was just so batshit insane that I feel they are deserving. The guys at Panda were the OG bootleggers, for a short time in 1983 they slithered onto the scene and vomited their wares, but before they could finish they vanished quite suddenly. Now, Panda was the supreme budget brand, they made their games out of the cheapest materials they could get, and cut as many corners as possible, i'm not sure what they sold for originally but I'm sure they gave even Zellers a run for their money. Panda's game lineup consists mainly of games made by the European game company Sancho, though there are a few from different companies. Not all of the games advertised by Panda were actually released, I don't know why perhaps they actually got sued, or they just game up halfway through, either way they came to a sudden, sticky, end.
     
    Early Panda releases had a wraparound label, even though the cartridge had a partition for a top and end label, and the label continued to the bottom of the cartridge for some inexplicable reason. These early labels use an ink roll printing method, perhaps it was even done by hand, the second style of labels have only an end label that appears to be properly/'professionally' printed. I’ve never seen the PCB of one of these Panda games, since the cartridges snap shut with no screws, but I’m pretty sure all I’ll find on the PCB is a giant blob of solder. The cartridge shell may be a bit familiar to collectors several obscure and sought after games like Quest for Quintana Roo, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even Spy Hunter from Sega share the same or extremely similar cartridge design. In fact they just seem to be slightly modified, cheapened, Apollo cartridges with the branding removed.
     
    The artwork used for the boxes was stolen from the stolen games which isn’t hard to believe considering just about every bootlegger did the same thing. The art style is really all over the place, from cartoonish and kinda bad with Space Canyon and Harbor Escape, to professional painting with Excocet and Seahawk, to slightly amateurish airbrush work with Dice Puzzle and Stuntman. All of the games that were stolen from Sancho simply use Sancho’s artwork, apart from Stuntman. Tank Brigade, Space Canyon, and Harbor Escape have ‘original’ artwork, since they weren’t from Sancho they had to steal somebody else’s artwork. I don’t know where they stole it from, or maybe considering the cartoonish nature of them they were done by Panda themselves, or at least commissioned by them. Also if you’re wondering the manuals are just standard printer paper with the bare basic information printed on them, nowhere near as bad as Zellers’ instructions but still very lacking.
     
    Luckily for us Panda decided to issue some sales flyers back in the day, detailing which games they were selling, they didn’t release all of them which is unfortunate as there were a few unique titles that weren’t seen anywhere else. Here’s a list of them:
     
    Tank Brigade – Phantom Tank from Bit Corporation AKA Tanks but No Tanks from ZiMAG. Galactic Invaders – Unreleased, if you know of a space shooter with 24 game variations specifically, that’s what it was going to be. Space Canyon – Space Cavern by Apollo, they really butchered the graphics with this one. Baseball – Unreleased, I have no idea what game they were stealing with this one. Excocet – Excocet by Sancho, they really didn’t try with these. Seahawk – Seahawk by Sancho. Harbor Escape – River Raid by Activision, that’s lawsuit worthy. Dice Puzzle – Dice Puzzle by Sancho. Forest – Unreleased, same name same game from Sancho. Stunt Man – Actually Nightmare by Sancho, for some reason Panda changed the name and artwork despite advertising it as Nightmare originally with Sancho’s artwork. Skindiver – Unreleased, yep Sancho again, also better known as Sea Hunt from Froggo.  
    For all anyone knows Panda was just a frontage company set up by Sancho to sell their games in the US, and I kinda wish they managed to release all of the games, if only to get a somewhat officially released version of Forest in the US. At this point these games are just novelties with the only one that would be worth searching for being Stunt Man as it is the only NTSC version of Nightmare, from what I can tell not even South America touched that one. Just buy the official or Froggo releases, the only game where it might be cheaper to own the Panda version is with Tank Brigade, but that’s only if people list the game at what it’s worth. Yeah, due to their weirdness factor these games are sought after and are highly scalped, so don’t trust any of the prices on Ebay, they’re worth twenty bucks not a hundred and twenty.
     
    Here are the original sales flyers, they're from Atarimania if you're wondering

     
  8. DoctorSpuds
    So I’m gone for over a week and what do I come back with? Space Attack, a very bad idea from Mattel. Mattel’s MO was to make, slightly inferior perhaps, ports of their Intellivision games and release them on the 2600 to entice people over to the Intellivision, whether it worked or not is anyone’s guess. Most of the games Mattel ported were simple shooters that didn’t require much use of the Intellivision’s keypad controller, Space Attack, or Space Battle as the INTV port was called, is the major exception. Space battle used eleven of the twelve keypad button, and somehow that all had to be condensed into a single button controller.
     

     
    The graphics are unimpressive to say the least, there are two different screens in this game and they’re both fairly boring. First of all there is the radar screen, it is green and has squares arranged in rectangles around a center point, the only movements you’ll see are the icons of the friendly and enemy squadrons which are just colored dots. The play screen is also fairly lackluster, I will give credit for the colorful starfield, but at some point it gets a bit too colorful, I’m pretty sure there aren’t teal, green, and brown stars anywhere in the universe. The enemy ships are just a bunch of blue waffles that zip around the screen, I noticed that there are only ever a maximum of three at once, likely to cut down on flicker, but they move fast enough for it not the effect the gameplay.
     

     
    The sounds are just terrible, even for the 2600 these are just bad. A cavalcade of beeps awaits you, and one of the most disappointing booms I’ve ever received from a 2600 game. The 2600 was capable of far better than this.
     

     
    In order to condense so many commands into a single button and joystick Mattel made the direction you moved the joystick in conjunction with whether or not the button was held down command each individual squadron. In order to dispatch a squadron you hold the button down and move the stick up, left, or right, and when a squadron meets and enemy you simply move the joystick in the squadron’s designated direction. When described like that it seems fairly simple but I only know this because I have the manual, when I first played this on my Atari Flashback I couldn’t understand the game at all and never made it to the action screen despite many attempts to understand the game. The action is also a bit of a letdown. You move a cursor/crosshair around the screen and shoot at enemies that fly around and be a general nuisance. The cursor moves fast enough but your shots take a little while to get to where they’re going which means you have to lead the enemy by a bit, and since they love hanging around on the edges of the screen there is a bit of waiting involved. A few thiongs I do have to give this game credit for are the explosions destroying other enemies, if you get a pack you can knock out three to four at once, and the real-time mode where the enemies still advance and computer will fight for you while you’re battle an enemy squadron. It really is a pity this game is so boring to play though.
     

     
    I understand that Mattel was trying to entice gamers over to their console but this just wasn’t the game to do it with. Space Attack was released in 1982, Space Battle was released on the Intellivision in 1980, technically 1979, by the time Space Attack was released Star Raiders, Star Master, and Phaser Patrol were on the market or coming soon. All three of these games knock Space Attack out of the park with their complexity, action, and superior graphics. Mattel just couldn’t hold a candle to the competition. If you want to get a copy of Space Attack then you’re in luck, it’s dirt cheap. Currently you can buy a copy new in the box for six dollars with free shipping, but I honestly don’t know why you would. Space Attack goes to the Collector’s Zone, it’s just boring, and thank goodness Mattel didn’t release their 2600 port of Sea Battle!
  9. DoctorSpuds
    I have a rant for you, I’m very tired and it’s very rambly but I think I may have made a few good points.
     
    Here’s something odd that many people have a hard time coming to terms with, rarity does not equal value. When the topic of old games comes up in conversation I usually have to reiterate this multiple times, and almost every time I do this the person I’m talking to gets that greedy little gleam in their eye. “Oh, I have a Nintendo/Atari/Sega in the basement, and I have a bunch of games, I bet I could sell them and get a bunch of money.” That’s usually the gist of what they wind up saying every time, I get the feeling that they search on Ebay what their stuff is worth and wind up getting disappointed because their copy of Jack Niclaus Gold on NES isn’t worth 500 dollars. Because chances are, they don’t have anything worth anything. I feel that ‘The Media’ might have something to do with this overinflating of value, especially when it comes to old games. Most articles you see are about the .0001% of games, the ultra rare/valuable/famous, and they come out with outrageous numbers that may or may not be real, sure Air Raid sold for 33K in the box, but that doesn’t mean your copy of Defender is worth anything, or any of your games for that matter.
     
    You know what drives the value of a game up? Notoriety, or perhaps a good story, perhaps some mystery, something for people to dig their teeth into. A good story can turn an item from a curiosity into a collectible. The Air Raid cartridges are rare and have a good story to them, the same with Pepsi Invaders, or any of the ultra rare games in most game system’s libraries. NTSC Stadium Events has a good story and is rare, same with NWC carts or that sealed test market SMB that sold for 100k, that has a story, it has history. People care about those games, and it helps that they’re on popular systems. Word of mouth drove the prices of Earthbound up from the bargain bin to hundreds of dollars on Ebay, and the rarity did help give the game an air of value and exclusivity. I’m gonna quickly switch over to the absolute epitome of a good story increasing the desirability of an item. The Mona Lisa, despite being one of Da Vinci’s works was no more than another painting in the Louvre with a small following of art professionals, until it was stolen and became public knowledge and was soon hailed as a masterwork and is know the most famous work of art in history. But back to games.
     
    Some games are just valuable because they’re rare; yes I admit that wholeheartedly, some games are just rare, if I may fall back into my comfort zone of the 2600 for a moment. Games like Asterix, Eli’s Ladder, and Red Sea Crossing are just rare, they don’t have a particularly compelling story and in the case of some weren’t even known to exist until they were just found and released online. They’re rare and people will pay large sums for the exclusivity of owning it that’s just a given.
     
    Then you have the rarities that nobody cares about, I have several, in my experience much of this falls into the realm of the PC, though I have a few console games that would fall into this category. I am one of the tiny few who are even aware that Classic Pinball for Windows 3.1 by Impressions Software exists, I am currently the only person on the internet who has admitted to owning it, that being said, I’d be lucky to break even when selling it and I paid next to nothing for it. I own Windows Arcade Pack by WizardWorks, of which only a grainy image of the CD has ever been seen online, and yet I know that nobody is interested. The same thing goes for Championship Pool, also by WizardWorks, also for Windows, nobody cares. These could be the only complete copies on earth and nobody would care. I own a review cartridge of Choplifter for the SMS and the guy who sold it to me won’t even take it back. I have a review copy of Flight Simulator II on C64 with a letter of apology from the VP of Marketing at SUBLogic about the lateness of said review copy; the guy who sold it to me couldn’t even sell it on Ebay for ten bucks.
     
    Why is Custer’s Revenge more valuable than Bumper Bash despite it being far more common? Bumper Bash might just be the rarest pinball videogame to have ever been released and yet you can get a copy for less than 100 dollars while people pay similar to higher prices for something like Chase the Chuck Wagon which is more common. People have paid more for Devil’s Crush on Turbografx-16 than people have for Bumper Bash on Atari. Why do people still spend in excess of sixty dollars, as much as a brand new game, for Conker’s Bad Fur Day? The game isn’t even rare, if you cut the crap there are probably three full Ebay pages of nothing but Conker’s, the game isn’t rare. And you know what, I have the answer as to why some of these rare games are so worthless, people don’t care.
     
    People would rather play Devil’s Crush over Bumper Bash. People would rather own conversation starters like Custer’s Revenge or Chuck Wagon over Bumper Bash. People spend sixty dollars on Conker’s Bad Fur Day because it’s a good game, nobody cares about a pinball game for Windows from a company that nobody’s ever heard of, and nobody cares about a review copy of a flight sim game on C64. An item is only worth what its purchaser will pay for it, demand drives the market, and there is just no demand, and possibly no market, for these near worthless rarities.
  10. DoctorSpuds
    Those of you who’ve been around for a bit, or have gone back to my earlier reviews will know that Wizard of Wor was the first review I ever wrote. In all the time since I wrote that review my opinions of the game have not changed, it’s still a fantastic game. But that was with the 2600 version, I’ve recently acquired the 5200 version and I wonder how it holds up to its predecessor. I also wonder how the controller will affect the gameplay, but we’ll get to that when it comes.
     

     
    The graphics are alright though everything seems really basic. Enemies are now sporting multiple colors, though only for their eyes and tails, and are very much lacking in any animation apart from their legs moving. It is much the same for the player controlled character, he’s all yellow apart from his arm which is red, and only his legs have any animation. The mazes themselves feel very off, and after playing the 2600 version I’ve figured out why. They’re tiny, the mazes, although the main focus of the game, are tiny compared to the 2600 version or any other version for that matter, even the Astrocade version had a larger maze. Due to the shrunk down maze size  everything had to be made smaller to accommodate it leading to how basic everything looks, heck this looks more basic than an Intellivision game, apart from the multicolored sprites I’m sure the Intellivision could do as good a job if not better.
     

     
    The sounds oddly enough don’t sound as good as the chunky bass heavy 2600, and while the sounds are no doubt more complex they don’t seem to fit the game as well and overall feel very staticky. In what  I feel is a bit of a missed opportunity there are no voice samples in the game, I know they would take up quite a bit of storage but I get the feeling it was entirely possible especially when taking Berzerk into consideration, it had them, not many but it still had some.
     
     

    I’ve been dreading this, how does the 5200 controller affect the gameplay? Well it renders the game virtually unplayable, in my opinion, especially when coupled with the tweaked enemy behavior. The movement is slow and imprecise and the joystick has too much travel and too large a deadzone for accurate and fine movement. It feels like I’m pushing the stick through molasses, and the slow movement makes me feel like the in game character is wading through it as well. The enemies behave extremely erratically, whenever they reach an intersection there is a very good chance that they will just turn around and juggle themselves in small pockets of the maze. The enemies in the arcade also did this but it had either microswitched or standard contact point joysticks which allowed for quick and responsive control. The enemy behavior is not conducive to this joystick, if they had behaved like in the 2600 version, never turning around and simply steamrolling ahead, it would be far more playable.
     

     
    The contents of the game appear to be complete, you have all the standard mazes and enemies, and if it wasn’t for the controllers this might be the penultimate Wizard of Wor experience, second only to the arcade, or perhaps the C64 version, but I haven’t tried that one out yet. Unfortunately the controller really kills this one and the Trak-Ball doesn’t work so this might actually wind up being the worst home port of this classic arcade game. Unfortunately copies of this game are relatively scarce, with most coming to around 15-20 dollars loose, and I don’t even know what they’d go for boxed, if its anything near the 2600 boxed price then it really isn’t worth it. Wizard of Wor on the 5200 goes to the Collector’s Zone, just play the 2600 version, or wait for Wizard of Wor Arcade from Champ Games, also for the 2600, basically anything but this one.
     
  11. DoctorSpuds

    Something odd...

    By DoctorSpuds,

    So today I did something that I've never done before. I took a broken, non-working system, specifically an Atari 2600, and fixed it. I bought the system and box together (matching serial numbers), with no inserts, paperwork, or controllers, at a highly reduced price. The last time I snagged a matching SN console and box it was a Vader with the box only and working for 90$, this time I got lucky and got this non working four switch Woody for 50$, and considering this guy sells working 2600's at 40$ a pop I'd say I got a bargain. He told me that he'd tested it and it was not working, so I'd initially resigned to just buying one of his working consoles and switching the boards but this time I though that I might try to see what was wrong.
     
    Due to this being a four switch Woody to chips are socketed, which means I'd be able to just swap the bad chips out if that was indeed the problem, I have two complete sets of chips for occasions like this. At first glance everything seemed to point to the chips being the issue, there was no corrosion on the board, no bad caps, it's probably the cleanest system I've ever seen. The RF shielding was still on, and there was a repair/QA slip dating to 1982 which I'm guessing means this thing hasn't been opened since then and since the RF shielding shows no sign of being opened I assume that is the case. So I open this thing up and...
     
    It all looks pretty good, the chips are clean and there's no sign of wear, upon powering up the system none of the chips got hot which means there isn't a short anywhere, what a mystery. Perhaps this system just decided to die, but I'm not going to let it, it's time to re-seat some chips, I try the TIA chip, nothing, I try the 6502, nothing, then I try the RAM, and wouldn't you know it, one of the pins has folded in and in not actually fitting in the socket, bingo. I put in one of my spare RAM chips and there we go we're playing some Basic Math, I decided to just use the spare instead of trying to unfold the errant pin, I've tried that before and the pin usually winds up falling off, at least in my experience. 
     
    Oh man, the guy at the game store is going to be so pissed! Especially when i tell him what was wrong with the thing. That brings up the question though, how long has this console been like this, it came in with a stack of games with the latest one being from 1983. Hmmm, clearly someone put the chip in badly and never bothered to check the system again and so it languished in a basement for the past 30 or so years. Perhaps this was Atari's fault, or perhaps somebody got in there and screwed around and messed the thing up, then perfectly put the console back together, but lost a single screw in the process. What a weird thing, well anyway I think that deducts one from my 2600 body count, now it's down to three.
  12. DoctorSpuds

    QIX 5200 (Atari)

    By DoctorSpuds,

    Qix is a fun little arcade game than seems to defy any standard one would care to throw at it. Qix was an arcade release from Taito back in 1981 and by all accounts it was a modest success and it was all about drawing rectangles, hmmm. Qix was very slow to reach a home audience with the first home releases being for the Atari 5200 and 8-Bit computer line in 1983 with it finally reaching other consoles and computers in 1989 and into the early 1990’s, the Apple ][ version didn’t come out until 1989, 12 years after the computer was released. Qix it seems was a late bloomer, but it seems that it has gained perhaps a cult following as games bearing the Qix name have been released as recently as 2011. I only have the 5200 version of Qix, so that’s what I’ll be reviewing, I can probably also play the 8-Bit version on my Atari 800 but they’re identical apart from some slight control tweaking on account of the 5200’s unique controller.
     

     
    Qix is a frugal game, both in graphics and sounds. It only displays what is necessary and will only play sounds if it needs to, and since most of the graphical element the game does have tie in directly with the gameplay I will just condense this down to a single paragraph.
     

     
    In Qix your one goal is to section off a certain percentage of the screen without getting destroyed. In order to section off the screen you must draw lines and connect them with the border of the screen or other shapes you’ve created to create rectangles and various other shapes, once you’ve created the shape it then gets filled in and the edge becomes the new border of the screen. In order to keep things from getting too easy you will be contending with the randomly moving Qix, a series of strange lines that flits across the screen, and the two Sparx that will move along the border and will destroy you on contact. Eluding the Sparx is fairly simple as they will only move along the border but not along the lines you’ve drawn before they get filled in, you can just draw a rectangle around them. To keep you from cheating the game by just drawing a line and waiting there, or just moving back along a line the Fuse will appear and begin chasing you along the line, it will go away when you complete the shape. As the game goes on the difficulty will ramp up, fairly soon there will be two Qix to contend with and they will only get more and more erratic until all your lives are gone and it’s time to try again.
     

     
    Qix, despite being so simple, nails the ‘one more time’ mentality perfectly. Every time I lose I feel like I have to try again, to see if I can get a little bit further or try a new strategy I hadn’t thought about before. Qix is a masterpiece in gameplay above all else. Qix is an incredibly common game for the 5200 and 8-Bit computers with loose copies starting at less than six dollars for the 5200 version and less than ten dollars for the 8-Bit version. You don’t really need this game in the box as the game is so simple and straightforward that it would only be a waste of space.
  13. DoctorSpuds
    Yesterday I had the privilege of adding something to my “Never Again” list, a list I just created of things that I never want to do/experience again, and at work no less. It seemed like it was going to be a slow night, I had finished all of my set tasks and had just finished my break, I had noticed that about halfway through one of my coworkers had come in and raided the first aid cabinet, I figured he’d cut his finger or something and thought nothing of it. When my break ended I decided to use the bathroom, best to do it on company time and not during break, upon entering the bathroom I realized why my coworker was in a rush to get to the first aid cabinet.
     
    Blood, blood absolutely everywhere.
     
     On the floor, on the door, on the sink, mirror, walls, everywhere, the only place it wasn’t was on the ceiling. The handicap stall looked like there had been a murder committed in there, it turns out my coworker had nicked his wrist on his box cutter and it had bled profusely. I quickly fetched my manager so he could figure out next steps. He got my coworker properly bandaged and had him sit down in the break room to fill out an accident report, and guess who got left with two gallons of bleach, a mop, a bucket, and a bathroom covered in blood? If you guessed me then you’d be correct.
     
    Blood is incredible, it finds the most inconvenient places to splatter and conglomerate and then it goes there and dries up. I washed the floors, and the walls with a bleach/water mix, and in what might be considered a danger to my health I dumped an entire gallon of bleach on the toilet. My eyes were burning, my lungs were burning, and I couldn’t be in that stall for more than a few seconds at a time without coughing and retching. The toilet, my god the toilet, one could hardly tell it was supposed to be white, I wasn’t going to get personal with it so I just used the mop on the thing as well, a mixture of toilet water, bleach, and crusted dried blood was clinging to me, my pants were absolutely ruined.
     
    After a good 45 minutes of mopping and scrubbing I finally cleaned up all the blood and the bathroom was probably cleaner than it had ever been. After a short chat with my manager he allowed me to go home early to clean myself up. I think I’ve earned the respect of the entire store, as I think I can firmly say that I’m the only one there who’s volunteered to mop up a bloody bathroom, they don’t pay me enough to do crap like that. Worst of all, my pants are ruined.
     
    My coworker is fine by the way, he stopped bleeding, though I think of the two of us I came out worse since everything still smells like a public pool and my pants are ruined.
  14. DoctorSpuds
    Long has this game eluded me, but now I have it in my possession, sort of. I’ve really wanted to get my hands on Star Wars: The Arcade Game for a long while but the price has always been a prohibitive factor, mainly due to it being a late release Parker Brothers game coupled with a big IP driving the prices up dramatically. It seems though that I’ve been after the wrong version the whole time, because as I was focusing on the 2600 version, as I tend to do, I has completely neglected the other versions of the game, mainly the 5200 port. So, now that I have it, was it really worth all the time, and money, I spent to get it? Let’s start where we always do, the graphics.
     

     
    This is a fairly attractive looking game that goes for a very minimalist look, which makes sense since the arcade game this was based on was rendered using vectors, no solid colored shapes here. As far as the 5200 port goes, it looks like as perfect a recreation as the 5200 was capable of. The graphics are flicker free and the attempts at 3D are pretty good, but I feel that an opportunity was missed when it came to the graphics. A part of me wishes that the programmer went off in their own direction and filled in those shapes, even though the game doesn’t look bad by any means I feel that there just isn’t enough on the screen at once and I begin to get tired of seeing the same set of lines over and over again. I can understand the vector approach for the 2600 perhaps, but the 5200 was capable of so much more, and I feel that its potential was rather squandered.
     

     
    The sounds are alright. Mainly you’ll be hearing a load of gunfire and a few explosions, but apart from the Star Wars theme at the start of the each round you won’t be hearing much else. I fell that this was also a bit of a letdown since the arcade game has voice clips from the movie itself put in for immersion. I know the 5200 is capable of playing voice clips just listen to Berzerk. Perhaps it was an issue of storage, or certain criteria had to be met for the 5200 to play voice clips that would hinder the gameplay experience, I don’t know, but I do think it could be better.
     

     
    Due to this being a home port of an advanced arcade game things had to be shifted around and altered a bit, and removed. When starting the game you’ll be assaulted by a load of TIE fighters just like in the original, and as usual they’re incredibly difficult to hit, but once you get past that you’re immediately thrown into the trench sequence and completely bypass the towers. Only after you destroy the Death Star once do you get to play the tower sequence. Unfortunately the 5200 version can only offer a stripped down experience, the small red turrets in the tower sequence are absent and the wall mounted turrets in the trench section are also absent leading to a rather shallow experience as you spend a large chunk of the game not really shooting at anything. The controls are unique to the 5200, due to its analogue controller it uses the joystick to move the crosshairs like a cursor, wherever the joystick goes the crosshair goes, no more no less. These controls bring a lot of much needed fluidity to the game but make it impossible to emulate properly unless you manage to hook your mouse up as your joystick, the arrow keys just won’t work well.
     

     
    Overall I can totally see how a kid back in the 80’s would have loved this game, but unfortunately fitting the whole arcade experience into one little cartridge was just impossible. As for the game, it’s fun enough for a few rounds but you’ll quickly lose interest in it when the repetition hits. If you want to try out Star Wars: The Arcade Game for yourself you can find loose carts on Ebay for 15-40 dollars with boxed copies of course being more expensive at 40+. I’m gonna put this one tentatively in the Collector’s Zone, I can see how many people would find this to be great fun, but the price coupled with the stripped back nature of it just don’t gel with me.
     

  15. DoctorSpuds

    Robot Tank (Activision)

    By DoctorSpuds,

    When I was just getting into the 2600 I was still ignorant to the complexity that some games managed to achieve. So imagine my surprise when I plopped Robot Tank into my 2600 for the first time. It is quite clear that Robot Tank was made to be Activision’s answer to Atari’s Battlezone, and it really feels like it. Also reading the back of the box, this game apparently takes place in October 2019, so it is the perfect time for me to review it. Funnily enough, the prediction of a robotized military is not that far off, though instead of robotic tanks we use drones instead. Personally I’m glad Atari didn’t have another hissy fit over Robot Tank because of its similarity to Battlezone, mainly because I think Robot Tank is superior to Battlezone, at least the home ports of it. So let’s start where we always do, the graphics.
     

     
    This game is absolutely gorgeous. The color, oh, the color, this is incredible. The layout of the screen is quite simple, you have a large HUD, with four icons, I’ll go more into those later, realtime radar, your lives and an oversized Activision logo. Unlike with many gave of this type, the oversized HUD takes up less space than the actual viewing area, which is a nice change. Unlike with the 2600 port of Battlezone, you don’t see your tank, you’re simply looking through a screen, but what you see is absolutely wonderful. Scrolling terrain, and what might actually be a first for video games, view bobbing, the entire viewing area will raise and lower as you move along giving the illusion of the uneven ground beneath your treads. Also it seems Robot Tank borrowed from Enduro in that it has a day/night cycle and different weather effects like fog and rain that will affect your tank in different ways, actually this agme borrows more from Enduro than some might think.
     

     
    The sounds are a mix of gravelly engines, heavy weapon fire, and explosions, and they fit the game perfectly. Nothing really stands out all too much, the explosion seems to rely too much on a pseudo echo effect and the engine is just the one from Combat all over again, but they work well with the game. Though I will say, hearing the enemy fire a shot somewhere deep in the darkness and hearing the projectile whizzing towards you will illicit panic in anybody.
     

     
    Robot Tank is to Battlezone what Enduro is to Pole Position, it is a far more arcade-y experience that isn’t as much about score as it is about surviving as long as possible. You will be placed one on one against the enemy tanks which may seem like a copout but once you get into the game a bit you’ll realize that this was for the best. Your adversaries take the strategy of the best offence is a good defense as they are ruthlessly aggressive and will disable your tank one piece at a time if you aren’t fast enough. There are some helpful exploits at your disposal that will keep you alive for longer, mainly that you can off-screen the enemy shot and it will simply cease to be, you can also shoot the shot with your own if you’re desperate, this isn’t a simulation like Battlezone. The day/night cycle and weather will also have a far greater effect on you thank you think. At night the enemy tanks are completely invisible except when they fire at you, randomly firing is surprisingly effective but whatever you do, don’t stop moving. Fog will reduce your visibility to only very close range but you can still see the enemy tanks so get right in there and fire away. Rain will be your downfall as your speed is halved and so is your maneuverability, I’d recommend fleeing and avoidance until the rain is over. Snow just makes it impossible to aim as your tank is slippy sliding all over the darn place so avoidance is recommended as well.
     

     
    The four icons flanking the radar screen are your vital systems that are responsible for keeping you in fighting shape. Depending on where an enemy hits you, they will be destroyed, sometimes an enemy shot will get you in one shot so be thankful when it’s only one of your systems. The ‘V’ stands for video and when that is damaged your view will cut out periodically blinding you for short periods of time. The ‘C’ stands for cannons, when that is damaged your shots per minute drop drastically as sometimes your cannon just won’t fire. The ‘R’ stands for radar, I think you can guess what happens when that goes out. The ‘T’ stands for treads, if these are damaged you’re a sitting duck as your movement speed and maneuverability are slowed to a crawl. The only system you can live without is the radar but any of the other three are a guaranteed death, slow or otherwise.
     

     
    Robot Tank is an excellent counterpart to Atari’s Batllezone, both are great games in their own right though I’d have to say that Robot Tank edges out with its more arcade like gameplay, focusing more on survival than all out war. Copies of Robot Tank are cheap and plentiful with the cheapest loose copies on Ebay being less than ten dollars each and with boxed copies sitting around the 20-40 dollar range. This is an excellent game that everybody should have in their collection.
     

  16. DoctorSpuds
    Confusing licenses are the bread and butter of obscure games. Very few companies in the early days of gaming actually tried to tackle non-arcade licenses, with only 20th Century Fox, Atari, and Parker Brothers doing it in any quantity. The names these companies took just boggles the mind, box office bombs like Mega Force and Krull, movies that have been out of the public eye for years like Fantastic Voyage and Planet of the Apes, and comic book characters like Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk were all made into video games, though many were abandoned. By far my favorite weird license goes to Parker Brothers and their release of James Bond: 007 for the Atari 2600 and Atari 5200 as well as the Colecovision and Commodore 64. Instead of focusing the game on the most recent movie, Octopussy, which may or may not have been released to theaters by this time, Parker Brother decided in their infinite wisdom to cram scenes from four different bond movies into this one game. The four Bond movies in question are Diamonds are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, and Moonraker, even though the 2600 port had to omit FYEO. Well let’s just get on with it, I’m going to focus on the 5200 port, because it’s the only one I own, but I will reference the 2600 port when I can.
     

     
    Well, the graphics aren’t anything all that special, even for the 5200. James Bond is a very visually bland game, with much of it consisting of various shades of brown to indicate the ground and blue for water. The game starts with an attempt at a cutscene showing Bond getting into his car and driving off except everything about it is dreadful. Bond is three times as tall as the car, and when he magically squeezes into it the thing shrinks down to the size of a postage stamp and trundles off. The car looks like a banana with racing stripes and everything else you encounter doesn’t look much better, especially the garbles mess that is supposed to be a laser firing orbital satellite. There are blue blobs in the sky and men the size of oil rigs under the water, also, this game is a total seizure inducer. When you get to the ocean stages the projectiles you drop make the bottom half of the screen flash myriad different colors, and when you hit a giant floating blob the sky flashes crazy colors. At points in the game the entire screen will be flashing apart from the ground and the player/enemy sprites, it’s a total eye sore. If you ask me the 2600 port is far more colorful and easier on the eyes, even if it isn’t as graphically complex it still is more interesting to look at.
     

     
    The sounds are alright, there’s a decent rendition of the Bond theme but there is very little to talk about otherwise. All the rest of the sounds are various shooting and explosion noises, which on their own are pretty good, the problem is when playing the game normally you’ll hear the sounds so many times that they bleed into one and become very, very, obnoxious as this game is a total button masher.
     

     
    James Bond: 007 is a horizontal shooter where you must avoid and shoot your way through scenes of several Bond classics, though you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t read the manual. All the game boils down to is moving left to right and not really being able to hit anything because the shooting is terrible. In the first scene you must avoid laser firing orbital satellites and the worst potholes in human history, once you get past that part you enter the ocean stage where you avoid shots from enormous frogmen and more laser platforms. The end of the ocean stage us usually where most people’s playthorugh ends, in order to get to the next scene you must make the most pixel perfect bullshit jump in the history of gaming whilst autoscrolling screws with your positioning. You must jump over an entire oil drilling platform to land on an unmarked helipad on the far end of it only after illuminating it by shooting a diamond in the sky otherwise you hit the thing and lose a life. To make your life more difficult you also have little to no control as to where you are shooting as your shots go at an angle and all of your targets are moving. Also in an incredible waste of the 5200 controller, both the depth charges and normal shots are mapped to the same button so in order to fire on a diamond twice you have to press the button three times and light the ocean up in a seizure inducing display of colors. Why not map the depth charges to the second action button that doesn’t get used in the entire game? WHY? Alright so let’s say that by some miracle you land that jump, what happens next? Well you just do the same thing over again with differently behaving enemies and a slightly different ending, and as far as I can tell the other two scenes are the exact same things as that except with even more different enemies. The game has no variation as to what you actually do, which is move to the right and mash the fire button and occasionally dodge an enemy.
     

     
    I played this game on novice difficulty on an emulator for a good 30-45 minutes and despite knowing exactly how to play the game I got past the oil rig once, and as far as I could tell everything looked, sounded, and played exactly the same. This game has no variety, is unfairly difficult with how to beat it, and is just no fun after a few minutes. Playing on the 5200 with that controller is even worse as hand cramp set in after a few seconds of play, good god what an abysmal heap of garbage. Unfortunately this is one of Parker Brother’s final games, making it rare and somewhat sought after, here’s a bullet list of the game values on the various systems it was released on, and even though I don’t really need to say it, this game goes to the Collector’s Zone.
    2600:
    ·         Loose with manual: 45-60$
    ·         Sold loose for: 18-23$
    5200
    ·         Loose: 15$, sold listings reflect current values
    ·         CIB: 40$
    Colecovision
    ·         Loose: 20-32$
    ·         CIB sold for 40+
    C64
    ·         Cartridge + Manual: 40+
  17. DoctorSpuds
    Alright we’re back with the 7800 and with a game that I’ve already reviewed the 2600 version of. Xenophobe was an arcade success back in 1987, with a classic premise and a cool gimmick it was sure to guzzle quarters like nobody’s business. Because of its popularity Xenophobe found its way into being ported on many home consoles and computers of the time even if there was absolutely no way they could run it, hell, even the ZX Spectrum got a port of it. But I’m focusing on the 7800 port and one thing that immediately strikes me is the sharp difference in box art. The 2600 version had a cartoonish but still highly detailed lawsuit bomb, while the 7800 box has two poorly drawn people fighting an even more poorly drawn green blob with mismatched eyes and a big goofy grin. The 7800 art does not inspire confidence as the more you look at it the worse it gets. From a perspective standpoint, there is none, the door the lady is throwing a grenade through is massive, while the woman seems to be sunk through the floor. She’s also pointing her gun at the burly dude who, despite trying to look stoic has clearly shat his pants with fear. Both the aliens look absolutely childish in comparison to the humans which were at least clearly discernible as being such and had a distinct style, the aliens look like they were contracted to a third grader. Also that skull is way too big, as despite it being at least several feet from the people it still manages to be larger than either of their heads. Okay so if the box art manages to be this disappointing I’m afraid for what I’m going to find when I actually play this game, let’s just get it over with.
     

     
    Well, okay then, this isn’t too bad. Starting off with you’ll see a 7800 recreation of the arcade marquee, complete with attractive woman holding big gun and debaucherous alien. Then the game starts, you get through the cutscene and… You are the most disgruntled looking bald dude off the face of the earth. The graphics are fairly detailed by 7800 standards but the color pallet is very subdued bordering on bland. The opening cutscene with the spaceship is completely monochrome while the insides of the space station aren’t much better. The walls are grey, the things up against the walls are also grey, there are some nice splashes of color though, usually purples and blues, and with the floor being orange it keeps things from getting too lousy. Overall, it’s fairly ‘meh’ there’s nothing overtly terrible but there’s nothing to really draw you in and give you the ‘wow’ factor that you desperately need in a game as repetitive as this.
     

     
    The sounds are virtually the same as the 2600 version, though my opinions on them have softened somewhat. The music is still absolutely dreadful, I don’t know how they thought that was even remotely okay. Most of the sounds are well placed beeps and chirps but there are a few that stand out, mainly the shooting sounds for all guns above the standard phaser pistol, and the roar of the large alien as it charges at you,  those are some legitimately unique sounds I’ve never heard from either the 2600 or 7800 before. Apart from the music the sounds are inoffensive and work well with the game, how’s the gameplay then?
     

     
     Well… it’s Xenophobe, that’s for sure. Your sole purpose in Xenophobe is to kill everything that moves and a few things that don’t. You move room to room shooting a small variety of enemies over and over until you die. The game plays very similarly to the 2600 version but there are a few additions and improvements, and yes I do know that the 2600 version was likely based on the 7800 version but since I reviewed the 2600 version first I’m going to compare this to that. You can now jump into doors, oh yeah, and it takes away more health than some of the smaller enemies, this is an improvement since the 2600 version didn’t actually have doors. Shooting has been fixed; you can now fire rapidly from any place in the screen. The 2600 version metered out its shooting speed based on how close you were to the side of the screen, the closer the faster, now you can mash away and kill the larger enemies with ease. Weapon damage has also been tweaked, instead of only doing 10 units of damage like in the 2600 version, now grenades do 100 units of damage making them actually useful. Throwing grenades has been relegated to the second action button so there’s no need to crouch hold forward and shoot to throw a grenade like in the 2600 version and the arc is far longer so you don’t have to be standing next to an enemy to hit them. A few quality of life improvements include being able to crouch and walk and shoot all at the same time, and now having the ability to shoot while being knocked down. Instead of there being two outcomes for each station you visit, failure and success, there is now a third option, successful failure. You’d either lose the station to the aliens or you’d kill them all, now you can self destruct the station if you find the proper item and find the destruct console, doing this gives you fewer points and no health bonus, but let’s face it some of the later stations are four to five levels of Satan spawn and you won’t survive that. Oh yeah, and what was the most important thing the 7800 version has that the 2600 version doesn’t despite it being advertised on the back of the box? Oh, that’s right, simultaneous split-screen multiplayer! There’s a reason the screenshots of the 2600 version didn’t show any split screen because if they did that would be false advertising.
     

     
    All in all the game is a marked improvement over the 2600 version, which is no surprise. It’s a firmly ‘alright’ game, you might pop it in every once in a while but it’s not something you’ll spend a whole afternoon playing. What isn’t alright however are the prices, for such a common game the prices are ludicrous. The cheapest copy currently on Ebay is a loose cart for 28 dollars, the cheapest boxed copy is a PAL copy for 36 dollars. I got my copy for 40 dollars CIB which, looking at the rest of them, seems like a pretty good deal. If the prices were half of what they are now then maybe I’d recommend this one, but considering I’ve seen 7800 consoles sell for less I’d say this one goes to the Collector’s Zone, an alright game overshadowed by its price tag.
     

  18. DoctorSpuds
    Alright, so I think this’ll be a good game to start the 5200 with, Rescue on Fractalus! RoF was one of the first in a long line of games from Lucasarts, and as first games go this is amazing. I won’t bore you with a history of Lucasarts or of the 5200; I already did a whole write up on that, so let’s just jump into Rescue on Fractalus!
     

     
    FRACTALS! I don’t know what they are, or how they are utilized in this game, all I know is that they were used to make a full fledged 3D world for you to fly around in. Due to what I imagine is immense strain on the CPU and RAM the game runs in single digit framerates making for a very choppy experience, but I’m still overwhelmed that I can have it at all, and on the 5200 no less. The world is all brown, with only a grid of black lines to indicate changes in terrain, it’s very simple but it’s also effective because shaded 3D landscapes were probably a few light years out of the 5200’s reach at the time. It seems most of the work went into making the terrain as the rest of the game looks fairly simplistic by comparison, the enemies are vague shapes and your cockpit, though busy, isn’t all that complex and not nearly as cool looking as Phaser Patrol on the 2600. There are a few other effects that I really enjoy, entering the planet’s atmosphere is one of them, approaching an ominous sandy orb, fog fills your screen and then the craggy peaks fade in as the atmosphere lessens, it’s a little touch that goes a long way. According to the manual, I have not tested this myself, there is a day night cycle in the higher difficulties, as cool as I think it would be, I think I’ll pass, I’m not that much of a masochist.
     

     
     The sounds are a fairly standard assortment of space shooter pastimes. The chunky sounds of laser cannons, the roar of the booster rockets as you skim over the planet’s surface, the crack of a well place shot obliterating an enemy turret, they’re all fairly standard but they do their job well. Much of the game is dominated by the sound of the ship’s engine, but due to the 5200’s POKEY chip you can have more than two sounds playing at once so you can have a laser battle while not having any of the sound stepping over each other. Well everything seems pretty good so far, how does the gameplay add to this overall package.
     

     
    Well, if I had to compare it to anything it would have to be Choplifter, first person choplifter in spaceships. All the game amounts to is flying around the map, shooting enemy gun emplacements and an occasional flying enemy and picking up stranded pilots. There is a handy radar system that extends in a cone shape from the front of your ship and is very handy for locating well hidden pilots. You can also see a white indicator on the ships themselves which is helpful for close range pickups. All of these indicators are necessary because your viewing window is actually very small only taking up a third of the screen at most. Picking up the pilots is a bit of a process, fist you must locate them and press one to land, you must then turn your systems off so you don’t fry the pilot, then you must wait for the guy to run over to your ship, then open the airlock with three, when you hear them knocking it’s time to close the airlock turn on your systems and launch with six. The overall difficulty is increased due to you wrestling with the controls most of the time, but that’s in most part due to the low framerate messing with your reaction times and not the controller. Thankfully the programmers knew of this issue and gave your shots a blast radius so you don’t have to hit the enemies perfectly to destroy them. The non centering joystick actually works pretty well as a flight stick, it’s a pity that a few of the buttons on my keypad still refuse to work, I’m looking at you number seven. Speaking of the keypad, Rescue on Fractalus doesn’t have a keypad overlay, despite most of the button being used, thankfully somebody has made one of their own and you can find it with a simple Google search.
     

     
    The game is fun, but despite the nifty graphics it’s not really all that much of a game, and I think its way too easy. I have to jack the difficulty up to eight or twelve just feel a bit of challenge. Finding the Mothership is also a pain, there is no indicator of it until you’re right on it so once you destroy all the enemies and collect all the pilots you’re stuck flying in circles until you get to just the right spot that looks exactly the same as the rest of them. So yeah, it’s a game that’s good in short bursts, but not much to play for long periods of time, usually I’ll just reset it once I destroy all the enemies because the button I need to dock with the Mothership doesn’t work, I’m looking at you SEVEN. As of now there aren’t any loose copies listed on Ebay, only boxed copies. The cheapest copy is 35 dollars NIB, which isn’t a bad deal; I got my copy for the same price. If you can find a loose copy for ten dollars or a boxed copy for 20 dollars this game is well worth your time and money.
     

  19. DoctorSpuds
    Alright guys this is the final non-game I’m looking at for a while I promise but this one is just so strange. I won’t actually be talking about the game all too much since there is almost nothing to talk about in the first place. Comitoid is absolutely mind boggling, it is the textbook definition of confusing. All you do is fly a little spaceship around as it automatically shoots at large flashing objects. There are so sounds, there are no points, and most importantly you cannot be destroyed, so therefore this is moreso a glorified screensaver than an Atari game. Okay now that the game is out of the way I really have to talk about its creator, or lack of one. Whoever compiled my ROM pack attributed this game to SnailSoft, I cannot find anything on the internet about SnailSoft other than they created the Greeting Carts, and Meteor Smasher the only NTSC version of Astro War. What was odd is that when I grabbed a screenshot for the review the publisher/programmer in the file extension listed a guy named Greg Zumwalt as the creator not SnailSoft. After searching for ‘Greg Zumwalt Comitoid’ on Google I found a page on Github that listed him as the creator of several hacks of popular games, he is listed as the creator of Jungle Jane a Pitfall! hack, WacMan as Ms. Pac-Man hack, and Fish Revenge a Space Invaders hack. On the same page Meteor Smasher is listed under SnailSoft which leads me to believe that these two are actually separate entities, though they could be one and the same.
     
    I seriously cannot find a single scrap of information about these guys, they are phantoms. If anyone has any information about either SnailSoft or Greg Zumwalt please feel free to share, but when you’re this deep down the rabbit hole it’s unlikely that your questions will ever be answered.
  20. DoctorSpuds
    The other day I referred to Sub Scan from Sega as a bad idea… That got me thinking, or well, recalling something I had been thinking of previously. By 1983 the Atari 2600 was a pretty old console by console standards, and was being faced with fierce competition from Mattel with their superior in almost every way Intellivision, Magnavox need not apply themselves to this squabble. Atari needed a console that would trounce the Intellivision and the rumored super-console from Coleco, so Atari gathered their greatest minds and…
     
     Instead of coming up with new hardware like with what they did for the 2600 or their 8-Bit series of computers, Atari simply recycled verbatim their 8-Bit hardware. Funnily enough Atari would do this again with the XEGS. The result was a game console with games programmed for a computer, some of which required the use of a keyboard. But it was perfect for something to quickly shove out the door, hell, most of the games were already programmed, just slap them in a cartridge and send them on their way. This seemed like a good idea, on paper this is a low cost way of releasing a solid game console, sure the hardware was four years old, but compared to machines of the time it still held its own admirably. The games could simply be ports from their extensive 8-Bit library, and they could probably rope in a few their party publishers, Parker Brothers, Activision, CBS, the good ones, and as a result the 5200 library is far less spotty than the 2600’s. Unfortunately it wasn’t the technology inside the console that ruined the whole thing, it was everything else.
     
    So, the first 5200 model was I big ‘ol piece of poo. The only thing it had going for it was four controller ports, but let’s face it nobody was going to get their three friends over to play 5200. Atari was really smoking some crazy shit because after their controller design they decided to innovate some more with the dual power and video system. Instead of taking a video cable from the machine to the TV and the having power supply plug into the wall and then into the machine Atari had a weird box that complicated the process. You plugged a single cable from the console into the box, which carried both the video signal and the power, which was simultaneously plugged both into the TV and into the power supply, which was also plugged into the wall. Instead of just having two wires behind your TV you know have three and a stupid switch box, because yes the stupid power/video box was also a TV signal switcher. Because of this absolutely idiotic solution to a problem that nobody had, first run four-port 5200’s are shunned and avoided because they’re a mess to hook up properly that is if the switch box works in the first place.
     
    Another thing I forgot to mention was the size of the console itself; this thing is an absolute unit. Atari figured that people didn’t want to just leave their controllers out to get trampled and collect dust so they built controller storage into the back of the machine. This storage bay adds an extra three inches to the back of the console and it doesn’t even hold the controllers well to boot. If Atari had decided to omit the controller bays this thing would probably be only the size of a C64/VIC-20, and if they shaved all of the empty space from the inside then this thing would have been the size of a 2600, maybe smaller with a board revision, heck this thing could probably fit into a 2600 Jr. since those boards were seriously large and still full of empty space. The hardware was sound but everything else was terrible, and I’m not even mentioning build quality or quality of materials used, I’ve heard horror stories of consoles disintegrating on the shelf, because the plastic felt like it. Though it still isn’t as cheap feeling as the 7800, but we can all agree that despite being dubbed the "Pain-Line" the 7800's controllers were better than the 5200's by a country mile.
     
    Non-Centering Joysticks, there are very few combinations of words that would elicit a cringe like those three. These controllers are complicated for the sole purpose of being complicated, sure the Intellivision’s keypad and directional disc were a bit much, but this is on a whole new level. The inside circuitry is made up entirely of a single flex board, a thin sheet of flexible plastic with the circuits inlayed. The flex boards are fragile and get dirty easily, and are prone to scratching, which could sever the connections. The joystick is controlled with two variable resistors, one for vertical movement and one for horizontal, that have small knobs that fit into slots attached to flat plastic pieces that fit together on rails that all pancake together to make the thingy on the screen move. I don't know what Atari's engineering department was smoking but it must have fucked them up if they thought this was a good design. I will give credit where it’s due, having the start button and reset button of the controller is rather convenient and the introduction of a pause button was revolutionary, but the rest of it is terrible. The fact that the controller plug was proprietary didn't help with finding alternatives as the only one there was was a Wico with an external keyboard. The thing is a pain to hold the thing is a pain to use since the buttons are so mushy sometimes it won’t register, the keypads simply refuse to function and repairs are an absolute pain in the ass. What’s wrong with contact points? Even Atari seemed to get the point when their Pro-Line controllers used the tried and true method over this complicated bullshittery. And unfortunately because of this stupid design some basic mechanics in games had to be rewritten.
     
    In both Frogger and Q*bert you have to hold one of the action buttons to move, otherwise you’re standing still no matter how hard to torque the stick. If the games didn’t have this function you’d have to re-center the stick yourself otherwise you’d simply keep going. Some games are made far more difficult than they should be because of this, River Raid being the first that comes to mind. Because the action of the stick automatically re-centering is so ingrained into my mind I keep flying into walls because I forget to move the stick back, and as such the game is no fun to play. Star Raiders is a hassle to play with every button on the keypad having multiple functions, and having some buttons simply not work. Yes some games came with overlays but they were flimsy paper things that wouldn’t last a few minutes let alone a single session of Star Raiders. Some games are still very fun to play, Popeye, and Qix are great fun, even with the stupid controllers. Thankfully several games utilize the criminally underutilized Trak-Ball controller, the thing is sublime and Centipede is all the better for it.
     
    I’ve heard that there is a custom 5200 controller replacement in the works and I’m seriously considering it the controllers are simply that awful. I still stand by what I said earlier about just getting the 5200 ROMS to play on an Atari 8-Bit computer, mainly because you can play with whatever controller you like. The Atari 5200 shall forever be known as the first console to be killed by its own controller, what a waste, and it won’t be the last either.
     
    This thing disgusts me!

  21. DoctorSpuds
    Ah, well this seems familiar. First off, no I’m not taking a break; I’m just writing this to give you a few updates on future reviews and a small update on the book. Also I’m using this as an excuse not to write a review for today. Sorry.
     
    Recently I’ve had the monumental task of repairing several Atari 5200 controllers, and it seems I still have to open them up every so often to coax more functionality out of them. The local game store had four standard joysticks and a Trak-Ball controller, he basically gave them to me for 50$ and thankfully one of them has a keypad that almost fully works. I have a decent amount of games for the system now so stay tuned for my opinions on those.
     
    The book is progressing slowly, which is how I want it to. In the interests of not getting burned out I’m only working on it one or two days a week adding 5-10 reviews. I still expect for it to be ready early next year, though it might be delayed some with the addition of the 5200 because I’ll have to add a section for that particular console as well. So far the book is at a whopping  546 pages with a total of 171,938 words, light reading for sure. Some reviews have been reworked extensively, and I expect that number to grow as I get into my earlier write-ups, and I’ve had to remove a lot of intro sections just so it doesn’t seem like I’m addressing thin air because some readers likely won’t know anything about the blog, and it would just be weird.
     
    On a final note, fuck Atari 5200 controllers, they can all go snort shit.
     
  22. DoctorSpuds

    Congo Bongo (Sega)

    By DoctorSpuds,

    We’re back in Sega territory today, and the game of the day? Well, how about Congo Bongo? Sure that sounds good. Congo Bongo is a fairly blatant Donkey Kong ‘rip-off’, I only put rip-off in quotes because is almost every way Congo Bongo surpasses Donkey Kong. The original 1983 arcade had an isometric perspective coupled with beautiful graphics; the arcade still holds up today, it’s absolutely gorgeous. Sega took initiative and decided to port Congo Bongo to the major consoles of the time themselves, the only versions I have available to me through emulators are the Atari 2600, Commodore 64 (tape and disk), VIC-20, Intellivision, and Colecovision. Almost all of these versions have the same problem… they’re way too hard for avoidable reasons, for example to jump is barely long enough to clear any gaps so you have to wait until the last second to jump but if you’re a millisecond off you’ll fall to your death, or the hitboxes of the giant coconuts and of your little dude are very particular and by being anywhere near a coconut you’ll get hit, for being and isometric three dimensional game the hitboxes are surprisingly 2D. The only version that I think is forgiving enough to be playable AND fun is conveniently the 2600 version, so let’s just get on to that.
     
    This might just be one of the most graphically advanced games on the 2600, perhaps right behind Solaris, but for a non-red label game this might just be the best. The game actually manages to do a convincing representation of 3D on the 2600, so unlike Zaxxon Congo Bongo is actually isometric. Unlike Q*Bert, which also managed a 3D style perspective, Congo Bongo has everything solid and colored in and not relying of line of the same color alternating with black, like with what Q*Bert did. From what I’ve seen of the other games the first screen is accurate to the arcade, but the angle is off, the only two versions that actually had the correct ‘arcade’ angle is the Colecovision and C64 disk version, so I’m not going to whine about it. The sprite work is rather incredible, the level of animation on the hunter is on a level I’ve only seen from Xonox, and that is definitely one of the best gorillas on the 2600. Screen one isn’t static either; the water ripples and moves which is very nice touch. There is quite a bit of flicker between the falling coconuts and the pestering monkeys, but I’ll forgive that, the simple fact that the developers managed to cram so much into one screen on the 2600 of all things is just miraculous. But this isn’t the only screen, oh no, this game has three of them. Screen two, the Jungle River is a bit of a letdown when compared to the first, unlike with most all of the other versions, the Frogger style platforming screen is not in an isometric view, it seems they had to take a page from Zaxxon for this one. The view is top down with the hunter starting at the bottom and working his way up, all of the sprites are at least large, but most of them are very abstract, the only one I know for sure are the rainbow hippos but the rest are a complete mystery. Screen three is horrifically violent even by my standards (which are very high), you light Congo the Gorilla on fire… I read the manual and it says that it’s “play fire” and that “Congo can take the heat” but you just light a gorilla on fire, and that’s absolutely hilarious.

    This game doesn’t skimp on the music; there is a suitably catchy opening melody, as well as a constant jungle rhythm that plays in the background, there are a variety of beeps and boops when you’re jumping about the screens but none of them are ear grating or dangerous to your health so you should be fine. Musically inclined games are fairly rare on the 2600, so it’s nice to see a game of this overall quality getting treated well on all fronts. That’s all I have to say about that.

    Good looking games on the 2600 rarely have any substance to them, all of the effort went into making the game look as good as possible and not as fun as possible, that is not the case today. Congo Bongo is an incredibly fun game to play, it’s a standard avoid ‘em platformer much like Donkey Kong. You must navigate your hunter up the mountain, avoiding the falling coconuts, barrels need not apply here, you must jump over the precarious ledge before it crumbles beneath your feet, then there is the Monkey Plateau. These crazy chimps will hold on for dear life, and don’t even think about jumping the river with one of them on your back, you’ll sink like a rock. Once you’ve conquered the mountain you must then contend with the river, you’ll have to jump on lily pads, hippos, and giant fish, to make your way across, watch out the hippos and fish will boot you off if you stay on too long (whaddaya think they are? A Bloomin’ taxi service?). Once you get past the raging rhinos it’s off to get even and scorch that ape. This game has some of the most forgiving collision detection I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing, but it is rather random; most times you can walk right through the coconuts, which is good since they move fast and you don’t. The jumping is also a step up from the other versions, you are able to cross gaps with ease since you are able to jump so far, whereas in other versions you had to be pixel perfect or it was a life down the tube. If you thought the collision detection was forgiving in screen one… well screen two may just surprise you. This is where all your lives will be washed away, since you’re looking at this from a top-down perspective you can’t actually predict where your jump is gonna land, you’ll most likely undershoot or overshoot, thankfully you’re given plenty of lives to figure out the incredibly precise timing, it’s not a game-breaker but it does introduce a difficulty spike like no other. Also screen two has a habit of making the collision detection so erratic that you could be standing on water and nothing will happen but you could die standing on dry land, it’s a bit buggy.

    Overall this is a very fun game to listen to, look at, and play, sure the second screen is difficult and perhaps somewhat unfair but that doesn’t ruin my overall enjoyment of the game. Copies of this game are plentiful and cheap, you can easily find copies of Congo Bongo on Ebay for less than 10 dollars, but since this is a Sega game that means that the boxes are super expensive for no particular reason, the only boxed copy I can see on Ebay currently is sitting at 84$ buy it now, while you can get the game AND manual for 10$, it seems the box makes all of the difference. No Collector’s Zone today, let it pass.

  23. DoctorSpuds

    Sub Scan (Sega)

    By DoctorSpuds,

    I have a bad idea for you all today, Sub Scan, this game is a bad idea. On a conceptual level this game just shouldn’t exist, it’s so barebones that very few people will spend enough time playing the game to actually experience it in any meaningful way. I could talk about the sounds and the graphics, but why should I when the game itself does not deserve them. Even if the sounds are completely terrible, and the graphics are unfortunately good, I refuse to talk about them because the game is so stupid. You must drop depth charges onto submarines passing below, this is very much like a reverse Marine Wars or Air-Sea Battle, and is very much like Sea Monster from Bit Corporation, except Sub Scan manages to screw it up. None of the enemy subs fire back at you, they will just cruise pass and wait to get destroyed, it’s basically a shooting gallery game where nothing changes except the enemies move a bit faster as you hit more and more. None of the switches are used, you are stuck on the one difficulty and there is nothing you can do but slog through wave after wave of slow as molasses subs until there is a bit of real challenge. There is a bonus system shoehorned in, basically every sub you destroy adds to your bonus and when you hit the special bonus sub you collect that cumulative bonus, the higher total subs you destroy the more points added to your bonus per sub. The bonus system does not add anything to the game, if anything it seems to increase my apathy and the effort used to implement this could have been put toward something more enjoyable like having the enemies fire back or something. I’m almost tempted to classify Sub Scan as a Non-Game, there is barely enough content to entice me to play it again and the content the game does have only seems to fill me with a dreadful, painful apathy towards all things. This game has demoralized me so much I might actually enjoy work tomorrow.

    Collector’s Zone, and I’m not going to give you any pricing information because the game isn’t worth owning. The best part of the game is the box it comes in.
  24. DoctorSpuds
    What is there to say about M.A.D., well first off it’s really obnoxious to type, and second of all it is a surprisingly unique take on the Missile Command/Atlantis genre. M.A.D. bears a resemblance to all games of its genre, Missile Command, Atlantis, Commando Raid, Sabotage, etc, but if you ask me it trumps them all from a visual standpoint. The graphics are stunningly colorful and imbue the game with a vibrancy rarely seen on the 2600. The gun emplacement is made up of the cooler end of the rainbow, purples, blues, and turquoise, with the turret itself being an earthy umber, while the cities go all out pride by consisting of the whole-ass rainbow.  The overall designs of the gun emplacement and cities are fairly complex as well, though the cities are bordering on abstract. The enemies are your fairly standard mix of cruise missiles and helicopters and are designed well enough; the enemies are also where the game differs from the others of the Missile Command genre. Instead of shooting down projectiles like in Missile Command, or shooting down quickly descending ships like in Atlantis, or even shooting down soldiers dropped by enemy craft like in both Sabotage and Commando Raid, M.A.D. has the enemy ships themselves kamikaze right into your cities. Thankfully the game has mercy on you and will show you which ship will dive bomb by changing their color to white. There is also a vague wave system where the enemies will attack in different formations, either all coming from one side of the screen or the other, or even both. Sometimes all the enemies will start off white, which is when you panic. The sounds are perfect for this sort of game, the shooting sound is very much like the one from Asteroids and the explosions are chunky and fantastic. The sounds and graphics actually complement each other since when an enemy successfully destroys a city the screen will flash yellow and red and the chunkiest of the chunkies plays, and it is incredible. The shooting is rather stiff unfortunately, and it really feels like minute adjustments are just not possible which can lead to frustration when things get heated and you just can’t hit that last helicopter and you game over. The movement speed of the turret is also a bit too sluggish for my liking. Overall M.A.D. is a unique take on a tired concept and just winds up being ‘meh’, you might play it a few times but it will always be back on the shelf in a few minutes. The real deal breakers are the prices though, the cheapest currently listed is at six dollars but they are frequently listed at ten plus, and boxed prices are just stupid with the cheapest being 45 dollars, which is about 25 dollars too many. If you can find it for 5 dollars then it would be worth picking up, otherwise it goes to the Collector’s Zone.

  25. DoctorSpuds

    Food Fight

    By DoctorSpuds,

    Hype, I don’t get it, all it usually does is raise expectations to a ludicrously high degree. Usually the expectations get so high that the final product could never fulfill those wild expectations. What if then, you have a game that flew under the radar for so long that nobody but a small few even noticed it, add onto that the fact that it was only released in any quantity on a console that almost nobody owned. Food Fight falls perfectly into that oddly specific category of game. Originally it was a modest hit in arcades in ’84 and was officially released on the Atari 7800 three years later in 1987 and later still on Atari’s XE line of computers in ’89, but we don’t talk about that one. Call me crazy but I think this was supposed to be the 7800’s “Killer App” the game you couldn’t get from Nintendo or Sega, only Atari could give you Food Fight. Unfortunately, even though it sold well among 7800 owners it couldn’t save the 7800 from the juggernauts Nintendo or Sega and their (i.e. Nintendo’s) highly restrictive licensing practices, which strangled and killed the 7800 more than Atari ever could. The hype for Food Fight is real though, and I’m inclined to believe it as it seems to have grown after the game was released, not before. So, is this something that neither Nintendo nor Sega could give us? Let’s get this party started with Food Fight for the Atari 7800!
     

     
    First impressions aren’t all that good, if you ask me this game looks right at home with games from the 5200, not the cutting edge 7800. Believe me though this game impresses in different ways, perhaps the graphics aren’t all that impressive looking, but remember this is a port of a 1984 arcade game and if you ask me this looks pretty darn close. There are several highly impressive graphical effects used in the game but they are tied in with the gameplay so I’ll explain them in the gameplay section, but just as a note: there is absolutely zero flicker anywhere in the game. Just remember that when I explain those effects later.
     

     
    The sounds are a selection of highly satisfying arcade-y beeps and trills, with a smattering of music here and there. I suppose that would be the perfect word to describe the sounds, satisfying. Everything feels right, from running around the screen, throwing food, beating the stage, and even collecting the bonus. I feel that this might be the first time an Atari game that claims to have ‘arcade quality sounds’ actually delivers on that lofty claim. Now, if the sounds are satisfying then the gameplay is ten times as satisfying.
     

     
    You have a simple goal, get to the ice cream and eat it. As you journey across the screen you will be harassed by a load of chefs, they will take a life if they touch you. To protect yourself you must throw food at them to scare them away but watch out, more chefs will appear from holes in the floor, don’t fall in! That’s the basic gist of it, it seems very simple but the execution is fantastic. The controls are responsive, throwing food is quick and fun and if you happen upon a watermelon you can throw as many handfuls of food as you want, covering the screen in sticky sweet goodness. Upon reaching the ice cream cone, the child’s head grows three sizes and its mouth opens like a snake to fit the whole thing in, the cone is larger than the child’s body. The animation is amazingly smooth and is almost hypnotizing to watch. Upon completing each stage all of the unthrown food will fly up to the score, each piece of food adds 100 points to your score and my goodness is it amazing to watch, especially if you managed to not throw any food in that screen. When you get caught all of the food conglomerates on your body and you get suffocated and eventually die. Seriously, this is just a wholly satisfying game to play, as the game progresses the screens get more and more dense with food, chefs and pits, apparently there are 100 screens, and I’d believe it!
     

     
    This is a fantastic game that, while not being as complicated as Super Mario or Sonic, is far more rewarding to play and is just so damn satisfying! Copies are fairly cheap with loose carts starting at less than eight dollars and boxed copies starting at seventeen dollars. No Collector’s Zone today, the game is just too good, and cheap to boot.
     

AtariAge
Forums
Store
General
Follow AtariAge

Copyright ©1998-2023 AtariAge

×
×
  • Create New...