DoctorSpuds

I found another one on Ebay! The Dynasound Computer Center. Look at this beauty

That's quite an assumption you made there.

Since the beginning of time there has been dust and since almost the beginning of gaming there have been ways of keeping dust off of your stuff. With the 2600’s unique ridged design it has a very striking look to it but it’s also a bastard to clean as all of us who’ve had basement/garage/thrift store finds know. The 2600 is a goddam dust magnet, and since its conception there have been ways of preventing such uncleanliness from occurring. Atari was clever, they build dust covers into their cartridges, which means that unless it’s been through hell a cartridge will usually never require a cleaning, most third party companies and later on Atari themselves omitted built-in dust covers though. It’s too bad that Atari didn’t have a built-in dust cover for their console though, so I guess you can settle for the next best thing a third party dust cover. There were dozens of these things offered by dozens of companies, in some cases the same product was being sold by a different company. The Game Center The most common dust cover you’ll find is actually from Atari themselves, we’ve all seen a Game Center, and some of us are even unfortunate enough to own one. In essence it’s just a large hunk of plastic and woodgrain, it’s advertised as being able to hold 27 cartridges, controllers, manuals and ‘accessories’. The thing itself it’s all too unpleasant to look at, especially the Sears Tele-Games version, but it’s large, it’s bulky, and most importantly it’s very fragile. The dust cover is just a large piece of shaped smoked plastic that really hasn’t aged well, it’s not uncommon for the cover to be cracked or chipped but usually it’s just missing altogether rendering the dust cover function redundant. If you have a small collection and don’t intend to get much more than would fit in the Game Center then you’d be pretty safe in owning one otherwise you’d best stay away. The Vid-Tari/Vid-Lid This thing is weird; it is a dust cover that fits over top the system and rest in the crack between the top portion and the base of the machine. Again it’s just a large lump of plastic but I think it’s one of the more cleverly design dust covers out there. Due to how tall the cover is you can fit two controllers beneath it resting on the console, on the top of the cover is an indent the will fit up to 10 cartridges, and around back there is a little cubby to hold as many manuals as you can stuff in it. The thing is made from shiny black plastic, which on the box is made to look transparent but is actually opaque, but I think it looks very nice when paired with a Vader 2600. This thing was sold by a company called Video Specialties as the Vid-Tari and the name was changed later on to the Vid-Lid. Honestly this thing is worth tracking down just for how strange it looks. The VideoStak Video Game Center If you thought the Game Center was excessive then this thing will blow your mind. This thing is huge coming in at a whopping 18.25x16.5 inches it takes up as much floorspace as a modestly sized end table and is almost as big as my computer. There is a good reason this thing is so big though, it has to hold a lot of stuff, but it doesn’t do it vertically. A quick note, VideoStak also originally sold the Game Center, I’m pretty sure Atari just bought stock from them and slapped their name on it, because of this the Game Center clear plastic dust cover is interchangeable between the two. The Video Game Center has the cartridge storage at the back, it can hold 18 2600/Colecovision cartridges or 24 Intellivision cartridges. I only mention the Colecovision and Intellivision because this thing is designed to fit not only the 2600 but the Intellivision, Colecovision, Intellivision II with Voice Module, and the Coleco Gemini. The one thing that really confuses me is how you’re expected to fit the console accessories like controllers, cords, and manuals in the thing, it’s a mess of plastic protrusions and nothing seems to fit anywhere. Honestly you’d be better off with the Game Center. Fabric This is just your basic dust cover, a piece of fabric fitted for the console, no fancy storage solutions, no plastic just fabric. These are the best way to go since no matter what console you have somebody makes a fabric dust cover for it, and in some cases you can even get customized one off of sited like Etsy. Atari did release their own branded fabric dist cover, it’s denim with Atari emblazoned across the top in white ink, whatever you do don’t wash these things the ink will wash right off. Also the Atari branded one doesn’t fit heavy sixers all too well, it’s a bit snug in places. Just get one of these. Others… Imagic released their own dust cover/storage solution it is called the ‘Imagic Video Storage Center’ just rolls off the tongue, it looks fairly standard and doesn’t seem to do anything particularly special. The Atari 2600 Carrying case:… Well that seems fairly self explanatory. The Video Game Organizer: It looks like the Imagic one except it’s reversed and has space for the Paddle controllers on the side. There are a crap ton of dust covers/storage solutions for almost every classic console and I would consider it to be a futile effort to try and collect them all, some of them are rare, others are expensive, and most importantly they're all pretty terrible. I would recommend against owning any of these unless your collection can actually fit into one of them, otherwise they're just hunks of plastic that you'll never use, like Pong consoles except even more useless. Just to demonstrate how much people don't want these things I got both my Game Center and Video Game Center for free, the guy just wanted them out of his basement. They're all ugly mostly useless lumps of plastic and you'd be better off getting a fabric dust cover instead.

What time is it? You guessed it its crappy movie tie-in time, and what disappointing movie-based game are we going to be looking at today? Krull? No… Ghostbusters? Nah! Philly Flasher?.. Hell no! Ah! Of course there can be no other than Mega Force! Who remembers Mega Force? ‘cause I don’t, this movie was a total flop at the box office barely making back a quarter of its 20 million dollar budget. It’s your standard Mad Max style post apocalyptic future with awesome vehicles and explosions everywhere. This movie is so disliked that it has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes with critics, though it seems audiences like it a bit more with it sitting 41% with them. With a movie this well received it seems only logical that a game bearing its name should be released for the good old Atari VCS. Before we delve elbow deep into this stinker I feel the need to impart some trivia. The commercial for the Mega Force Atari game featured a young Brian Cranston of Breaking Bad fame, he still looked like a 50 year old man though and only had around five frames of his face in shot but it is undeniably Brian Cranston. Okay no more trivia. I gotta hand it to them; they did very good when it came to the graphics of Mega Force. The background and environments are detailed and pleasing to the eye. The enemy sprites are rather simplistic but they get the job done well enough. The sprites for the cities, fuel depots, and other environmental items like palm trees and oases are done fantastically and are very detailed by 2600 standards. Overall the graphics are done well but I struggle to find anything meaningful to say about them so I’m just going to go on to the sounds. The sounds are alright, they’re good and chunky just like I like them. The shooting and explosion sound effects are particularly gratifying but that’s about all I can say about them. The rest of the sounds are the same ones that you’ve heard dozens of times in every other Atari game, in fact I can’t say with certainty that any of the sounds are original, they might all be reused from a different game, Fox or otherwise. The gameplay is so close to being good that it hurts, but it just has so many flaws that it doesn’t quite work. The game that they were trying to emulate was Defender, what with the side-scrolling shooter gameplay and overall feel. The problem is you aren’t allowed to go all out scorched earth like in Defender, here you have to be slow and meticulous because you aren’t out to just destroy things you have to protect them as well. You are tasked with destroying the black and red enemy base while also protecting the white and yellow city of Sardoun, it sounds simple. The get to the enemy base you have to cross a no-man’s-land of enemy aircraft, ground to air missiles, and fuel depots. Here’s where things get difficult, saucers will appear around fuel depots, as will the missiles, the saucers will fire on you pretty indiscriminately while the missiles will lock onto your position and attempt to hit you from the bottom. Any sensible person would just nope the hell out of there but you can’t you have to stop and destroy the saucers because the saucers will continue forward and destroy the city of Sardoun, the game won’t end if the city is destroyed you can destroy the enemy base and finish the round but you won’t get any points for it and you’ll lose a life. So, you’re being forced to confront the saucers it sounds like it shouldn’t be much of a problem, but it is. You maneuver like a three legged rhinoceros wading through molasses, turning around from full speed takes about half the screen and vertical movement is extremely slow while moving forward makes Usien Bolt look like a tortoise. The game simply doesn’t work; you are forced to make calculated and sudden movements with the controls from Defender, while maintaining your fuel level, destroying enemies that are attacking from front, back, and bottom, and if you let a single enemy past you may lose the game because those suckers can level Sardoun in a few seconds. The manual mentions bonus items that will boost your score but they won’t matter since you either won’t be alive long enough to collect them, or you won’t get any points from them since Sardoun was leveled since you missed a single saucer and couldn’t turn around in time. If the controls were more precise many of these complaints would be retracted, but as it stands Mega Force is just an average to bad game. If you want a copy for yourself then you’ll be paying around 7-20 dollars for a loose cartridge and 35+ for a boxed copy. It’s Collector’s Zone for Mega Force without a doubt, just play Defender or Defender II you’ll have a far better time.

Karate with friends beats anything else the Atari has to offer. Or anything listed by the person who comments below me.

Sorcerer’s Apprentice is an odd one to say the least. This was the only one of the four planned Disney games to be released on the 2600; it seems the market fell out from under Atari very soon after this game’s release. What year did this game release on? 1983? Oh, that would explain it. The three other planned Disney games were Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Donald Ducks Speedboat, and Dumbo’s Flying Circus, if you were wondering. All of these games have been recovered and it seems that they were all mostly complete before being scrapped. I know that it takes a lot of creativity to make a game but the premise for Sorcerer’s Apprentice seems so forced that it’s almost comical but I will have to talk about that in the gameplay section and before we can get there we’ll have to get through graphics and sounds so let’s not dawdle and just jump into it. The game opens with a fantastic title screen with a gigantic picture of Mickey Mouse’s face slap-bang in the center of it, but that’s not where this game’s great graphics end. The game has two play screens and one sub-screen you use to move between the two, the first screen is the mountaintop. The mountaintop consists of two nicely gradiented hills that take up the bottom part of the screen with the rest of it just being a big blue sky. Normally I’d complain about much of the screen going unused but I’ll get to that in the gameplay section as well, suffice to say it’s a decent screen. The second game screen is the well this is where all of the brooms are dumping their buckets of water, this is another decent screen but is a bit more abstract than the first. If you didn’t know those were stairs I’d bet you’d be very confused, but the only thing that really warrants mentioning is the rising water and how the parts of the screen that get submerged change color, it’s a really nice touch. The third screen is basically a transition screen between the two game screens it’s just Mickey climbing down a ladder to a doorway. Speaking of Mickey his sprite is done very well and is very true to the source material, red robe, blue hat, big ears, the works. The sounds aren’t all that impressive, mostly it’s a bunch of indistinct beeps and boops, with one small exception. The song The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or to be more precise the first two measures of the song will play once in a while, the composition isn’t bad and it’s actually on key which is nice. Otherwise there just isn’t all too much to the game. This isn’t your standard move-around-the-bottom-of-the-screen-and-shoot-at-things game, it’s your standard move-around-the-bottom-of-the-screen-and-shoot-at-things game with a bit of Apollo’s Lost Luggage thrown in there as well. While in the mountaintop screen all you have to do is shoot the falling projectiles, there are falling stars and meteors for you to shoot. The actions of the first screen tie directly in with the actions of the second screen let me explain. Each star that you miss while on the first screen creates a broom on the second screen resulting in the second screen filling faster and you losing the game more quickly. Every meteor you hit becomes two buckets on the second screen that will drain the water, but it’s not quite that simple. For a bucket to drain the water it must get midway up the screen but the buckets will retreat if a broom gets near so you have to get down into screen two and stop those brooms yourself because there’s no way you’re shooting all of those stars. Unfortunately this game has one Major Flaw, a flaw so major I capitalized the words. Shooting sucks, it sucks so bad. Your shots are guided, they will follow your movements, but if you’re moving while you shoot then the shot will automatically move in that direction while still being guided, there is no option to turn this off. Hitting anything is made ten times harder than it should have been because of this, the stars fall straight down it seems only logical that you should be able to shoot straight up without having to stand completely still thus making it impossible to aim your next shot without ruining your first. Just try to play game 3 I dare you. Sorcerer’s Apprentice has the makings of a fantastic multitasking shooter/collection type game, and it succeeds in some of it, but it just flounders in its most important aspect. Bad shooters are just no fun and Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a bad shooter. If you want to get a copy of this game for yourself you’ll be looking at 12 for the cheapest loose copy on Ebay and 35 dollars for the cheapest boxed copy. Do yourself a favor and stay away from this one, to the Collector’s Zone for sure.

If you’ve never seen or read a Garfield comic then you’ve been living under a rock for the past forty years. Garfield is the king of Sunday comics and has been running consistently since 1978. It seems sometime in the early 80’s somebody reached out to Jim Davis or his company to make a game based on Garfield and Friends. Here’s where the problems begin, or actually the one problem, the game was copyrighted 1984, and as we all know Atari wasn’t doing too well in 1984, so this game along with a large amount of other licensed games were scrapped. Of all the licensed prototypes I’ve played I think Garfield is the one that is most deserving of completion. Due to licensing this is highly unlikely to happen but one can remain hopeful, who knows maybe they’ll be up for it? The game has an excellent opening, a large pixelart drawing of Garfield himself arms and legs crossed looking like a suave bastard. The overall graphics are excellent, the sprites used for Garfield, Odie, and Nermal are large, detailed, and full of character. The environments are also large and detailed, and feature such locations as the Fence, the House, and the land of Odie. I can’t help but notice an odd similarity to Taz/Asterix/Obelix, they all open with a rendering of the main character and they all have a strange gradient-ed triangle at the bottom of the screen, I’m pretty sure there is some recycled code in this particular prototype. Also, I can finally stop complaining about a lack of starfields because Garfield has one and it’s used perfectly. Overall the graphics are detailed and advanced, usually this has a detrimental effect on the rest of the game, but since this is a prototype we have no clue what the final product was going to be, but if this game follows the same patterns as the rest of them then the sounds are usually the final thing to be finished. There are very few sounds and certainly nothing to dedicate an entire paragraph to, there are just a handful of beeps and nothing else. Sadly I don’t think the gameplay coding was quite complete when this game was scrapped, it’s simple and extremely easy to exploit. The main goal of the game is to traverse the fence and rooftops to rescue Nermal who is hanging from a ledge/rooftop. While you are making this perilous journey you will be assaulted by hamburgers, potted plants, and the devil himself, Odie. Each screen will present you with a different obstacle, there is a pattern to all of it and it is as follows: burger, plant, Odie, burger, plant, Nermal, land of Odie burger, plant, land of Odie plant, and repeat. This set of screens is the entire game, and it will play over and over until the end of time. Since there are screens where the obstacles are nothing but burgers, and burgers give you 50 points each, it is quite possible to simply stay on that screen for several hours and when you get around 500,000 points you can make your way to Nermal and collect him to instantly double your score. Yeah the gameplay is very shallow and I’m guessing that there were supposed to be different types of obstacles alternating on each screen so that you can’t do what I just described. The only two other screen I haven’t mentioned are the two Odie screens, one has him popping out of a chimney and touching him means death, the second screen is what I call the Land of Odie. The Land of Odie is a mystical place where you are forced to jump along the backs of multiple Odie sprites, and for some reason there are two of you, I think this screen is incomplete what about you? Overall the gameplay is simple, shallow, and repetitive, and could definitely use some polish, all it really needs to be a complete game are some alternating obstacles and escalating difficulty and then you’d have a pretty decent game. If this had come out back in the 80’s I’m sure kids would have had some fun with it but since it was 1984 and the NES was right around the corner I think that fun would have been short lived.

Also who made the text in the manual Comic Sans? That's just unforgivable.

It's very unlikely, and if there was it hasn't been dumped or is not widely available.

Since I talked about it so much in the previous review it seems only fair that I review The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Version 2. This version of the game was never released even though it seems Wizard Video already had packaging planned and produced before scrapping the game to release the one programmed by Ed Salvo. The guy who programmed this version, Robert H O’Neil, was also responsible for Polaris from Tigervision and the unreleased Flesh Gordon that Wizard games was going to try and shoehorn out as the first ‘Adult’/pornographic game on the system. In my opinion Version 2 is the superior game let me tell you why, starting with the graphics of course. I’ll admit that the graphics in V2 are not as good as V1’s. The playfield is made up of rainbow squares with a rainbow border, as this is a prototype I don’t know if these were intended to be the final graphics but what we currently have really doesn’t instill much confidence. The sprites used for Leatherface and the Man with the Gun are small and rather cute, they remind me of the bear sprite in I Want My Mommy. Actually the premise of this game is quite interchangeable due to how vague the sprites are, you could in fact be a school teacher chasing a naughty student with a ruler, or a medieval knight chasing an archer through a forest, the game could have been anything. Due to the graphics being so lackluster I’m not looking forward to the sounds, since bad graphics almost always lead to subpar sounds. Much of the game is played in silence; you’ll only start to hear sounds as you close in on the victim much like in V1. Unlike in V1 you won’t be hearing an extremely high pitched beep whenever you get near the victim, instead you hear the chainsaw start up, and you’ll only hear the victim scream after you catch them. Speaking of the scream, in V2 it doesn’t hurt my ears, due to it being played fairly infrequently and since the sounds used are far better I’d say that this is a pretty good sound effect. The only other sounds you’ll hear are the sounds of the timer running out, which is fairly startling, and the sound made when you press the action button, but I’ll get to that in the gameplay section. Texas Chainsaw Massacre V2 is a cat and mouse type game where player one as Leatherface must catch player two who is the Man with the Gun as seen on the box art for both versions of the game. The playfield is set up is a grid pattern but the rows are staggered so there are few horizontal straightaways but plenty of vertical ones. This is definitely a game of strategy as you must lure the second player into traps that you’ve laid, by pressing the action button you can drop rainbow squares that will block the path. Leatherface can move through these blocks but player two cannot. Player two isn’t completely helpless though since he has a gun and can shoot Leatherface. This leads to an interesting strategic conflict as player two must remain in the straightaways but player one can block those off and force them into the grid where the gun cannot be used as effectively, it’s actually a very good idea for a game. The game even has AI for player two so all the Lonely Larry’s out there can play the game without a second person, the AI isn’t smart but it will exploit your weaknesses very well so you’ll have to plan very far ahead to trap and kill him. This game needs very little improvement, perhaps a larger or more complex playfield a different color palette and different character sprites. The core gameplay and sounds need little to no improvement and work quite well, perhaps even better than the version that got released. Since this is a prototype game it was never released but you can play it if you have an UNO or Harmony Cart, I’ll provide a LINK to Atarimania so you can download the game for yourself if you want to play it. It really is a pity that this game never got released.

Of all the licensed games that have been released I would put Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the top of the ‘least likely to appeal to anyone’ list. The Atari 2600 wasn’t really known to have much success with ‘adult’ oriented games, as we all know it appealed more to kids and teens with the huge amount of arcade conversions, and I suppose the adults were there too but it seems they were after much the same as the kids. Oddly enough TCM was programmed by our old friend Ed Salvo who programmed Skeet Shoot one of my most disliked games on the system, and Mountain King, one of the most advanced and complicated games on the 2600, also one of my favorites. TCM was treated much like the Mystique and Playaround games, relegated to a small spot behind the counter IF the store even decided to carry it. I also feel the need to mention that this isn’t the only version of TCM that was made, there is a second version where you actually have to kill the man with the gun, as seen on the box art, as Leatherface, as far as I can tell it is a fully completed game that was just never released, so I might talk about it later on. For now let’s cast ourselves into a pit of depravity and gore as we look at The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the Atari 2600 by Wizard Video. I’m rather torn on the graphics, there are elements that I like and elements that I feel could use some improvement. Let’s start with the elephant in the room; the chainsaw is baby blue and it looks like crap. I don’t know what the coding constraints were when programming the graphics but there must have been a way to make the chainsaw a different color. The foreground obstacles are well done; you’ll be avoiding cow skulls, white painted fences, wheelchairs, and undergrowth/really dead bushes. The background is a mixed bag for me, on the one hand I can appreciate the detail that went into the house and truck as well as the horizontal scrolling, but on the other hand the single row of absolutely enormous trees are almost comical and somewhat ruin whatever immersion one could have while playing the game. The ‘victims’ are also well done, they are rendered in multiple colors and have defined facial features, the details are quite nice. Well, the graphics are a mixed bag, are the sounds as well? This particular bag is not mixed, this particular bag is horrible. There is only one sound that I even need to mention, since the rest of them are actually okay, and that is the scream. The scream is just an extremely high pitched beep, and holy crap it is murder on the ears. Since there isn’t much to the soundtrack I’ll just skip right on down to the gameplay, hopefully it can make up for how rather lackluster the game has been so far. Well it seems the game is going to stay that way since this is one of the shallowest games I’ve played so far. All you do as Leatherface is avoid oncoming obstacles and mow down the same two girls over and over. Despite being incredibly simple the game is also incredibly infuriating. When chasing down the girls they will sometimes teleport behind you , which is obnoxious since you’ve already engaged your chainsaw at that point and now you’ve wasted some of your precious fuel. You can avoid fuel loss by not activating your chainsaw as you approach and rather wait until the saw is actually touching or overlapping with the girl’s body then you activate it. Once you figure out the teleporting nonsense the game goes from frustrating to boring since all you’re now doing is walking around obstacles and doing the same thing over and over again. The game does have a ‘time’ limit in the form of fuel, you use some up when you activate your chainsaw, and some is used up as you walk around. You can replenish a small amount of fuel every 5000 points, basically every five kills. The only thing that will challenge you is the collision detection, it is super precise and if a single pixel of your body touches any pixel of an obstacle you will be immobilized for a few seconds wasting your fuel. The wheelchairs will be your worst enemy in the end since they can move at comically fast speeds, sometimes faster than one can react. You get three fuel refills before the game is over, when you’re all out a little cutscene will play of one of the girls coming up behind Leather face and kicking him so hard he vaporizes. Game Over… Once the ‘WOW’ factor wears off you’ll see that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a shallow, repetitive, waste of time that only hardcore collector’s should pursue. Oddly enough the second scrapped version I find to be somewhat superior as it is two player and actually has a somewhat original premise, but I’ll get to that another time. If you wanted to get a copy for yourself you’ll be looking at prices of 100-300 dollars for a loose copy, and 200-700 dollars for one complete in box. Honestly if you really want this game you should just get a reproduction cartridge or an SD cart. This game goes to the Collector’s Zone without a doubt. EDIT: Spiceware has provided me with a fixed version of the game that changes the color of the chainsaw, it looks much, much better. If you want to play the fixed version then here you go, it only changes the graphics so the game still sucks to play, but at least it looks much better. tcm.bin

Thanks a bunch!