DoctorSpuds

This game has been on the docket ever since I started writing these reviews, but until know I couldn’t really put my feelings about it into words, I probably still can’t but I’m gonna try anyway. It is likely I avoided reviewing this game early on because I didn’t want to review two very similar games so close together, the first review I ever did was Wizard of Wor and I probably felt that Dark Cavern was just a bit too similar. But as my range of games has expanded I think it’s been more than enough time to review this game. An interesting factoid though, before we start the review, it is fairly common knowledge that Mattel, the makers of this game, also had their own semi-successful console the Intellivision. It was common for Mattel to port their more popular Intellivision titles over to the 2600, to perhaps entice gamers to come over to their console, many games like Astrosmash, Space and Sea Battle, Lock ‘n’ Chase, He-Man, Kool-aid Man, and Night Stalker (in the form of Dark Cavern) were ported over, and in an odd enough twist were sometimes better on the 2600 than on the Intellivision, what a twist of fate! Dark Cavern I feel is better to play and all around more fun than Night Stalker on the Intellivision, and while the games aren’t exact copies of each other, there are some substantial differences, Dark Cavern still comes out on top trouncing the superior console. The graphics in Dark Cavern are fairly solid albeit very basic. All of the sprites are just simple single color designs; thankfully instead of having some static images sliding around the screen the programmers at least gave the enemies some frames of animation, and by some I mean two. Yeah… the game just looks very bland, there just isn’t anything to it, sure the maze is constructed competently and the programmers did a pretty good approximation of the Mattel Running Man but otherwise there is just a whole lot of nothing. I don’t even have anything to pad out paragraph with so I guess I’ll just move on to the sounds. This game has very few sounds, but the sounds it does have are pretty darn good. The first and main sound you’ll be hearing is the grinding crunch of the killer robots’ treads echoing around the cavern, the second will be the echoing gunfire you exchange with your robotic foes, yes they actually found a way to make the shots sound like they’re echoing, very nice. There is a suitably alarming death sound whenever you are shot by one of the robots, and a suitably rewarding, chunky, and funky, death noise for the robots whenever you shoot them. The only other sounds I can think of are the sounds related to collecting your gun and ammo; there is a slow trilling noise that will get higher pitched and faster the longer you take to collect it, it injects a good amount of urgency into the situation. So all around the sounds may be few in number but they make up for it in quality. In this game… you shoot shit, and get shit shot at you. Your job in this game is to frantically run around an underground maze and shoot the evil robots tasked with your destruction, accompanying them are spiders and bats the will stop you in your tracks if you make contact with them. As you accrue points more robots will be released at once, I think I managed to get four at once at one point, but you’ll start off with a manageable two. You start off with 20 bullets and trust me they’ll go fast; you can collect ten more by running to the flashing gun and picking it up. That’s pretty much all this game is, you running around the maze and shooting robots, the only things that keeps it from getting boring are the moving obstacles, the robots deceptively clever AI and the well scaling difficulty, this game will not let you get comfortable. More times than I would care to admit I was lead straight into a trap by the robots, the most efficient way to dispatch them is by taking them out from behind since they can’t shoot behind them and they can’t turn around, but the other robots always find a way to intercept you or get behind you and take you down. This is a fun and challenging game, it may not be a graphical powerhouse, but it doesn’t need to be, it’s a good idea executed well. Copies of this game are relatively cheap as well going for as low as six bucks for a loose cart and 15-way too many$ for a boxed copy. Due to how incredibly flimsy M-Network boxes are it’s rather hard to find an uncrushed box for any Mattel game, so the lower the price the higher the likelihood of it being pancaked. All around I’d recommend you get this one, it is a very fun experience indeed.

"Suitable for the Commodore 64"... Hmmmm. I don't think that cover is suitable for anything but ridicule. But I think we can all agree that Dishaster is still a quite awful game at the very least.

Oh dear! That is rather distressing, I'm sure such a game would never fly in today's social and political climate.

Its games like this that simply make me wonder “Why?” Why did a company release this game, what could they have hoped to achieve with a game like this? The short answer is always money, these companies that had no experience whatsoever in videogames simply got into the industry for the perceived wealth it would bring. Enter Zimag, these guys were in the game industry for less than a year, and guess which year that was? Yep 1983… so you can bet they didn’t last long. They released a grand total of four games on the 2600 and six games on the Atari 8-bit family of computers, but here’s the thing, I actually wish Zimag was more successful since these guys were a link to both CCE and the legendary Bit Corp., amongst other weird publishers. If only Zimag had lasted longer, who knows what weird and obscure games they’d have brought to the U.S. market, in their one and only catalog it says they had planned to release a game called Pizza Chef and Immies and Aggies for 2600, you can find the ROM for Immies and Aggies and Pizza Chef, but it would have been cool to get them as actual cartridge releases here in the U.S.. But we need to talk about one of Zimag’s actual released games, and my goodness it is regarded as one of the worst games in the 2600 library, Dishaster, otherwise known as Dancing Plates. Stand back people, this is gonna get messy. This game is very, very purple, and looks somewhat awful. At the top of the screen there are what I’m assuming are the tops of circus tents, but they could be radioactive rainbow pyramids for all I know. The bulk of the screen is taken up by purple with ten long light purple vertical lines interspersed across the screen. This game has about four moving parts, there is the girl you control who actually has more than two frames of animation, she actually has three frames of animation. The rest of the movement is taken up by the plates that reside on the tops of the long purple lines, first the plates will begin to wobble, then they will wobble more aggressively then they will transform into large blue squares and fall to the ground. That is all the movement you are given in Dishaster, how disappointing. This game is quite barren when it comes to sounds, that don’t mean there won’t be sounds constantly playing though. This game has background music, a two measure long dirge that makes my eyelids feel very heavy. There is a three note walking tune, a light beeping noise whenever you’re spinnin’ those plates, and there’s an angry *DING* whenever a plate hits the ground. That’s all you get, a melody, a semi-melody, and two sound effects, utterly fantastic. In the Zimag Catalog (Conveniently located on AtariMania) the blurb for this game says that “There’s nothing to it. All you have to do is keep a few plates spinning on top of some tall poles.” It’s amazing that the blurb trying to sell you this game inadvertently told you why NOT to buy this game, there’s nothing to it. All you do in this game is run around the bottom of the screen and hold the button beneath some poles every so often, sure there will be more plates to hold the button under, but you’re given so much time between you spinning the plate and it actually falling that I was able to take a bathroom break and come back to continue playing without losing a single plate. The score goes up at a fixed rate, which is dumb, there is no way to get the score to raise faster, which takes away any and all replay ability to this game, there is no challenge there’s no way to get good at this game. The first time I played this game I just sat there bored out of my mind moving along the screen in a pattern to keep all the plates spinning, it got to the point where I was unconsciously reversing the pattern because I was so brain-dead that a simple six step pattern became confusing, I finally turned the game off at 100,000 points having earned five extra lives for a max total of eight, and having wasted fifteen minutes of my time. This game sucks, don’t buy it, seriously. I can find enjoyment out of games like Karate and Sea Hunt, but this falls in with games Skeet Shoot, games so barebones basic that they shouldn’t have ever been released, I know this game was made for kids, but this is simply insulting to kids. Prices vary wildly for this game, I snagged my copy for 10$ but there are listings for loose carts from 13-100+ dollars, and the only listing for a boxed copy is sitting at a princely 170$. Just do yourself a favor and don’t buy this game, I hereby chuck Dishaster into the Collector’s Zone with a vehement loathing I will only reserve for one other game.

Alright I have a gallery up with scans of all the pages. Check it out HERE Also I was very confused when you mentioned the misspelling of Yars' Revenge since the catalog I was using to compare the two actually had it spelled correctly, I checked the # and it was CO16725-Rev. D just like the other two. Could this be another variation? The top is the new version that is the subject of this topic the middle is the one I used to compare and the third is the one you used to compare. It seems we've got these things coming out of our ears around here.