DoctorSpuds

This game seems to be rather polarizing in the community, mainly since it’s the only game I have been actively told to avoid reviewing at all costs, but mankind never got anywhere by playing it safe. So… for your delectation I present to you Karate by Ultravision. Unlike its brother game Condor Attack, Karate actually had an accessible and affordable re-release in the form of Froggo, and the inevitable Taiwan Cooper bootleg. I decided to get the Taiwan Cooper version for one deciding reason, and that would be the box art, I may not be an artist but I do know magic marker and colored pencils when I see them, it looks like it was drawn by a middle schooler, that may be an insult because I knew plenty of people in middle school who could draw far better than that. As is indeed customary at this point I must transcribe the blurb on the back of the box, and in this case the scoring info as well, simply because whoever printed these didn’t know English too good. Karate Game Description: Karate is Chinese tranditional fighting and defending skill and feat. Every action in Karate is the beautiful combination of power and art. Now, you can enjoy yourself in this Orient Great Art – Karate. The game 5 screens. Every screen takes 2 minutes. The belt of the winer will be changed step by step, from the white to the black. Scoring: Beating head by arms: 10 points Beating Breast by arms: 10 points Beating head by feet: 20 points Beating breast by feet: 15 points Skillful beating down: 60 points Sorts: 1 game, 2 players. Absolute joy… People don’t like how this game looks; I’ve had it described to me as “dancing diaper stickmen” which is by far my favorite description so far. I’ll admit that the size of the fighters is impressive, as well as the fact that they’re animated not altogether horribly a decent bonus, sure their legs may go multi-jointed once in a while. Simply put, giant half-screen sized fluidly animated (by 2600 standards) characters, stickmen or not, are an impressive feat. This is an amazing jump in quality especially when you compare it to Condor Attack, a game so insecure about actually playing itself that the screen actually rolls whenever you start the game, or die for that matter. Simply that the game doesn’t collapse in on itself is a miracle. You may think I’m being lenient on this game, but I’m not, I actually think it looks pretty good, especially by Ultravision standards (which were very, very low). This game pretty much has two sounds, the sound of the crowd cheering at the start of the game, and the sound of your two meatbags punching the stuffing out of each other; they work well in the context of the game, that’s all I’ll say. Gameplay, this is the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. Karate is one of the first one-on-one fighting games, and it definitely feels like it. Controls are fairly standard when it comes to a game of this type with a controller of this type. By holding the joystick in any of the cardinal directions and holding the button you’ll perform one of four attacks, a high kick or a low kick, and a high punch or a low punch, everything’s gotta be above the belt in Karate. The one thing that snips everyone’s goiter though is the awful collision detection, which is indeed very awful, if you’re lucky one in four attacks will actually hit your opponent, while they will only miss maybe half of their shots. I have found a dominant strategy though, if you simply position yourself slightly below your opponent and hold left and the action button to perform the high kick your opponent will be unable to hit you with any attack and you will constantly hit him in the head with your foot, the highest scoring attack, meaning you will beat him by at least 500 points every round sometimes up to 700 points if you have luck on your side. But this was meant to be a two player game, everybody who’s played this game has played it one player, I’m pretty sure that if you and a friend play this you’ll find it to be a hilarious and fun experience (I’ll post an update if I can get a player two). Overall this is an amazing train wreck of a game, but only because of the shitty collision detection, the rest of the game has been made rather competently. Would I recommend that you go out there and buy a copy? Yeah I would, if you have a second player handy and plenty of booze you’ll probably have a great time. I would recommend buying either the Froggo or the Taiwan Cooper releases, since the original Ultravision copies go for hundreds if not thousands of dollars these days. The Froggo release will set you back maybe 10$ for a loose cart, boxed copies are a bit too expensive at the moment, and the price fluctuates quite a bit on the Taiwan Cooper version but the copy I have I got for 10$ including shipping CIB, so if you find one it may be a better value than the Froggo version.

You just made my day

It’s arcade time! And today let’s looks at one of the rarer conversions on the 2600… Bump ‘n’ Jump! I have only just recently played the actual machine for the first time and I gotta say… Nice. Originally B-n-J was published by Mattel under their M-Network label, but I was lucky enough to stumble across a boxed copy of the slightly rarer NTSC Telegames variants on Etsy of all places. It seems a lot of those Telegames re-releases are in the PAL format so I just got really lucky with this one since I only found out afterwards how easy it is to get duped with these things. So after comparing what I’ve experienced with the arcade version with the 2600 version I’ve just gotta say… Nice. Lots of care and attention went in to make this a very faithful port of an already very complex game, so without any further dawdling let us review Bump ‘n’ Jump. This is a very impressive looking game; the arcade game was a rather ambitious top-down view racing game capable of displaying many vehicles at once, and from the looks of it the 2600 version is an extremely faithful recreation of what the arcade laid out. While being fairly simple, the environments/ patterns on the side of the road are constructed in a way to give you the illusion of speed and are varied in their design. Your fellow drivers are quite a lively bunch, driving around in race cars, dump trucks, tractors, and actual literal skull & crossbones (using the ends of the bones as wheels, how inventive). The enemy vehicles are sadly rather low resolution and are all single colored, but I can understand why the programmers did this since they needed all the memory possible to keep the graphics smooth and flicker-free, which they are. All around the game looks simple but faithful, fair enough, on to the sounds. When starting up the game you’ll hear a little fanfare to start the race and afterwards you’ll hear a simple tune play in the background. You’ll also hear the sound of the engine revving up but it will be cut off whenever you hit another car or another car explodes, mainly since the tune gets a sound channel all to itself all of the rest have to fight over the remaining channel leading to some sounds getting cut off. Interestingly enough the game has an option to turn off the background music, by selecting B&W mode the music will simply stop. Unfortunately all the sounds are still cramped into a single channel but I’m willing to ignore that simply because the choice is nice to have. Also the jumping sound effect is annoying, onto the gameplay. The name truly says it all, you bump into cars to hopefully ram them into their fiery deaths and jump to fly over your own watery grave. Bumping is the main gameplay element in this game, you have to know which cars to bump to either cause or avert disaster. Some cars are easier to bump than others, race cars will be propelled further than the tractors, which barely move when you make contact with them but will send you flying. The skull cars are the in-between, between race cars and tractors, but they will actively try to run you off the road while the other cars act merely as obstacles. You can jump and land on the other cars to instantly destroy them, but this has its own downside, since everything shares the same sound channel you won’t hear the sound alerting of a river ahead, and the graphic on the HUD is very easy to miss so you better keep one eye on the HUD at all times. Jumping is a good way to get out of a sticky situation, if you’re boxed in on all sides by skull-mobiles or tractors it’s an easy way to free yourself, or if you’re bumped on a narrow stretch of road you can jump to get yourself back on. Overall this game is fairly light on the graphics but heavy on the fun. There weren’t very many games like this on the 2600, and the ones that were, are either crap or expensive. I would wholly recommend you go out and get a copy, loose carts on Ebay are usually less than 10$, but I would caution against trying to get this game CIB then you’re lookin’ at about 80$, and if you really want to risk it you can go after one of the elusive NTSC Telegames variants. No Collector’s Zone today…

This game is murder on my keyboard and I still suck at it.

My opinions on Data Age have changed somewhat as my collection has expanded, it seems that I got off on the wrong foot with this particular company since I have found several games from them that I can actually glean some form of enjoyment from. Out of their eight released games I actually enjoy four of them, those being Frankenstein’s Monster, Bermuda Triangle, Journey: Escape, and Encounter at L-5. Of those four I have only reviewed one, so it seems to be around the right time to review one more, so let’s review… Uh… Encounter At L-5, sure why not. I’ll admit that there isn’t too much to this game, it almost seems like a rehash of BUGS except they actually put some time and effort into it. Your one objective in this game is to shoot as many aliens as possible before you are destroyed. The method by which you control the game is rather unique since this is a paddle game, and if you ask me it’s utilized well. You’ll notice that when you move the paddle left and right a green square at the top of the screen moves along with you, this indicates the location of your ship and where it is currently aiming, until you press the button though your ship is invisible and thereby immune to enemy fire. When you hold down the button your ship will appear and begin firing, now if you move the paddle the trajectory of your shots will follow the green square at the top of the screen. Enemies are constantly descending from the top of the screen, and actually scale rather well to give an indication of distance, the easy game modes don’t have the enemies firing at you very quickly but later modes will pose more of a challenge. Since the descending ships don’t pose much of a threat in the earlier difficulties there are special ships that will show up every so often and begin flying in a jittery line towards your gun whilst firing constantly, if they reach the ground you will lose a life so you better get them before they get you. This is a fun game to just relax to; even just playing on the start screen is just fun to chill to. This game may be light on the graphics, sound, and gameplay, but it isn’t light on the fun. This is a fairly cheap game with copies going as low as 5$ free shipping on Ebay, boxed copies are a bit scarce and a bit pricey so I would avoid going after one of those. No Collector’s Zone today, let it pass.

I normally avoid sports titles on any console, I simply don’t enjoy them, but I may have found one that I actually like. The last game I reviewed that could be defined as a sports game was bowling which was my ninth ever review and as it was amongst the early Atari releases it was nothing to look at. But unlike with bowling, baseball had several versions released starting with Home Run in 1978 and ending with Pete Rose Baseball in 1988, I think we’ll review the latter of those two today. I still find it amazing that there were 2600 games still being sold by the late 80’s, when P.R. Baseball was being sold, the Sega Megadrive was being sold in Japan, that’s just a weird thought isn’t it? Let’s get back on track. P.R. Baseball was published by Absolute Entertainment; Absolute was founded by Gary Kitchen and one of the original Activision founders, David Crane, was a part of it as well. Perhaps Activision was becoming too much like Atari was and so they simply left the company to create another, as the founding members of Activision did before. Absolute’s fate is an unfortunate one, after a good streak programming for the NES and Genesis amongst others; they declared bankruptcy in 1995 and Absolute was no more. So without further delay let’s look at the game. This is without a doubt the most visually complex sports title on the 2600. The first screen you’ll see is a behind the shoulder perspective on the pitcher and my goodness it’s some real eye candy. All three of the players on the screen are absolutely gigantic, and are well defined and well animated to boot, the pitcher especially. The game consists of six screens that cover the entire diamond and the outfield; there are three screens for the outfield two for the infield and one for the pitchers mount. Every player is represented right down to the shortstop, and even though the sprites are all a single color in the field screens they are still large and well drawn. There is also a handy map at the top of the screen when you’re in the field screens that indicates here the other teams players are on the field, which bases they’re on, and if they’re trying to steal a base. Overall this is a spectacular looking game especially for the 2600. The sounds in this game are disappointingly sparse; all you’ll really be hearing is the white noise of the crowd, there is a snippet of the national anthem to start the game but otherwise it’s just a bunch of beeps and smacking noises whenever you catch the ball. Like with all baseball games on the 2600 the controls are a bit confusing at first. Starting with pitching you can pitch four different types of pitch by holding the joystick in one of the four cardinal directions and pressing the button, you can also adjust your position horizontally in an attempt to influence the trajectory of the ball. On the field if the ball is going to the outfield you’ll only be controlling the one player in left, right, or center field which eases up on confusion. Controlling players infield is a bit tricky since you have to hold the joystick in one of four directions and press the button to select the player, certain players have jurisdiction of certain horizontal strips of the screen so if the ball is a bit too low for second base to get and a bit too high up for the pitcher to get you have to get first or third to run over, even if second is closer; just hope the ball doesn’t get hit infield. Another major problem of baseball games on the 2600 is throwing to the bases, thankfully P.R. Baseball alleviates that headache with that little minimap that’s at the top of the screen, it will show arrows pointing to all of the bases in the four cardinal directions again, and you simply have to hold the joystick in one of those directions and press the button to throw it to that base and as soon as the ball is in possession of one of the basemen the game automatically cuts to the pitcher’s mound removing the need to throw it to the pitcher like in other games. Batting like with any baseball game is more about luck than timing, you will be hitting a lot of foul balls in this game; I’ll leave it at that. Out of all the baseball games on the 2600 I’d say the Pete Rose baseball is my favorite, the game looks good and the game plays good, which is more than I can say for it competition. At the moment of writing this there seems to be a small influx of NOS which are being sold for 12.75$ Free Shipping, otherwise loose carts are sitting at around 13-40$. I really don’t want to put this game in the Collector’s Zone but once the NOS dries up I simply can’t recommend it. Buy it now, while you still can!

Imagic makes me sad… I oftentimes wonder how such an amazing game company fell so far and so fast, then realize I can just look at the Wikipedia page for it and find out. Imagic was one of the most high profile deaths of the Video Game Crash starting out strong in 1982 and quickly crashing in 1984, eventually their games were distributed by Activision in the black box/blue label variation. Many of Imagic’s 1982 releases are well known and fondly remembered as well as cheap to buy, their 1983 releases, while more advanced are usually less known and harder to come by, and their 1984 releases are nearly impossible to find in any capacity. My main problem with the 1982 releases is that they’ve been done to death, almost all of the Imagic titles we immediately think of when we hear the name are from ’82, so I’ll change things up with one of their 1983 releases, how about Laser Gates? Technically I own the Zellers version ‘Laser Volley’ for some reason the CIB copy was cheaper than just a loose cartridge, and I’m always lookin’ for a deal. When I popped this game in I was pretty impressed, it’s a side scrolling shooter, which on its own merits is impressive for the 2600, but when you factor in the titular laser gates well… That’s quite a fine recipe for success if I do say so myself… And I do. One thing that I’m not too keen on it the oversized HUD, it takes up half the screen just to show you your score, shield level, energy, and time, it seems a bit overkill but then again it was probably a programming necessity so as not to use up too much RAM. The color scheme is a bit plain, grey on brown on black, but that is made up for again by the titular laser gates, they’re just so wonderfully colorful that it makes me forget the rest of the rather bland color scheme because if there’s one thing I like, its pretty colors. There’s a small selection of colorful and distinct enemies you will encounter from a bat to a missile to flying saucer. This game doesn’t have too many sounds, more than some but still not too many. The one sound that I love though is the sound the gates make when they appear and disappear, it makes my subwoofer go crazy, and if there’s one thing I love its heavy bass. Otherwise it’s your fairly standard affair of beeps boops and otherwise, though the sound that was used for the gates with the moving opening I can’t help but think of Xonox’s Ghost Manor since that particular wavelength was used quite often and to great effect. This game is a side scrolling shooter *sigh* with a twist. Instead of it being a standard ‘shoot the enemies’ affair like pretty much all shooters, Laser Gates shakes things up by adding obstacles that you must avoid. The titular laser gates are back and they come in three varieties, first you have the appearing and disappearing gates, they come in twos and are fairly easy to avoid. You are then faced with the gates that smash into one another in an attempt to crush you, they are also fairly easy to avoid if you get the timing down. The third variation of the gate has a moving hole that you must fly through again its fairly easy to avoid. So if the gates are pushovers where’s the challenge? The enemies make up for the lacking challenge, they are small and fast, each has its own unique movement pattern, the missile makes a beeline for your ship but will not fly into your direct line of fire until the last minute, making it quite difficult to hit and nearly impossible to avoid. The bat moves in a zigzag pattern towards your ship making it hard to predict its location, it will also follow your ship if you move past it. I don’t really know the pattern of the saucer thing, since I’ve only gotten to see the one in all of my time playing the game. There is also a sort of radar tower that is in a fixed position of the tunnel floor or ceiling, it’s very easy to hit and tends to only fire in a straight line ignoring the position of your ship. Overall this is quite a fun game to play; unfortunately it loses its luster rather quickly, after you fly past the 20th set of ineffectual obstacles and get hit by an enemy you can’t really avoid the game just becomes boring to play, at least to me. This is not a cheap game, a loose cartridge will set you back at least 10-20$ and a boxed copy recently sold for 60$, I would recommend against buying this game since the experience simply can’t justify the price, it’s the Collector’s Zone for this one.

Perhaps

Indeed I do know about Pat Roper and his maniacal quest to 1-up Activision in every possible way. It's far too late for me, I've played Karate, I've played it more than any sane human should, perhaps I SHOULD review it, if only to test my mental strength.

When I look at either Skeet Shoot or Karate I have two initial reactions... First I laugh, then I cringe. When I play Star Fox I do not laugh I only cringe, this game physically makes me sad, I absolutely loathe this game.

It’s time to finish off the unholy trinity. I’ve really been dreading reviewing this one, mainly because I view this as amongst the worst games ever created. Star Fox by Mythicon is an absolute train wreck, and yes it is one you can look away from. Star Fox was the third and final game from infamous publisher Mythicon before they went belly up in 1983. While the games that preceded it, Sorcerer and Fire Fly, are virtually identical to each other, Star Fox is actually an original game, much to my dismay. I’ll admit that when I first heard there was a Star Fox for the 2600, this was after I’d played Star Fox on SNES, I was intrigued and excited, and when a copy of the game showed up at my local game store I snapped it up as fast as I could, along with the other two Mythicon masterpieces. When I finally played the game though I realized what a mistake I’d made, I immediately removed the game from my 2600 and put it on the shelf to molder in obscurity for the rest of time, but since I’ve reviewed everything else from Mythicon, including the boxes AND warranty slips, it seems the time has come for me to cleanse this game from my subconscious and review it. This is an incredibly bland looking game; much of the playfield is a dull grey color with the ground being brown with a decent gradient and the sky being a rather deep blue, also with a decent gradient. In the background there are tiny black structures that are either supposed to be oil drills of some kind or just plain buildings, it’s very hard to tell. Your ship is viewed from a side angle giving it the impression of a flying saucer while your enemies look like squashed black circles with a hole punched out of it. The only thing left to look at apart from the score and game type information, y’know the smiley face that flips you off; there is only the flashing pixel that is resting in the brown part of the screen, we’ll get to that sunnuvabitch later. CHRIST! What the hell is wrong with this games sounds!?! It’s just a constant dissonant scream only interrupted by the shooting noise and the sound of an enemy being hit; otherwise it’s just a constant keening wail that will puncture to the deepest innermost parts of your soul. Mute this game immediately, if you ever dare to play it, please just mute it. This game is similar to the others from Mythicon, despite not being a direct copy of the others there are some elements lifted from them, and a few others oddly enough. The main goal of this game is to blast enemies and collect that flashing pixel at the bottom of the screen, but as those who’ve already played this game before will know, you cannot steer in the brown part of the screen, it is explained away in the manual but I know it’s simply to play off a programming error of some kind. You have to guess where the pixel is going to move to then drop down in an attempt to get it, but you will always overshoot it since you still maintain some momentum so you have to predict where you’re gonna land and if it will be on the pixel or not. All of this is taking place while you’re dealing with some of the most erratic AI I’ve ever seen, one moment it’s trying to fly away from you, the next it’s trying to kamikaze into you. The only point progression system is back, once you gain enough points the game gets harder, in Star Fox’s case another enemy ship will appear to harass you, I believe it gets up to three ships at once. Strangely enough this game begins to feel an awful lot like Sea Hawk (Sancho/Froggo/Panda), except far worse. I don’t think I really need to tell you this but STAY AS FAR AWAY FROM THIS PIECE OF SHIT AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE! The bland visuals coupled with the uninspired and broken gameplay with a dash of headache causing auditory flatulence create one of the most unpleasant gaming experiences out there. If you MUST know loose copies of this game are around 10$ on Ebay, I don’t have a CIB price since I haven’t actually seen one yet. I’d say this game is approaching ‘Skeet Shoot’ levels of bullshit so I’ll just put Star Fox right next to it in the flaming inferno of the Collector’s Zone.

If you were to ask me what the greatest game on the 2600 is from a graphical, technical, and gameplay standpoint, I would hands down say ‘Solaris’. This game squeezed every drop of potential the 2600 had then added in a splash of its own, and the result is something that one would assume could only be created for a much more powerful system. As you would likely assume, ‘Solaris’ is a Red Box game and as such was released late into the 2600’s lifespan, even though it was 1986 I get the feeling 2600 owners were very happy to see this one coming. It seems that ‘Solaris’ was to be tied in with ‘The Last Starfighter’ but somehow the license was dropped and an original name was given to the game, and somehow the programmer himself (Douglas Neubauer) is/was the owner of the copyright for the game he created. One thing I need to address though is some particularly nasty laziness on Atari’s part; instead of creating an original piece of art for the box they just reused the box art from ‘Star Raiders’, I know the 8-bit version ended up being ‘Star Raiders 2’, but c’mon. This game comes dangerously close to looking like it could be on the Colecovision, everything is in high resolution, is colorful, and moves smoothly and is flicker free (and only flickers when it’s intentional). This game has three different environments you’ll be flying around in, the planet, in space, and in the corridor. The planet is wonderful to look at, there is a remarkably 3D-like scrolling floor, even if it is segmented into rectangles at least it’s got smoothly scaling craters to add visual flare, there is a mountain range in the background and a large ringed planet in the sky. Space is fairly basic in comparison to the planet, all you have are dozens of giant planets whizzing at you at high speeds, there is some flicker here but it’s only on the planets and they’re here and gone so fast you won’t even notice it. The corridors are much like the planet except the floor no longer has craters on it and has become very thin, limiting your movement, also that giant shield is a wonder to behold. If I were to dive into this game is detail this review would be my longest one yet, so in the interest of efficiency I will not be doing that, so let’s simply move onto the graphics instead. This game has some of the most wonderful and crunchy sounds I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to. The sounds of the engine, unlike in other games of this type, is rather quiet and soft sounding, which is nice since the sounds of combat absolutely take center stage. The explosions… oh! They sound so wonderful, even just the sounds of your ship firing are blissfully crunchy and gritty. This simply is one of the most well crafted soundtracks for a game I’ve ever heard; the programmer clearly understood that the sounds are equally as important as the visuals or the gameplay. Speaking of… The game is fairly simple to grasp, you shoot shit and get shit shot at you. Your overall goal is to find Solaris and wipe every trace of the Zylon (not Cylon) menace from the galaxy; you will likely do neither since this game gets crushingly difficult. The three different sections we discussed in the graphics section also come into play here; on the planet you are restricted to left and right movement only and are allowed greater freedom in controlling your speed, mainly because you need to collect stranded astronauts and refuel your ship in intergalactic garages. The space section is where most of the combat will happen, you are allowed horizontal as well as vertical movement since you will need to dodge around many various enemy combatants many of whom have different offensive styles to learn and memorize. The corridors have the most limited movement since you are sick moving horizontally and are unable to control your speed to any great degree, you will have to either destroy or avoid stationary enemies and collect a key that is resting immediately before an ista-kill shield wall. Again if I were to describe the gameplay in any great detail we’d be here for an hour or more so I’ll leave it at that. I would recommend that anybody who owns and Atari owns this game, it is, in my opinion of course, the greatest game ever made for the system, and while not my favorite, it comes pretty damn close. Wonderfully enough this is a very common game, if you can’t find it in the wild for some reason then expect to pay around 10-12 dollars for a boxed copy, I won’t say anything about loose carts since everybody should own this game in the box, even if it’s the only boxed game you own. You won’t regret it.