DoctorSpuds

No that was Han

I've decided to expand my operation to Wordpress in an attempt to get my reviews in front of more eyes. This does not mean I'll stop posting here though, you'll keep getting your regularly scheduled dosage of reviews don't you worry. Starting off I'll be posting my old reviews a couple a day so it'll take a while for it to catch up with the blog here, the only difference between those reviews and the reviews here are a hefty amount of spellchecking and punctuation correcting.

This game has been on the docket for a very, very, long time, but for the longest time I was completely stumped by it. I simply couldn’t play this game properly, until recently when I sat down and just played it, and looked up the manual on Atarimania but that isn’t important, what is important is that this is one of the strangest and most unique titles on the 2600, whilst having one of the most unique titles on the 2600. Snail Vs Squirrel or Snail Against Squirrel, or just Squirrel, it doesn’t matter how you say it, all you need to know is that this is one of Bit Corp. /CCE’s mysterious legendary titles that only existed for the longest time in the PAL format with NTSC copies rumored to exist somewhere, thank goodness for whoever made those Taiwan Cooper carts since they released the only version of this game in the NTSC format and I think we should all be grateful, since this is one heck of a weird game. So, let’s stop lollygagging and just jump right into it. To call this game colorful would be an understatement, when you power on the game your eyes are assaulted with primary colors. As soon as you put your hand down from shielding your eyes you’ll see that the game is rather competently constructed. As with most 2600 games, you’ll need to use your imagination quite a bit, especially right off the bat since that strange structure is actually meant to be… uh… well actually I don’t know, none of the manuals I’ve read actually say what your climbing, all I really know is the weird face thing at the top is meant to be your ‘cave’ (do squirrels live in caves?). The creature you control does not, in fact, look like a squirrel; it looks more like a bear wearing a muumuu than anything. Overall the game looks colorful but still fairly basic, it has very few moving parts with which things can be spiced up, it’s all very static. This game has more sounds than most but still manages to disappoint. All you’ll be hearing is the ‘walking’ sound which is a basic three note progression; there is a light ‘beep-beep’ when a nut is ready to be collected and a deep ‘beep-beep’ when a nut is about to expire (or run away). The strangest thing though is when you complete a stage a piece of music will play but it’s in reverse, I actually recorded the music and played it in reverse and it actually sounded worse than when it was reversed (how does that work?). This game has a simple premise; get the nuts to the top of the screen, get five to the top and you go to the next screen. This game’s main problem is the ‘huh?’ factor, you’ll start the game and immediately go ‘huh?’ when you just start losing lives for apparently no reason, but thankfully I’ve figured it out. Each nut is on a timer, if the nut runs out of time it will fall to the ground, if the nut is on the ground for too long it will disappear and you’ll lose a life, you reset the timer whenever you pick up the nut, the problem is that you can only hold one nut at a time and there are two nuts to deal with. This all leads you to moving each nut a little bit at a time, and you have to have a ‘leading nut’ since if they cross paths with one another you’ll automatically drop them and they’ll start sliding away from you. Your next big obstacles are the snails, they’ll appear from the sides of each available platform and steamroll their way across them, if they encounter a nut they’ll push it along the platform until it falls off, if you make contact with them whilst holding a nut they will eat the nut, and if you aren’t holding a nut they will drop you all the way back down to the bottom of the screen. There is a way to destroy these pesky snails though and it’s quite simple, instead of attacking their soft fleshy fronts you assault their armored backsides to destroy them, basically you walk into their backs and they die, don’t do it while holding a nut or it will be consumed. Overall this is a frustrating, but ultimately fun puzzle game, it tests your problem solving skills as well as your reflexes when catching those nuts as well as prioritizing a strategic and methodical approach. The problem though is that this is a fairly uncommon game, and I haven’t seen a Taiwan Copper version on Ebay since I bought my copy. It seems the well has begun to dry up with the more unique Taiwan Cooper titles, so my recommendation to you is to grab a copy if you can find one but don’t pay too much for it, anything less than 20$ for a boxed copy is enough. As is customary with these Taiwan Cooper boxes the description of the game is absolutely hilarious so I’ll take a moment to transcribe the description. The little squirrel will keep some walnuts on the hole. The ripe walnuts will fall down and make loud special sound. If the little squirrel gets 5 walnuts on hole, the screen will run into the next. To press the button, to take or set the walnut. The snail will eat the walnut, so the squirrel should avoid the snail’s attacking, and destroy the snail on back. The walnut on hole can not be put too long, or it will fall down. Absolute gold…

There are many games I'm afraid of, this is one of them.

Some shit is worse than others

So I’ve been thinking back on my Skeet Shoot ‘review’ and I’ve come to the realization that three paragraphs of me saying hahaha isn’t sufficient to vent my frustration with this game, so I’m gonna go the whole nine yards and give this lousy piece of shit a full review, not because the game deserves it but because I want to insult it more. Skeet Shoot was Apollo’s very first game, and boy does it feel like it, though I’d say it feels like a first year game dev major’s scrapped project more than anything. Thankfully I can say that Apollo’s games did improve in quality, which isn’t too hard to do when the game you started out with is a dumpster fire of disappointment. So… without further ado lets dive headfirst into the still smoldering wreck that is ‘Skeet Shoot’. Looking at this game hurts me deeply in profound places: My heart, it breaks to see such bile on my beloved 2600, my brain, because the game just looks like absolute shit, my stomach, because this is just making me nauseous… If you’ll pardon me for a moment I need to go vomit. When you boot up the game you will see the top two thirds of the screen taken up by a sickly shade of blue, this is the ‘sky’, the bottom third of the screen is supposed to be the ground but the shade of green they used reminds me more of that slime you’d make in elementary school out of Elmers’ glue and shaving cream and green food coloring, vile. There is a large blue square in the center top of the green bit, I don’t know what it’s supposed to be, but what I do know is that it’s absolute garbage. I know you have to use your imagination with the 2600 but this would push the mental limits of even the most creative of people. When you finally start the game you will see the sorriest excuse for a person that the console can muster, it looks like a front view of a folding ‘caution when wet’ sign with a circle taped to the top, and then tape a black line which resembles an oversized Mohawk to represent the gun. This. Is. Shit. The only three things I haven’t mentioned are the scores that nobody cares about, the tiny square bullet you shoot, and the large diamond shaped discus that emerges from the blue square; otherwise there are no other graphical elements to this game. This game has four sounds, the sound of the discus being launched, the sound of you shooting your Mohawk, the sound of you missing, and the sound of you actually hitting the discus. None of these sounds are interesting, none of these sounds are really worth mentioning, they aren’t making my ears melt or my head explode, they simply exist. There are very few words that can in this moment describe by anguish and disappointment in this game, WHY DID THEY RELEASE THIS GAME!!! WHO LOOKED AT THIS GAME AND SAID “YES, I THINK THIS IS A GOOD GAME AND SHOULD BE PURCHASED BY PEOPLE FOR REAL, ACTUAL, MONEY”? WHAT SICK DEPRAVED LUNATIC THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?!?!? Playing this game is stupid. The skeet launches in one of three directions, diagonally left, diagonally right, and straight up, you will not know the trajectory of the skeet until it has left the screen (there may be a game variation with a slower skeet but I don’t give a shit). Your restroom sign of a person will appear randomly in one of three predetermined locations, you can see the issue already right? You don’t know where you’re going to be so you can’t aim accordingly, but that doesn’t matter since you won’t know which direction the skeet is going. If you think this is bad enough well I still got more for you, you can aim in only FIVE directions. This all means that you have to hit a skeet moving in one of three directions from a location that you do not know until AFTER the skeet is in the air, by shooting in one of five directions and hoping that the bullet and skeet miraculously intersect. The window of success is so tiny, and so quick to pass, that from certain locations you may not actually be able to hit your target when allowing the average human reaction time. This game is absolute bullshit. Do not buy this game, to not be tempted to buy this game. I’m going to take a page from the Video Game Critic and give this game a letter grade… F-… This game goes into the Collector’s Zone as far as it can go, further than even the trash from Mythicon. The bar has been set so low that if you dug for it you’d burst into flame before you even got halfway there. FUCK THIS GAME!

Just covering my bases

Of all the ‘Avoid-it’ games I think I have the most experience with Sky Jinks, after my furious battle in last year’s HSC I can firmly say that Sky Jinks is one hell of a fun game. In essence Sky Jinks is a giant slalom; you must guide your little plane around the colored pylons whilst avoiding strategically placed obstacles. The graphics are rather plain, the only thing I thinks is worth noting is the shadow that your plane casts gets further away from you as you gain altitude, otherwise there isn’t very much to look at, actually the fact that the objects have shadows in general gives the game a more realistic air, I like it. I know many people think of Sky Jinks as a throwaway game, you know, the game you play a few times and put on the shelf to never think about again, but no… this is one hell of a fun game to get good at. This game is a controller snapper, when you’re really getting into it, just barely scraping the edges of your wings on the obstacles, getting as close as possible to a pylon just to shave a few milliseconds off your time, and when you get to the end and see that progression, if only by just a few milliseconds is so rewarding. I suppose you could say that about any of these ‘Avoid-it’ games, cutting it as close as possible just to get a slightly better time, or just to play a little bit longer is probably one of the greatest feelings one can achieve. Just one more turn, just one more try…

Of all of Activision’s 2600 games I feel that Enduro is probably one of their best. There were very few games of this style released on 2600; you had Pole Position, Fatal Run, Night Driver (debatably), and Enduro, and the only one out of those four that I actually enjoy is Enduro. Unlike most Activision ‘Avoid-it’ games, in Enduro your goal is not to set a best time, your goal is to drive past a set amount of cars over a period of time, and if you do you continue the game. Graphically this game is stunning on a surface and technical level, of course you have that classic Activision sunset on the horizon, but that’s not the main visual draw. The thing that will amaze you is the day/night cycle with different weather effects like snow and fog thrown in. These weather effects actually affect the handling of your car or your visibility, which is a nice touch. If anything this reminds me of another Activision title that I really need to look at ‘Robot Tank’ which shares the day/night and weather. Gameplay-wise this game handles very similarly to Grand Prix where the slower you move the slower the handling is which introduces a risk/reward element to the gameplay, do you go slower and rely on being able to see what’s coming? Or do you go full speed and just hope your reaction time is up to snuff? I usually for the latter, only using the former on the snowy bit where your handling is impaired. Overall this is a fantastic game and I would strongly recommend you go out there right now and pick up a copy; copies on Ebay are less than ten bucks so I don’t see the downside to getting it. I would recommend against trying to get a copy in the box since people like to price it for much more than it’s worth, if you find a boxed copy for 15$ I would recommend you snap it up.

Hmmm, I don’t like Freeway; I feel that it is too simple for its own good. In Freeway you are a chicken who must cross the road for no discernible reason, its ten lanes of traffic and you’ve gotta cross all of them. My main problem with this game is how simply boring it gets, you can only go up, there is no moving around like in Frogger you are stuck on a single straight line. There is also a second player but you are not likely to get somebody to play a quick game of Freeway with you. This game has no lives and you can’t get run over by one of those chicken sized cars. If you get hit by a car you get pushed back a little bit, which is infinitely disappointing. The graphics are very basic, yet technically impressive, the simple fact that the programmer managed to get 10+ cars moving on-screen without any visible flicker is a technical marvel (something Activision were very good at accomplishing on a regular basis). People who’ve read my ‘Official Frogger by Sega’ review already know that I’m not a big fan of Frogger and Freeway, to me, is like Frogger but worse. You can say it’s for kids, but I think that even kids will get tired of this one after a short while. The only thing that I think is truly worth praising are the honking sound effects, they sound like actual car horns which really confused me when I first played the game. If you already don’t have Freeway, despite the fact it’s one of the most common of Activision’s games, it’s fairly cheap on Ebay 7-10$ but I still wouldn’t recommend you buy it, perhaps only to round off your collection but for nothing else.

I know I didn't say it in the review but loose copies of this game are about 5 to 8 dollars and you can find it boxed for 15-20 dollars on Ebay.

You’ll likely remember how in Sunday’s review I criticized Barnstorming for being ‘style over substance’, well I think Keystone Kapers may have finally balanced these two opposing forces. The premise is fairly basic, you are a cop who needs to catch a burglar who is escaping through a shopping mall, you must avoid obstacles in order to catch the thieving fiend. Everything in this game screams effort, from the animated escalators, to the running animations of both the cop and the burglar, to that classic Activision sunset, it all looks great and is filled to bursting with color. Playing the game is a fairly simple affair, run, then jump, and occasionally duck. Keystone Kapers is a screen-by-screen obstacle avoiding madhouse, starting out with bouncing balls, leading up to stationary ‘Cop Catchers’, all the way to shopping carts and instant-kill RC airplanes. The Burglar starts on the second floor and you must keep him from reaching the roof, thankfully you can run faster than he can, and you are given a little advantage, the elevators. The elevators can be a blessing and a curse since as soon as you get in front of the burglar he turns around, but you can’t go down the escalators, but he can. Both you and he start in the same place, but on different floors, and run at the same speed for the entire game but with the myriad obstacle put in your way you’ll be hard pressed to catch this crook! Loose carts for this game are very cheap, on Ebay you can get these for less than ten bucks all day, I would recommend against trying to get this boxed since the prices are rather inflated, but if you can find one for 15-20$ I would say go for it.

Well, that's unfortunate.

Agreed

I never could get in to Demon Attack

You may recall a short time ago when I mentioned ‘style over substance’ in my Smurf Rescue review, sadly I think Barnstorming falls into such a category. Graphics-wise the game is absolutely stunning, the background with the mountains and the beautiful sunset, the foreground with the giant barns and windmills. The best looking thing in the game though is that bi-plane, the propeller spins and the pilots scarf whips around in the wind, it truly is a visual marvel. Sadly the gameplay for this one is pretty shallow; all you have to do is fly through the barns, and over the windmills as fast as possible, there is a bit of avoidance involved with the birds but they’re pretty easy to avoid. The game just gets boring after a while; all you do is fly through the barns and over the windmills rinse and repeat until you’re done. Of all the ‘Avoid-it’ games Activision put out I think Barnstorming is the weakest. Games like Grand Prix and Skiing are, in my opinion, better and more fun because they give you more options, more ways to approach the incoming obstacles; in Barnstorming you have one way to play the game and it gets boring. Barnstorming is still a fairly cheap game, I’m seeing copies on Ebay for five dollars or less, but I wouldn’t advise you to pick it up. Barnstorming goes to the Collector’s Zone for just being a shallow and boring game.

Well... What are you waiting for?

The main thing that I find characterizes these ‘Avoid-It’ games is simplicity, these games are simple therefore anybody can pick them up and have a good time with them, and because they’re so simple I think I’d be forgiven for giving many of these a single paragraph review, so without further ado lets review Grand Prix. I believe James Rolfe (AVGN) said it best “It’s a bunch of kazoos flying through a cabbage patch…”, and I rather agree with him. The cars, while simple in design, are colorful and large, couple that with as many as five being on the screen at once all the while staying flicker free and I’d say you’ve got a pretty good looking game here, even if the cars DO look like kazoos. This game is in a top-down view as you try to get your kazoo to the finishing line as fast as possible, you will be hindered by other kazoos, oil slicks, and bridges. There are four difficulties, starting simple and getting progressively longer and harder (as these games tend to do); sadly it seems there isn’t a random course selection so each of the four courses has the same order of cars each time. There isn’t anything special when it comes to the sounds; all you’ll be hearing is the grumble and crunch of the engines and the occasional ‘CLACK’ when you rear-end another kazoo. This is one of the most common games in the Atari 2600 library, if you buy a console lot you’re likely to get this game with it, but if you don’t already have it and can’t find a copy in the wild (for some reason) then carts go for as little as $3.99 (free shipping) on Ebay, and boxed copies go for as little as 10$, it’s a fun game so go on out there and play it.

I don't have checkers, and the guy who I know has a copy refuses to sell it to me.

It's the next 'Week Of' and this week we've got some real classics for ya! This week we'll cover (mostly) all of Activision's 'Avoid-It' games, games where the sole objective is to avoid objects to achieve the objective of getting either the lowest time, to the other side, or simply continuing the game. The seven games I'll be reviewing are: Grand Prix Barnstorming Keystone Kapers Freeway Enduro Skiing (It'll be on a Monday since I've already reviewed it) Sky Jinks

Never in my life have I needed something so much and never known until I've seen it. I'll take six.