DoctorSpuds

True, they didn't have the game licenses but they did have the movie license, at least until Disney snapped it up a little while ago. Have you seen how many versions of Star Wars Fox put out, how many special edition VHS, DVD and Blu Ray, are now cluttering up the shelves of every Half-Price Books from New York to L.A., I think Fox still walked away with a tidy profit from Star Wars, probably more than what Atari or Parker Brothers ever saw from game and arcade sales. Fox is still king!

Hence Fantastic Voyage and Flash Gordon?

But Fox already had Star Wars... Oops for a moment there I didn't think Fox was that greedy, but what am I saying, of COURSE they are.

It seems we have returned to the realm of the obscure. I have reviewed a game from this company before, and ever since I have been yearning for another of their games. Commavid is one of THOSE companies, none of their games ever had a wide release despite their overall quality and are as such rather rare today, two more companies I would define as one of THOSE companies are Tigervision, and Avalon Hill. AS I was browsing through Ebay, as one does, I found a listing for Room of Doom by Commavid in the box no manual, I rarely jump on auctions but I jumped on this one. I won the action, which we all know is an amazing feeling, and several days later IT arrived. What immediately struck me was how short the box is, Commavid carts are some of the tallest for the system, but they also have the shortest boxes being about a centimeter shorter than a Mythicon box and a centimeter taller than a Xonox double ended cartridge. The artwork on the box is absolutely fantastic, whoever the artist was for these Commavid boxes (I can’t make out the signature) I hope they were successful; all around the packaging is A+ material. If the box is enough to make me exited then what about the game? Let’s begin. This game barely has any graphcs, you, the player, as well as the dudes shooting into the titular Room of Doom are a lumpy bubble headed blokes with long guns of sorts, and it looks really awkward when you’re shooting up or down. There are a small variety of monster locked in the room with you, but they are very abstract at best, and I couldn’t tell you off-hand what they are meant to be. Otherwise you have a HUD that displays your remaining lives, score, and the timer. All around the graphics are kinda terrible; I wish I could say simplistic like with Alien Swarm but nothing here actually looks good it all just seems sort of low effort. This game also has the barest minimum of sounds; there are a few beeps at the beginning, and then there are just more beeps, there aren’t even any good explosion sounds, and what explosion sounds are there sound more like lasers than anything else. It all just seems so bare, there is almost no substance to this game so far, I really hope the gameplay can save this game. Guess what! It can! Your objective in Room of Doom is to shoot all the gunmen surrounding the titular room whilst avoiding gunfire, obstacles, and a monster that will chase you around. The early rooms are easy but I was finally stopped in my tracks at room six, this game gets incredibly difficult. As you progress the monster gets faster, the gunmen will shoot faster ultimately leading to rapid fire, there will be more gunmen, there will be rotating knives acting as obstacles, it gets hectic. Also this game has 64 game variations… That’s like Apollo levels of game variations, and they all add something new so you’ll never get bored of the game. Honestly I really like this game, the ‘Avoid it’ gameplay has always been one of my favorites, I cannot begin to describe how rewarding it is to weave through gunfire taking potshots at the gunmen behind their opening and closing doors, finally taking out the final guy just before the timer hits zero and the monster becomes invincible. This game is addicting and fun, and despite not being a visual or auditory marvel it makes up for it with solid gameplay, the problem is though, this is a Commavid game, and there is no way people are selling these things for cheap, the only loose listing I say on Ebay was for 40$ for a loose cart and 290$ for a complete copy minus the warranty slip. So I must unfortunately condemn Room of Doom to the Collector’s Zone for being too expensive for its own good, quite an unfortunate vice that many great game fall into.

I’m going to try something a bit different today, I’m going to try and compress an entire review into one paragraph, let’s go. Spacemaster X-7 is one of the more original games released by TCF, and as far as I can tell it isn’t tied in with any known license. The main objective of the game is to destroy the star base in the center of the screen, by shooting it a whole bunch; this is made more difficult with an expanding and contracting shield that has ever shifting entrances. It’s not smooth sailing as soon as you get inside the shield though since the base, especially in later levels, will begin shooting differently behaving projectiles to pursue your ship or to just be a nuisance. The graphics in this game are extremely basic consisting of a mainly black screen, your ship the base and the shield, there is a basic HUD but nobody really cares about those. The only two things really worth noting when it comes to the graphics are the, somewhat, smoothly expanding shield and the explosion effect when you destroy the base. I was fortunate enough to get my hands of the Taiwan Cooper version of this game ‘Spider’ since the actual TCF carts usually go for around 15-20$ on Ebay and I got my ‘Spider’ in the box for less than 10$. Sadly I will have to put this game in the Collector’s Zone simply because the gameplay doesn’t justify the price tag that comes along with it

Improved my score a bit and attempted the bonus game.

There are a lot of strange games out there, I know I keep reiterating this point but it’s like if I sneeze I find more weird games. I had previously though this particular game to be fairly normal but then I gave it a little though and realized that no this is a strange game indeed. Cast your eyes over to Japan and to Nintendo, it was 1982 and their home console, the Famicom, was still a short while away so what do they do in the meantime? Arcade games I guess. I don’t know why they chose Popeye to be the star of one of their arcade games, after a bit of research I found that Popeye has never really gone away, I had always assumed that after the cartoons came out Popeye vanished from the public eye completely and was only pseudo-revived when the film came out, but it seems I was very wrong. Now that I mention the film, it came out in 1980, the arcade game came out in 1982, perhaps Nintendo saw that there was a movie and thought the time was right for a Popeye arcade game. Well, whatever the reasons were I’m glad that Nintendo did, because Popeye is a damn good game and as such was ported to almost all of the popular home consoles of the time, even the Odyssey2 got one. We’re going to be looking at the 2600 version, as is standard on the blog, but I might throw in a bit of comparison with the other version along the way. As is standard with the 2600 version of any game it doesn’t look that great, at least when compared to its competition. I would still, however, say that it looks pretty good for the 2600 in general, everything is represented faithfully. With a little bit of imagination you can discern Popeye Olive Oyl and Bluto scooting around the screen, Bluto in particular is given some nice animations, he’ll hop up while reaching at the platform above him to grab a hold of Popeye and he’ll wildly swing his outstretched fist at the platform below in a frantic attempt to clobber you, good stuff. The environment has been simplified to a massive extent, while all the basic elements form the arcade game are present much of the eye candy has been removed, I suppose you can say that the graphics, much like the 2600 port of Q*Bert, are functional not pretty, you can tell what everything is supposed to be and that’s good enough. I’d like to take a brief moment to look at the Odyssey2 port of Popeye, and despite me not owning it, it needs to be looked at, scroll down to the screenshots and just look at it. The sounds in Popeye are… Really quite good, when starting the game you are treated to the final few bars of the Popeye theme song, which is a great start. Once the gameplay begins you realize that this game actually has background music, and it’s really catchy. When you collect the spinach you hear the classic… well I called it the ‘spinach song’ and anybody who’s seen a Popeye cartoon knows exactly what I’m talking about. Otherwise you are treated to various melodic beeps when collecting hearts amongst others, it’s all quite good. As were many arcade games, actually games in general, at the time Popeye is a very simple game. All you have to do is collect a set amount of hearts, or other various floating object, floating down from the top of the screen, whilst avoiding the hulking Bluto, and punching bottles hurled by ‘The Sea Hag’ out of the air. This is a difficult game; much of your positioning must be very precise to be able to use the stairways the reach the different levels, and you can’t do any fancy maneuvering on them you have to go up or down, this usually leads to you getting stuck on the staircases when you are trying to escape from Bluto or the bottles being thrown at your face. You can punch the bottles out of the air, but unlike in the Colecovision version where your arm actually emerges, in the 2600 version the Popeye sprite changes and if a bottle makes contact with you while you have that slightly altered sprite then it won’t kill you dead. Due to the lack of feedback punching is extremely hard to time and will likely lead to many deaths. You may notice that off to the sides of the screen there are flickering green squares, that is spinach, it’s a lot like the power pellet in Pac-Man, allowing you to punch Bluto into the ocean for a brief period, and be invincible to bottles, but as far as I can tell you get ONE per level and they don’t replenish after you lose a life so use it sparingly. I’m rather torn here, while I like the smother movement of the 2600 version the Colecovision version is a bit easier to play with the improved punch, I’m not touching the Intellivision port with a ten foot pole and the Odyssey 2 port just makes me laugh, It doesn’t even have the punch. Thankfully copies of Popeye are plentiful and cheap, if you can’t find one in the wild then expect to pay 5-10$ for a copy on Ebay. No Collector’s Zone for this game, its level of quality and cheapness of price make it a game everybody with a 2600 must own.

Children’s games are nothing new, just about every console has them and most of them suck due in large part to them being far too simple and condescending for even children to play, but that hasn’t always been the case. On many of the older consoles, especially the 2600, you had games made for both adults and young children at the same, the one that comes to my mind is Missile Command where it has a disclaimer printed on the box that it has additional versions for young children, even Draconian a recently released homebrew has a kids version. The 2600 DID have games dedicated for kids though, mainly the KidVid games and the games based on Sesame Street but there were a few more thrown in there by other publishers, and it today’s case it’s Parker Brothers, the game we’ll be reviewing today is Sky Skipper (I’m cringing internally at even typing the name), a drab little game that I feel doesn’t to enough to qualify as a worthwhile investment of time. I’d prefer to not even bring out my 2600 to play this drab nothingburger of a game and just stick with Stella, but that isn’t how I do things. There is very little when it comes to graphics when it comes to sky skipper, and despite the fact that everything is done at least competently, there is nothing special to this game. The bi-plane looks like a bi-plane the animals look somewhat like animals, the only thing that looks rather off is the gorilla, it seems none of the second generation consoles, or computers, of the time could display a decent gorilla (with the obvious exception of the Colecovision,) but at least I could tell that this was supposed to be a gorilla just by looking at it and didn’t have to consult the manual. There is very little variation when it comes to the graphics as well, you are given two stages to fly around in and as you progress you cycle between these two stages with different factors making the gameplay a bit more difficult, but the simple fact is by the time level three rolls around you have seen everything this game has to offer on a visual level, unless you count having the stage be a slightly different color, which I don’t. I will admit that the little jingle that plays when you start up the game and when you complete a level is obnoxiously catchy, I’m liable to whistling it at work for the next couple of days. Otherwise you just get to listen to the constant farting of the bi-plane and you scoot around the screen, with the occasional sound of a bomb being dropped. You are also gifted a jumbled mess of rubbish whenever you run into a wall or an enemy assault gorilla, which is not going to be very often. So apart from a decent little jingle there just isn’t anything to listen to as well; Hmmm nothing to look at and nothing to listen to, I can’t say I’m too surprised. In this game you drop bombs on gorillas and collect flashing animals whilst avoiding obstacles, that’s it, there may be more obstacles thrown into the mix later on down the line, but the objective remains the same. When you drop a bomb onto the gorilla it’s laid flat and the animals it was guarding begin to flash in and out of the small boxes, presumably cages, which confined them, you must then fly over them to collect them. If the gorilla gets back up before you can collect all the animals you just have to drop another bomb on his head and get the rest. You have a limited amount of fuel at your disposal, but apparently you can refill your fuel by collect one of each animal in a row, this is stupid because you’ll expend an entire tank of fuel just to refill it again whilst making almost zero overall progress, unless you want to do it three times in a row. Even with the introduction of moving clouds the game remains painfully easy, all you have to do is move around the clouds, I know everybody is saying “oh this is a kids game, it’s supposed to be easy”, I’m saying that this is too easy even for kids. Once you get around to level five your plane begins to move faster making the game even easier, at this point I just gave up out of sheer boredom, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever play this game again. Yes this is a kid’s game, it’s also a very bad kid’s game, its mindless, its repetitive, and its dull, something I’m sure kids probably wouldn’t appreciate, even in the 80’s. There may be some of you out there who are nostalgic for this game or may have grown up with it and enjoyed it, good for you I don’t want to trample those memories, I am simply doing an honest review of a kids Atari game. If you disagree with me then you are welcome to do so, but please don’t go around saying I can’t review a game because it’s meant for children, I see that argument flare up so much when it comes to stinkers like this that it get’s rather obnoxious. Sadly this is not a cheap game, I’m looking on Ebay and people are asking over 10$ for loose copy and over 30$ for a boxed copy, personally I wouldn’t pay more than 2-3$ for this but that’s the way the market works. I will condemn this game to the Collector’s Zone, for being a bland and dull snoozefest that simply didn’t need to be made. NOTE: Only after doing research on Monday's review have I found out that Sky Skipper was an arcade game by Nintendo, this knowledge does not change my opinions on the game, if anything it makes me like the game even less.

We all have our own unique like and dislikes, it's fine for you to dislike or be indifferent to something I love and vice versa. Weirdly enough though, I'm not actually a big fan of Dig Dug at all, if anything I rather dislike the arcade version (I have played the actual machine), it's only the 2600 version that stands out. Yep the Coleco version is just a prototype, just imagine the arcade version but all stretched out on your 16:9 monitor and there you go.

Who here remembers Dig Dug? All of you? Well that’s good because I WAS gonna talk about it today but instead of doing that I actually just kept playing the game, and by the time I realized I need to start writing the review I was out of time to write it. So, instead of putting it off a day I’m just going to tell you right now, if you don’t own Dig Dug on 2600 you NEED to get it right away, no joke I just spent three hours playing Dig Dug. I have tested the 2600, Intellivision, 7800, arcade via a plug-n-play, and Colecovision versions and the only one I wanted to keep playing was the 2600 version. Despite its graphical shortcomings the 2600 version was the only one I could fully enjoy. You can find copies all over the place in the wild, on Amazon and Ebay people are asking 10-15 dollars which, while a bit steep, is a fair price to pay for such an amazing game. I don’t even think this game needs a review, just go out there and play the damn game already!! I just spent three hours of my life playing this game, you should too.

Well, it's a start.

Oops!, I'll fix that!

Before Sega was the darling of the 16-bit era it was the darling of arcades worldwide. With games like Zaxxon, Turbo, SubRoc 3D, and the classic Carnival, Sega was a force to be reckoned with in the arcades, but the console market was different for Sega. Many of Sega’s IP’s were already on the popular systems of the time but being released by other companies, so what do you do when all of your most popular games are being distributed by other companies? In Sega’s case, distribute non-Sega titles. This lead to games like Spy Hunter, Tapper, and Up ‘n Down, (all licensed from Bally Midway) to be released on the 2600 by Sega. So we have an arcade publisher selling another arcade publisher’s games on a console released by another arcade publisher, I know this was pretty normal back then but I still find it funny. Sega released a smattering of original games not found in the arcades, one was Thunderground an interesting game to be sure, but not the one we’re looking at today. Another Was Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator, (oops, it actually is an arcade game) again not the game we’re looking at today, in fact the game we’re looking at today is one of Sega’s more overlooked titles: Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom. I have absolutely zero knowledge of Buck Rogers, but since this is an Atari game I don’t need to, also if I may rand for a brief second on how awful those grip cases are, they are impossible to stack nicely with other 2600 cartridges, they’re almost like reverse M-Network cartridges. Enough about the cartridges and onto the game, this is Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom on Atari 2600. Moonsweeper, this game looks sooooo much like Imagic’s Moonsweeper that it’s almost funny. This is a behind-the-back shooter much in the same vein as (again) Moonsweeper, and Solaris (I really gotta give that game a look sometime), but sadly it doesn’t look quite as good as its competitor, the 3D scrolling is fairly well done and the sprite scaling, while a bit jumpy, is adequate enough, my biggest problems are the color schemes. Every level is a basic palette swap of the previous level except the colors they chose are agonizing, level one is a tolerable blue on black, that’s fine, level two is a deep blue on a green-ish brown that reminds me of unmentionable things, level three is a royal purple coupled with a slightly darker shade of that same unmentionable brown, it all just ugly, if they’d chosen more complimentary colors (like Moonsweeper) I wouldn’t be complaining so much but c’mon purple and poo brown? That’s just a joke. All the sprites are weird monochrome blobs; the only things I can discern as being objects are the gates that you fly through. It doesn’t really matter about the quality of the sprites though since you’re moving so fast you won’t be seeing them for long, I’ll get to that later, suffice to say the game looks very complex for a 2600 game but is mediocre at best indescribably ugly at worst, we’re off to a good start if I do say so myself. I originally thought this was a bug with my copy but when you start the game up and don’t do anything the game starts to yell at you with one of the worst noises I’ve heard from a 2600, I would call it a wail if anything. Something I just found out is that if you press the action button as soon as you power on the game the game farts at you! There are a whole host of sounds buried in this cartridge; the sounds you’ll hear most though are the sounds of the engine and the insufferable beeping of the timer, which never stops and only increases in pitch to add to your stress. Apart from those two sounds you’ll hear a bunch of crunches and whooshes and booms and you swerve between gates and shoot enemies, also the sound you make when you go boom has made me jump more than once. Sounds aren’t too bad, let them pass. It seems that the two things most people criticize most about this game are the graphics, which I agree with, and the gameplay, which I’m a bit on the fence about. The word of the day seems to be Moonsweeper and that’s because Buck Rogers is basically a poor man’s Moonsweeper. You fly through gates, like in Moonsweeper, but instead of taking off after collecting stranded astronauts, you are then taken to a shooting gallery where you must blast away s bunch of blue pancakes and then destroy the two halves of a pink TIE Fighter (of course) and repeat. This game has very little variation to it, and the only thing that keeps you moving is that timer, and to add to the boredom we add frustration, mainly because the collision detection is extremely fidgety, sometimes you can have half your plane touch a gate and just breeze through it and other times if the tip of your wing even overlaps with a gate you will explode. There is even a bit of frustration in the shooting gallery sections, since the enemies emerge from behind you they can also hit you and take a life without you being able to react. Even the shooting can lead to frustration, much like in GORF you can shoot once then you can shoot again cancelling out the previous shot, but Buck Rogers shoots so fast it gets difficult to aim mainly because it has turbo mode on permanently, instead of having to press the action button again to shoot you can just hold down the button and you just keep shooting cancelling out the shot you wanted to take (I hope I explained that properly. Overall this is a mediocre game at best frustrating chore of a bore at worst; it just doesn’t hold up to its competition. Sadly this isn’t the cheapest game either; you’re looking at a 10 dollar minimum with the odd deal here and there. I’m gonna have to say Collector’s Zone for this game, it just isn’t worth the cost, and no way am I gonna pay 70$ for this game in the box, what are you? Insane?

Apollo presented the games market with a very mixed bag of games. Some were rather fun to play but not very original, like Space Cavern, others were original but not at all fun to play, like Racquetball. One game though seemed to rise above the rest, garnering a somewhat cult status in some circles, that game is Infiltrate. It’s impressive that a game company which appeared and vanished so very quickly even had any offering at all; Apollo was a flash in the pan even when compared to other third-party companies. Apollo was the second third-party company to publish for the 2600 after Activision, and in their one year run, managed to publish eleven games of varying quality. It seems that the owner of the company was getting a bit too big for his britches and was running the company into the ground with lavish spending and delusions of grandeur, the main core of programmers fled the company which ultimately led to it filing for bankruptcy, don’t worry the programmers went on to program for other, more established, companies. The final game to be released by Apollo was Guardian, hence the rarity since almost immediately after it went into production Apollo was dead. Let’s now look at the game though, or we’ll just be here all day weeping, this is Infiltrate. AHHH! MY EYES, IT SO RAINBOW!!! This is an extremely basic looking arcade platformer, it looks strikingly similar to Fast Eddie (TCF) but with a few notable differences. First of you have a very garish color palette, and instead of ladders you have raising and lowering platforms, some of which will raise up two floors while some will on raise up one. Instead of having a, very goofy looking, spy on each floor Infiltrate only has two that will doggedly attempt to catch you or shoot you. Admittedly this game doesn't look very good, everything is super chunky, the spies look like ghosts, the secret documents you need to collect are a rectangle as tall as you, and you are a stick figure wearing a top hat, I’ll admit that the explosion looks fairly decent but that’s about it. This game has the bare basics of sounds; most of it is just repeated beeps of a different pitch. I’ll admit that the sounds do fit fairly well with the presented aesthetic but it still just feels lazy, I’ve been spoiled by better sounding 2600 games and now I want them all to sound good, but that’s never going to happen. I will admit though that the explosion sound is very nice, but that about the only thing I can praise in the sound department. The premise of the game is very simple, get to the top and then get to the bottom, avoid the spy guys. In practice the game is far more difficult, with every secret document collected the spy guys get faster and smarter, until they become so fast and smart that it’s impossible to play the game. That’s my main gripe with this game, as soon as you make a round trip, top to bottom, the spy guys are so fast that it’s impossible to outrun them or even get a shot in, in the end it’s all down to the luck of the duck. You shoot them, duck, and pray you hit them before they hit you, or you’ll miss and they’ll just run into you and take a life. The game is incredibly hard but it does have the ever coveted ‘one more time’ mentality that so many games try and fail to acquire, this game is fun, it’s fun to see how many trips you can make before your lives are drained, I bet this would be an incredibly fun multiplayer game, but since I have no friends that will never happen. Also like many Apollo games this one has a good amount of game variations where you can select the amount of players, spy guy intelligence, and whether the spy guys are invisible. For what it is, Infiltrate is a fun game, but by no means is it a masterpiece. It’s also a very cheap game; I’m seeing loose carts on Ebay for at least five buck. No Collector’s Zone for this game today, mainly for being a decently fun game and for being incredibly inexpensive.

Style over substance, an unfortunate vice that seems to grip many games released nowadays, as it seems all of the budget for them went to making the game look good not leaving enough for a developed plot or characters. We’ve seen this most recently with the Star Wars Battlefront games from EA, which, while being absolutely gorgeous have some of the most lackluster gameplay I’ve ever witnessed. There are games that do the opposite though, games like Stardew Valley and Terraria have very simple graphics, but have gameplay refined to near perfection, and need I mention the juggernaut that is Minecraft? But style over substance is nothing new, there have been many games in the past that LOOK terrific, but are either awful to play, or just plain boring to play, a few examples are: Shaq-Fu (I know this game get s a lot of flak but it looks pretty darn good), Dangerous Streets on Amiga (looks good in screenshot form at least), and the game we’ll be looking at today… Smurf Rescue on 2600. This might just be the best looking 2600 game released during the system’s original run period. Every screen is bulging at the seams full of color and detail. There are several unique screens, the first you will see is the starting screen (obviously), which has your Smurf standing next to a mushroom house, in a bright happy forest (the sky is literally pink). The second screen is also in the forest, but there is a fence, yes a deadly dangerous fence that will kill you upon impact, how dramatic. The third screen is in a very green field but there is a river blocking your path, the river is animated quite smoothly so it gets a pass from me. The fourth screen has some very square cliffs but the same background from the third screen, a very low effort screen if I do say so myself. By far the most interesting screen is the fifth screen, the cave, it changes the color scheme from a happy green to a devilish purple with large stalactites hanging from the ceiling and a large spider web perched in the center this is an amazing looking screen. The final screen is in Gargamel’s castle more specifically his dining room where he has Smurfette on a platter, you’ve gotta climb the oversized furniture to save her. All around this is a fantastic looking game, especially for the 2600, but can the soundtrack add to or detract from this greatness. Ehh… a bit of both actually; all that plays is the Smurf’s theme music, over and over again. The tune is on-key and harmonized well, it even lowers in pitch and gets a rudimentary echo effect when you are in the cave, but the song just gets on your nerves after a while, just like the Smurfs. Otherwise there are a few basic sound effects for jumping and getting hit, but I get the feeling that without that chipper music masking everything this game would be a rather silent affair. The gameplay is where things begin to drag, all you do in is game is walk right and jump, that’s it, in later difficulties enemies are introduced, but in most cases you can just jump over them too. Your little Smurf is an absolute wimp, if he touches a fence he falls over and loses a life, if he puts a toe in the river he suddenly gets very heavy and drowns, if he touches a sheer cliff face he falls over and dies. To also increase the difficulty instead of adding different obstacles to the existing screens, the programmers just added more of them, suddenly you’ll have to jump over two fences or two rivers, in the next level it will be three fences and three rivers but the enemies will move a bit faster. It’s absolutely barebones and poses very little challenge to the player, the hardest thing about this game is figuring out how to high jump, you have to press up to jump, and when you land then you press up again to do a high forward jump. Overall this is just a barebones experience with a shiny coat of paint on it, back in the 80’s this might have worked what with the 2600 being so limited in the graphics department, but not today. Thankfully this game isn’t too expensive; you can find them on Ebay for less than ten bucks a pop. Despite the low price I don’t think I can really recommend this game for more casual players since the gameplay is, again, so barebones and lacking, this game gets commuted to the Collector’s Zone for not being all that fun to play.

Once upon a time, this game was rare, I mean THE rarest, I of course am referring to the fallen angel that it Motorodeo. Once it sat at a kingly R10 on the AtariAge rarity scale, now it only at a modest R5, how the great have fallen. We can thank Venezuela for this influx of new old-stock, these days you can find almost all of the Atari Red Box/label games for a modest price brand new, as long as you can stomach the shipping times. Venezuela also has a large amount of Taiwan Cooper carts which make me hopeful that somebody will find a forgotten piece of paperwork and finally name the company responsible for producing them, but that likely will never happen. As you may have gathered Motorodeo is a Red Box game making it one of the final games released for the 2600, there is a bit of contention as to which game was released last in the U.S., it seems to be a toss-up between Motorodeo, Ikari Warriors, Radar Lock, Xenophobe, and Sentinel. Sentinel may have the largest CX number but they were all released in 1990 (Yes I know about KLAX!). But we’re not focusing on those other games today; today we’re looking at Motorodeo. I know a lot of people rag on this game for how simple it looks especially when you look at its date of release, but I don’t think it looks too bad, especially when you consider the technical side of things. This is a split-screen horizontal racing game, and the fact that the programmers managed to get two separate tracks to move at different speeds whilst displaying two player controlled vehicles and all the different obstacles with only minimal flicker is a miracle of programming. Remember Xenophobe notoriously COULDN’T do split screen, but Motorodeo DID, so what if it looks rather simplistic it’s amazing! There are several nice touches that I can appreciate as well, when running into the brown (-ish) vertical car it gets deformed and crushed same thing goes for the other white car; they didn’t have to do that. The only flickering I could see was the tires/treads, but I think that only because of all the movement that takes place so they had to be displayed differently. Also this game has a handy menu where can select the car type, tread type, and select who controls what car the computer or a player, (it also has a preview of the track right on the main menu screen which is really cool) the second menu allows you to select the difficulty or practice over different obstacles to get the hang of the game There isn’t much to this soundtrack you have a fairly awful tune that plays on the menu select screen, it’s probably something famous that I just don’t know or care about. Then all you really get in-game is the grumble and crunch of the engines and the little bloopy noises as you go over ramps and collect points. A nice touch I noticed was the subtle reaction of the engine to different circumstances, it will lower in pitch when in the air and will judder when rolling, again a nice touch. This game is made by that split-screen multiplayer action simply being able to compete against a fairly competent computer is a breath of fresh air. The controls are a bit difficult to pick up, you press and hold the action button to accelerate, you use left and right to roll in mid-air, you hold down to wheelie, and you tap up to activate the nitro boost. By default most people will hold right despite not actually needing to, this makes it more difficult to wheelie. I would recommend using a controller with a large amount of travel on it, if you’re using something like the incredibly sensitive Amiga Power-Stick you’ll be accidentally using up all your nitro’s as soon as you get them. You collect nitro boosts along the course, they’ll usually be placed at the top of a jump arc so you better hit them just right, you will start with one as well. Nitro’s are easily wasted though, if you hit one of the ‘blockade’ jumps (the ones that change their angle and also change briefly into a solid wall and stop you dead in your tracks) the boost is just gone, same thing goes if you just nick the bottom of one of those floating platforms. Overall the action is smooth and the obstacles are somewhat varied, and even on easy the computer will be a challenging opponent, so all around good stuff. This used to be a game for hardcore collectors only, and it seems that it might be leaning more towards that path again. When I purchased mine it was 20$ free shipping from Venezuela, but it seems prices are going up again, sealed copies are up to 30$ and some people are asking upwards of 100$ for sealed copies. Loose copies are not worth getting since they are far too expensive and seem to all be from Europe. If you have the disposable income I’d recommend that you get a copy of the game while there are still fairly inexpensive copies floating around, otherwise this game gets put into the Collector’s Zone.

Outsourcing is nothing new; almost all big companies do it. Many different industries outsource whether it be for assembly, manufacturing, or acquisition of raw materials. Outsourcing is fairly common in the videogame industry as well; games like Aliens Colonial Marines were famously outsourced to smaller less capable developers much to the chagrin of the consuming populace. Fox is no different, when first breaching into the new burgeoning videogame industry they licensed the initial lineup of games from developer Sirius, and continued using them to develop many of their subsequent games, instead of developing them in-house. If you had ever wondered why games like Fast Eddie and Deadly Duck were under the Fox label well there’s your answer, Fox bought them from Sirius, and later outsourced the labor of making new games to them as well. I really hope I got all that right. Since Fox’s first batch of games weren’t their own and were original they tended to be a bit weird, just look at Beany Bopper, what the hell is it? So, today we’re going to look at the only other Sirius game I haven’t named yet Worm War I or WWI for short (oh I see what they did there). This game is weird; I can’t decide if the graphics are great or just okay, I keep fluctuating. There is no doubt that this is a very colorful game, this shit is built outta rainbows, but then you see that the colorful exterior is hiding a rather bland interior. Much of the game is composed from large chunky blocks, rectangles everywhere, the only thing that really stands out is the fluid worm animation (those suckers are flopping everywhere). The tank you control is fairly small and low-res, and those Pagoda Gas Stations look like mushrooms. So, it has a flashy exterior plastered in rainbows and some damn good worm animation, coupled with smooth movement and no discernible flicker paired against bland rectangular graphics and gas stations that look like mushrooms. At a glance it looks boring but in action it’s quite nice, I’m torn on this, voice your opinion in the comment section, but I for the life of me can’t decide. I’m also torn on the sounds, but I’m leaning towards ‘good’ as my opinion. Much of the game’s audio is taken up by a rather high pitched noise when you’re travelling at the slowest speed, speed up and the sound lowers (the opposite of what it should do). The engine noise isn’t the only thing to listen to though, you have the wonderful chunky sound effects of the worms appearing and being exploded, coupled with the unique gloopy sound that the gun makes, makes for a unique audio experience that I rather enjoy. It just sounds so different from the standard shooter on the Atari, and I like it. This game is a vertically scrolling shooter, with (you guessed it) a twist! In this game you don’t rely on lives, instead you have a fuel counter that slowly goes down, once it reaches zero its game over. You can replenish your fuel counter by driving into the Pagoda Gas Stations; you will burn up fuel more quickly when you crank up the accelerator, so use it sparingly. As with any shooter you are faced with enemies to shoot away, WWI is no different, the worms will appear in groups, as you blast away one group another will appear hot on their heels (do worms have heels?) usually in higher numbers. Once you get past what I have dubbed level one large blocks will begin to descend, you should blast these away because contact with one of these is as bad as hitting a worm. The blocks get more and more dense with each level, eventually it just gets silly. This is just a fun mindless game to zone out to, what I do is accelerate to the maximum speed and just try to get as many worms as possible before I run out of fuel. Despite being simple and rather mindless WWI is quite fun to play, in my opinion it’s one of the better vertical shooters on the system despite its ridiculous premise, I mean who would name their town Teriyaki that’s just silly. Sadly, much like Alien, finding boxed copies for a sane price is a near impossibility. On Ebay boxed copies of Worm War I are being peddled at 140$ for a copy that isn’t cut in half, I was lucky and found a decent boxed copy on Amazon for 21$, which is what I think the game SHOULD be valued at. Loose copies range from 9$ to 20$, I would recommend against trying to find one of these boxed, in fact I would say to avoid any boxed TCF games until the scalpers move on to something else. So, for loose copies buy away, but boxed copies go to the Collector’s Zone, for now at least, we have to wait and see where the market goes.

Indeed I am quite biased, I'm reviewing these games and pieces of technology as a collector and game enthusiast, I do not take into consideration the personal experiences of people who owned them at the time, I do not have the time to interview people. I review these games based on how they hold up today, not 37 years ago, and if a game doesn't hold up or is too expensive for it's own good then I put it in the Collector's Zone sometimes with a few choice words. You mention having a Pac-Man wrist game, I had those too, everybody had those, especially the Tiger brand, but even if people liked them back then we all look back on them with general disdain with perhaps a few standouts. I can't because I didn't live there, I do this for fun, if you read my very first post I didn't say I would be an unbiased source of information, I'm here for the fun of it. Besides the thing still isn't worth it. For those long road trips I'd have taken a good book any day. ( know this comment sounds very defensive, because it kinda is, but I'm not all too worked up over this, I just want to put forth my points in a somewhat rational manner, I just got out of bed so I'm still not in my proper mind and might just end up regretting this post sometime in the future)

We all have a cart racer of choice; some prefer Mario Kart, others prefer Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing, and others still prefer Rascal Racers. There are so many cart racers out there that it’s impossible to name them all. There are a few though, myself included, whose cart racer of choice is something so outlandish and awesome that it could have only come from Lego… Hands up for all of those who remember Lego Racers. This is probably the most recent game I’ve covered so far and only my second foray into the world of polygonal gaming, but this game is worth it. For the younger readers, this will illicit childhood memories, I was still rather young when I played this on the family PC (don’t ask me what machine it was because I have no clue), and it ate up my life. I have beaten this game more times than I would care to admit, and have probably partaken in thousands of laps around those tracks. Lego Racers was one amongst the first batch of games Lego released, alongside titles like Lego Island, Loco, Creator, and Chess (I wasted a lot of time on this one too). A while back I found the old install of Lego Racers on one of the old family PC’s and amazingly enough it booted up without needing the disk, and even more amazingly it works perfectly with Windows 10, I’ve heard after the fact that this game in particular works poorly on modern PC’s, but I don’t get it. This review will be a bit different that a normal one; instead of doing a blanket review, and mashing all the tracks into a single paragraph I’m going to do a paragraph on the first four tracks in the first circuit, just to give you a taste of what’s on offer. But before I get to that I need to talk about the start of the game, and the music. Since this is a Lego game you are given a large amount of customization options to play around with, starting with creating your racer. My racer is named Turdman Jones, and fun fact I actually own this figure, you then make his license where you actually give him his name. The best part about making your racer is actually building your racecar, the options are rather limited initially, but as you beat circuit races you will unlock more pieces and chassis to build with. Lego claimed that the way you built your car would affect handling and performance but as far as I can tell that was a lie, if you build a solid wall on one side of the car and leave the other side empty it will still handle the same. The music in this game is fantastic, fun and quirky. The menu music has been etched into my brain, as well as the build racer music. Each track has its own unique piece of music, and since this was 1999 it had to be MIDI. Kudos to you Eric Nofsinger you have constructed some of the greatest game music I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to. You have four options on the menu (there are more but these are the three that pertain to racing so shush), single race, circuit race, versus race, and time race. Single race is rather obvious, with this option you will race three laps (you can change this in the options menu, up to five) on a single track of your choosing, this is handy for learning the tracks and finding the locations of the many shortcuts. Circuit race is basically the grand prix mode; you will race all four tracks in the circuit in order against the reigning champion, get third place or better and you unlock the next circuit, get first and you publicly shame your opponent and steal their car. Versus mode is something you’ll never do on PC, because you NEED to use a controller for player 2, you can’t share the keyboard, and besides it’s just split screen against each other, no NPC’s to be seen. Time race is the time trial mode, you will race against Veronica Voltage, if you beat her on all of the tracks you will be allowed to steal her car as well, apparently it goes faster. If you’ve already beaten the game this is a good way to keep going because, like you, Veronica will use shortcuts, increasing the difficulty by quite a large margin. Without further ado though, lets look at the tracks. First Circuit Reigning Champ: Captain Redbeard First Track: Imperial Grand Prix. This is the pirate track, if that isn’t apparent by the name, and an excellent intro track. The colorful graphics are at their best on this track (the graphics are great for all the tracks but we have to start somewhere), there are several noteworthy set pieces on display here, you have the giant swinging crate on the docks, don’t hit it or it’ll spin you out, there is also the mineshaft with mine carts trundling around in the walls beware of explosives they might just blast the level apart. This track is full of hairpin turns that really acclimate the player to the control style. A handy hint that I never knew until recently, you can drift in this game by holding SPACE, I wish I knew about this before, it makes things much easier. Second Track: Dark Forest Dash. This is one of the medieval tracks, and graphically it is spectacular. The lush green forest fading to a murky gloom is a treat to the eyes, two notable set pieces are the giant and extremely loud waterfall, that I always wanted to drive into, and the spooky ghost the will spin you out if you come into contact with it. The track design is quite different from the last one interspersing shallower and longer corners to offset the sharper hairpin turns. The sound design for this track is one of my favorites, with the wailing of the ghost and the howling of wolves in the background coupled with those kick-ass tunes make this one of the best looking AND best sounding tracks. Third Track: Magma Moon Marathon. This is the first of the space tracks, and out of all the tracks this is my favorite, it’s also the easiest, it’s also hosted by Turdman Jones’ twin brother. The first thing you’ll notice is how blue the whole thing is, don’t worry the other space track is incredibly green. A few notable set pieces are the magma bridges with laser gates preventing you from taking a swim, and the… uh… laser gates that you drive under, if you drive under them in the correct order you’ll open a secret shortcut. Unlike the previous two tracks this track has no hairpin turns allowing for the accrual of some serious speed (this is the only track I can lap the NPC’s on), it also has one of the most cleverly hidden shortcuts in the game, to unlock it you need brains rather than brawn. Fourth Track: Desert Adventure Dragway. This is the first adventure themed track, and it takes place in one of my favorite periods in history: Ancient Egypt. This track has some of my favorite set pieces, including a giant sphinx, a weaving track through a campsite, and a crumbling obelisk that will block your way from lap two onwards. This track focuses mainly on straightaways and chicanes which allow for some serious carnage if you have the correct power-up. This track has one of the most well hidden shortcuts in the game, you’ll have to comb every inch of that desert to find it. One thing I’ve neglected to mention until now is the power-up system and how you can build up your power-up’s strength. There are four colored bricks that you will find interspersed throughout the tracks; there are, red, blue, yellow, and green bricks. There are also white bricks that you can collect, you can collect a maximum of three at a time, and with each white brick you collect your power-up gains strength. Red bricks are offensive weapons, starting with a cannon ball, up to a grappling hook, then to a beam of lightning shooting out from the front of your car, and finally you release three homing rockets that will target the racer ahead of you. Yellow bricks are obstructive weapons starting with the classic oil slick, up to an explosive barrel that floats around the track where you left it, then there is a tractor beam that will hold a racer in place for a brief period of time, and finally there is the Mummy’s Curse that reverses the steering and makes the screen zoom in and out obnoxiously. The blur bricks are defensive shields, the first is the blue shield, it lasts for a short period of time and can deflect attacks, the second shield is green and simply lasts longer, the third shield is yellow and lasts even longer and can reflect attacks, the final shield is red and lasts the longest, reflects attacks and will spin-out other racers on contact. The final power-up, and the only one you’ll be using is the green brick which is a speed boost, the standard brick is a short speed boost, the second tier is a longer speed boost, the third tier is a pair of rocket boosters that lift you of the ground as well as boost you faster and lasts longer than the other two. The final green brick power up absolutely breaks the game, it is the Wormhole, it will literally skip you a short way across the level instantly, this is how you win, I’ll admit that it’s graphically interesting, but you’re skipping so much of the beautifully crafted tracks, I kinda wish that it wasn’t in the game and you had to rely on your driving skill and power-up usage to get you across the finish line, not just collecting three white bricks and getting a green brick and skipping a large chunk of the level and repeating the process until, you win. Overall this is a fun but flawed game that still delivers a charm and style unique to the Lego brand. I almost forgot to mention that despite there being six champions to race against there are only twelve tracks, the other twelve are just mirrored versions of the same tracks… LAME!!! Thankfully Lego Racers is a fairly cheap game, I’m seeing copies on Ebay 15$ or less all day, I’m actually considering buying a copy just to have a disc to go with the game. I will spare this game the wrath of the Collector’s Zone mainly out of nostalgia, but c’mon it’s impossible to stay mad at a Lego game.

I've heard that fried gerbil tastes delicious. Just a hint of lemon, juice or rind, with some basil and thyme as seasoning, oh! So good.

Here's a modest start to my run this year. Dragonfire: Score: 2920

Out in the wild lands of Canada, there is a magical place known as Zellers, and at Zellers they sold wondrous things at a low price. Amongst these myriad budget items there were video games, strange ones at that, they came in red boxes with ‘ 2600 compatible’ emblazoned on the front in bold white letters, and the artwork was horrible. Well, whilst trawling through the endless pages of Ebay I found one of these ‘2600 compatible’ Zellers titles, Challenge, I was immediately intrigued because of the artwork on the front of the box. What appeared to be two Ghostbusters, resplendent in their grey jumpsuits and Proton Packs were zapping a giant butt ugly goblin creature, this couldn’t be from the Ghostbusters movie because the far ‘buster is noticeably female. What did Zellers steal this artwork from? Will we ever know? Does anybody even care? I can answer one of those questions with certainty and the answer is a resounding NO! After a bit of digging I was able to find out what this game is, apparently this is a possible Bit Corp. release under the same name, Challenge, which was released under the Funvision label, the Zellers version has the Funvision branding removed, or at least obscured in-game. This game was also released in the Taiwan Cooper flavor under the name My Way, or Mein Weg in Germany. This game even made it to Australia, same name different company, in Australia it was sold under the HES brand. This is a fairly unique looking game; there are eight horizontal lines and six vertical lines, there six strange balloon creatures moving back and forth on the horizontal lines. Despite having a standard black background the game is very colorful, and despite being very colorful the game isn’t hard on the eyes. There is a lot of noticeable flicker on display, but that’s because of the large amount of stuff being displayed, so the flicker is acceptable, and besides, it’s not too bad especially when one considers ‘certain’ games known for flicker. The graphics are fine, simple perhaps, but I get the feeling there isn’t much that could have been added, let them pass. The music that constantly plays is an absolute earsore; I don’t remember exactly what the song is, but all I can think of when it’s playing is “I know a song that get’s on everybody’s nerves”, and that’s exactly what this song does, get on my nerves. If it played a little slower I wouldn’t have too much of a problem with it, but since it’s so fast It just gets on my nerves (hah!). It’s obnoxious for sure, but there isn’t anything else to listen to here, that all there is. So let’s move along to the gameplay. This is a basic reactionary game that tests your reaction times and puzzle solving skills; Your goal is to guide a dog thing from the bottom right of the screen to the top left by navigating around the vertical lines, all the while balloon things are moving horizontally across the screen. The Balloon things are slightly offset to each other creating exploitable gaps to weave between them, because if you touch one it’s back the bottom right. There are a few problems with this game, firstly being your movement speed, you move very slowly making those little gaps even tighter to squeeze through, the first level is okay, but once you get to level two things get a bit crazy. The second and main issue is how unforgiving the collision detection is, when moving between the vertical lines you are unable to move left or right until you get to the top, and you have to be in a particular place to start going down, so if you’re too far right and try to go down you’ll simply get hung up on the wall and lose a life, you have six but they go away quite fast. I’ve only ever managed to get to level two, where some of the balloon things have buddied up and are now prancing across the screen with a friend, if you can make it past this level then you are a better puzzle solver than I. I would warn against getting into Zellers collecting, it’s best to wait until one comes up for auction because people ask outrageous prices for these things. There is a loose copy of Challenge for sale right now for 50$ BIN, but the only sold listings I’ve seen are from auctions and they almost always go for less than 10$ including shipping, I was lucky with my copy. Due simply to inaccessibility I’ll hand this game to the Collector’s Zone. But if you see a copy for auction place a watch on it, they usually don’t get bid on and the first is usually the winner.