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DoctorSpuds

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  1. DoctorSpuds
    When it comes to Catch ‘em games one reigns supreme Kaboom! But we’re not going to be reviewing Kaboom! for a while, we’re looking at one of the games it inspired. Which could be? Could it be Lost Luggage, Eggomania, Big Bird’s Egg Catch, Berenstain Bears, did I find the unreleased prototype of Kickman? (Hint: it’s no). I’ve already looked at two of the more notorious Catch ‘em games, Beat ‘em & Eat ‘em and The Music Machine, and chances are you’ve read the title to this review so you already know off the bat that I’m reviewing Eggomania which means this entire beginning portion where I pretend to choose the game is completely unnecessary and I am now questioning my entire existence… … … Alright, now I’m back to a sane state of mind let’s take a brief look at Eggomania by U.S. Games.

    This game is charming but also extremely weird, I really like the visuals but what’s on display confuses me greatly. You are a giant blue frog, which is actually supposed to be a bear, with a large dish on its head catching large blue eggs dropping from a gigantic bird waltzing around at the top of the screen. When you catch all of the bird’s eggs you then proceed to shoot them back up at the bird and if you hit it just right all of its feathers drop off and it flies away in its red polka dot boxer shorts to the sound of a wolf whistle. If you miss an egg all of the eggs currently on-screen will proceed to hit the ground gradually increasing the yolk level, the game is over when the bowl is submerged in yolk, that’s just gross. The bird sprite is fantastic; it’s large, colorful, and oozing with character, when you drop an egg it will actually dance along to the music as you drown, if you didn’t want to throw its unborn children at it before, know you will. The frog-bear does not look like a bear it looks like a frog, it has zero frames of animation and constantly looks like it stepped on a particularly sharp Lego, pained and anguished. Since this is a Paddle game the controls are suitably fluid, even when you’re moving through tons of fluid. Eggomania is also a very musically inclined game and thank goodness it does it very well. The music is harmonized quite well and the tunes are catchy to boot which is a rarity on the 2600. I don’t really need to describe the gameplay to you since you’ve already played Kaboom! it’s basically just a carbon copy of that with the graphics switched out but with a bit of added difficulty, since you have only the one dish if you miss it then that’s it, with Kaboom! you had the three buckets, in Eggomania it’s like you just have the one top bucket and that’s it. Personally I think Eggomania is more difficult than Kaboom! but it brings enough to the table that I think it stands out from its competition.

    This is a fairly cheap game with loose copies coming in at around 8 dollars, though you can likely find it for much cheaper in the wild. CIB prices are a bit erratic, with come minty looking copies selling for as little as 12.99 while ratty looking ones ell for the same price. The most expensive CIB sale was for 40 dollars which if you ask me is far too much for this particular game, if you see a CIB copy with everything for around 12-15 bucks then I’d say it was worth it. No Collector’s Zone today, Eggomania is spared.

  2. DoctorSpuds
    Well isn’t this a little awkward, today’s subject for review, my recently acquired Datasoft Le Stick, has just stopped working. I have popped open the bottom to get at the wires to see what was going on and my worst suspicions were confirmed. Due to how you use the Le Stick, violently jerking it from side to side, it really does a number on the internal wiring where they all coalesce into the controller cord which leads to wires being severed. Datasoft tried to mitigate this by placing the wires into a plastic cradle and filling the whole thing with glue, clearly they didn’t think the people would be using these things 35 years later since the glue is dry and so are wires. Two wires have been completely severed, and several more have the copper wire exposed, which those severed ends are now fraternizing with leading to the thing to simply stop working.I was going to do a whole bit about which games you should play on the thing and weighing whether or not you should buy one, but with what I know now I think you should never buy one of these since the simple act of using it will lead to it destroy itself. In the brief time it was working though I did find three games that work really well with it, they are: Bump ‘n’ Jump, Nexar, and Enduro. I was going to see if I could add more to that very short list but as I was testing more games the aforementioned wire issues happened. Oh well, at least I didn’t pay the ridiculous Ebay prices. And no there is no way I can repair it, there simply isn't enough wire and there isn't enough space to even patch it up without making things even worse, now I have one more useless thing to put on the shelf.

  3. DoctorSpuds
    I am well and truly lacking inspiration for a game review today, nothing is jumping out at me in any meaningful way. So instead of doing a review that I don’t really want to I’ll do something else that I keep putting on the backburner, and don’t worry it’s not a new thing for Mondays, it’s just the thing I’m currently doing for Mondays. I’m just going to take a look at some more boxes, there’s always something to talk about with those, and I honestly have fun doing it, I’ve kept them relegated to Mondays but depending on how I feel about it that might change. The only thing I have to do now is choose a publisher, well actually I chose one before I even started writing this so I won’t bore you with trying to fool you into thinking this was a spur of the moment decision, I’m going to look at my small Taiwan Cooper box collection. Nobody knows who actually manufactured these things, all we do know is that they’re here, and holy cow they’re weird.
     
    Every box follows the same formula, a color picture on the front, the title above the picture, and ‘NEW’ in an explosion graphic to the left of the title. The backs are similarly cookie cutter there is a small to mid-length blurb in poorly translated English with an artist rendition or screenshot of the game at the bottom of the box next to a small graphic of a hand improperly holding an Atari Painline joystick controller, indicating that these things were manufactured around the time of the 7800 and the 2600 jr. consoles, which would explain the variety of games concealed within these pieces of shit. The only box I have that doesn’t conform to this design is my copy of ‘Squirrel’ that has a completely blank back with the exception of the hand/controller graphic. Despite the overall design being fairly boring the boxes come in eye catching colors that vary from lime green to neon red to brown. There is no text on the sides of the boxes so you’ll have to pull them out individually, unless you have them memorized by color, but that won’t help since some of them share the same colors. The artwork on these things is absolutely notorious for being strange and usually not pertaining at all to the game it’s meant to represent. With the exception of the space games which all have a generic spaceship/space battle, most of the games have strange, probably stolen, artwork, Open Sesame and Gateway to Apsh in particular are strange enough, but you don’t have to dig deep online to find stranger ones. I would urge you to look at the box arts for the following games: Beany Bopper, Col ‘N’, Fire Burg, and Glutton just to name a few. Most of the artwork is half decent but a few stand out as being of awful quality mainly Karate which has obviously been drawn with permanent marker and colored pencils. The overall box durability is fair, which is odd since these things were likely made from the cheapest materials possible, most will have edge wear or small dings on the corners, but very few have creased sides or any major cosmetic flaws.
     
    These things very rarely shipped with manuals letting the player figure things out on their own with only the poorly translated blurbs to guide them. I have only three games that have manuals, Squirrel, Karate, and UFO, though I would honestly classify them more as instruction slips. The Karate and Squirrel manuals are printed on thin semi glossy paper, each are about the same size as half a sheet of standard size paper, they are printed in color, and in the case of Karate simply regurgitate what was on the back of the box with added scoring info, and in the case of Squirrel it simply says what should have been on the back of the box in the first place with added scoring info. I honestly don’t know why they didn’t print the basic info on the back of the Squirrel box since they had already done it, they had a version of the box with a blurb on the back, removing it and adding an instruction slip seems to be a less efficient and more costly alternative. The UFO manual is a folded sheet of standard size paper which contains the blurb from the back, and B&W screenshot, hookup information, controller usage info, scoring info, and game types. All in all, the UFO manual is the most complete but it’s also printed on standard printer paper using what appears to be a fairly crappy printer, and of all the games to have a manual it’s the one that needs it the least, we all know how to play Condor Attack, and frankly I’m amazed that manual has survived with what little damage it has.
     
    I don’t even need to describe the cartridges, they’re legendary, but with the ones I have I noticed a few differences among them. You have the standard S.S. carts that seem to be the most common, then you have the S.S. Shorts which are the same design but shortened by a centimeter of so and saying ‘Made in Taiwan’ on the back instead of S.S. There are the super shorts that come with a wraparound label, and the strange 1234 design that I’ve only seen with my copy of Squirrel, it is a fairly satbdard cartridge shell with some small side ridges with 1234 on the back, it seems the version with the blurb has a S.S. Short cartridge and the one without the blurb has this strange 1234 cartridge, either way it’s weird. These things are also extremely fragile; with my copy of Open Sesame the corner broke off when I tried to fit it into the console for the first time. Due to the cheapness of the plastic it would not surprise me if the cart shells have warped over time, leading them to not fit properly into the consoles.
     
    If you were to look at them objectively these Taiwan Cooper boxes are just plain garbage, the cartridges are fragile and prone to breaking on contact with a console and the English in the blurb and manuals can be so nonsensical to the point of utter confusion, and honestly I wouldn’t have it any other way. These things are the remnant of a bygone era in gaming, when any shady company could steal a game and sell themselves, but I’m honestly thankful for that. In some cases these are the only way to get your hands on elusive or downright rare games for an affordable price, games like Spacemaster X-7, Condor Attack, Dishaster, and Jawbreaker were all stolen by these guys. In some cases Taiwan Cooper carts are the only way to play some games, mainly the Bit Corporation games which were PAL only until these guys got their mitts on them, games like Mr. Postman, Snail Vs. Squirrel, and Bobby is Going Home were all ported, actually the only two that weren’t are Cosmic Corridor and Sea Monster, which were released in NTSC by Puzzy but that’s a different, more expensive, story. If you don’t already have a copy or twelve you should pick one up, they’re cheap they’re weird, and they’re awesome. They even released a few for the Colecovision, that’s amazing!
     
  4. DoctorSpuds

    Stargunner (Telesys)

    By DoctorSpuds,

    Telesys was an earnest company with humble beginnings; they just wanted to make good, fun games. Unfortunately Telesys also died a very humble death as they did not find their desired success in the games market. Telesys arrived on the scene in 1982; they released six games and were gone by the end of 1983. Sometimes I’m glad when I learn of the unfortunate demise of a game company, Mythicon and Mystique immediately come to mind, and I’m still waiting for EA to just go away already, but with Telesys I actually wish that they stuck around. None of Telesys’ games were downright awful, they were all creative and even if they weren’t they still put a spin on a tried and true formula, they actually had plans of becoming a full-on real deal software company in 1983, expanding the company in other lucrative directions. Alas it was not meant to be, as Telesys was among the first to fold, alongside Apollo and Imagic. Due to its rather rapid decline Telesys likely wasn’t able to produce their final three games in large quantities or distribute them very well, meaning their final three have become quite uncommon. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on two of their final three, Ram It, and Stargunner, out of the two I feel that Stargunner will make for a more interesting review so I’ll review it first, but I’ll still get around to Ram It. But for the meantime let’s strap into our futuristic fighter craft, gun the engines and blast right into Stargunner by Telesys.
     
    Stargunner isn’t a very complicated looking game; there isn’t really all too much going on here. The background is black which, as you long-time readers will know, is a bit of a sticking point for me, I just feel like the 2600 just doesn’t have enough star-fields. The rolling hills at the bottom of the screen are quite nice; it’s always good to see the 2600 made to go sideways, even if it hates the very idea of it. Enemy designs are extremely simplistic, you have a rotary egg, a bunch of squares, and an alien head, while at the top of the screen there is a road sign having a fit of some sort and dropping logs on your head. The game does have flicker but it is tolerable, at least when there are three enemies on screen, the manual and promo material both show eight enemies which would be a different story entirely. The game does have a very nifty graphical effect that also has gameplay impacts, when you shoot an enemy it will break apart into four pieces, they fly apart very smoothly and remind me of arcade titles like Defender. When an enemy respawns four pieces will converge creating a new enemy, while reducing the risk of you running into a recently rematerialized enemy. So overall the game looks simple but is technically impressive in a few ways and apart from a glaringly absent star-field I have nothing to complain about, let’s move on to the sounds.
     
    I like this game’s soundtrack. When you aren’t firing the game will play a hodgepodge of beeps and tones, though unlike what the description would have you think it isn’t annoying at all and rather fits in with the rest of the game. The explosion noise I feel could have been improved upon, it’s just not quite chunky enough for my liking, but you know what is? The firing sound… It is fantastically chunky, and makes the whole experience feel that much more rewarding, it almost sounds exactly like the shooting noise from defender except with a hint more grit to it. Well so far we have unimpressive graphics, and feel-good sounds, unless the gameplay can knock us outta the park we’re just going to have another run of the mill generic space shooter.
     
    It looks like we have another run of the mill generic space shooter on our hands, though it does do a few things differently. You will be assailed by waves of enemies, the first wave consists of 10 enemies coming at you one at a time, two has 20 coming in twos, and three has 30 attacking in triplets. If you destroy one enemy another will almost immediately take its place keeping the maximum number of enemies on the screen at once. The enemies are stupid, their AI is rather nonexistent, some will just move left, other will move diagonally, most will just go down the screen and rest at the bottom waiting for you to pick them off, others will just sit still and wait patiently for a laser bolt through the brain. Only once did I encounter an enemy that had some semblance of intelligence but he died very quickly since he just followed me. The only thing keeping things from getting boring is Bobo (yes that is its actual name) dropping bombs from the top of the screen, you can’t kill Bobo but Bobo can kill you. He will loosely follow your movements not allowing you to get too comfortable waiting for your enemies to converge at the bottom. I assume the enemies get smarter or faster as the game progresses but I’ve lost all of my lives before that happens. It seems in the higher difficulty game variations the enemies behave more intelligently but I’m not sure since I can’t outrun them and die in seconds, I also noticed that there is a kid’s mode where everything moves slower, awww.
     
    All in all Stargunner is a decent shooter that doesn’t do a whole lot to shake up the formula, by no means is it a bad game it just comes off as rather generic. Unfortunately this is not an inexpensive game, thankfully there has been an influx of cheaper listings but the cheapest you’re gonna get for Stargunner is 25 dollars, though some enterprising individual has decided to price theirs at 140 dollars and still charge you for shipping. Because it’s a rare game I’d say about 20 dollars is a fair price for a worn copy, maybe 25 for one with a good label, but as it is I’d say Stargunner goes to the Collector’s Zone. See ya!
     
  5. DoctorSpuds
    The 2600 has several single screen platformers in its library. Some are excellent like Donkey Kong, others are decent but with flaws like Infiltrate or Tron, and others just suck like Miner 2049’er. There is one platformer that I feel doesn’t get enough attention though, and that is 20th Century Fox’s Fast Eddie. If I were to equate the gameplay other games in the library I would have to say it’s a decent mix of Tron and Infiltrate. Graphically the game is nothing special and sound-wise the game is adequate, but it’s in the gameplay where Fast Eddie truly shines. The layout of the screen is a simple five floors with two ladders connecting each to the level above, there are several placements for the ladders so simply press reset until you find one you like (at least for screen one). There is an enemy on each level, they look like the assassins from Infiltrate or the enemies from M2049R, but are suitably goofy. On the first screen some enemies will remain still while others, mainly on the floor you start on, begin moving after several seconds, in subsequent screens all of the enemies will be moving side to side, with the aforementioned delay on the starting floor. Your goal is to collect items floating above the enemies to collect points and move on to the next screens. The Items are a fairly random selection, starting with a love heart to a fish to a tank that looks straight outta Turmoil, but all still look good for Atari. All you have to do is jump and collect these floating items whilst avoiding the enemies, when you have collected enough items the super tall enemy on the top floor will shrink allowing you to jump up and collect the key floating above its head. Fast Eddie is indeed a fast game, from screen two onwards you are allowed no moments of respite from avoiding enemies, and thankfully the programmers thought to give you invincibility while climbing on the ladders allowing for some extremely close shaves. I would classify this as a pick-up-and-put-down game, it is incredibly enjoyable for 10-20 minutes but you will quickly find something else to play. As this is a Red Sirius style Fox release the prices are a little hectic, with loose carts and even the instruction manuals being listed on Ebay for 9-20 dollars and for boxed BIN listings the prices, at least for Red Sirius titles, are usually in the 140-400 dollar range, though for Fast Eddie it seems that it has sold at auction for much less. If you can find it for the right price I’d say to go get a copy, I would just advise caution if you’re going after a boxed copy and simply wait until a more sensibly priced listing shows up.
     
  6. DoctorSpuds
    Uh… What!?! They made a Chuck Norris game? Wait… Xonox made a Chuck Norris game!?! Well I just gotta play it now… …
    … I vastly regret… everything.
    So, this game exists. This game was released in 1983, right around the time that ol’ Chuck was gaining mainstream popularity, but he was doing Westerns not Kung Fu flicks (yet), which is what Superkicks would wind up being if it were a film. It’s just a classic case of “we’ve got a license for a celebrity, or other IP let’s just plaster their face or name on a game we already have in development.” The only things about Chuck Norris Superkicks that have Chuck Norris on are is his face horribly plastered onto the box cover, and his name unceremoniously inserted into the title; you can actually see green outlines around his hair that’s how high quality the cut and paste job was. This game was later sold under the name Kung Fu Superkicks by Telegames after the license expired and Xonox went belly-up and would you believe it, on the box they still use Chuck Norris’ face, they didn’t bother to change it, could Chuck Norris have sued them for using his likeness? I don’t think there’d be much of a case since that thing on the box in no way looks like Chunk Norris.
     
    Despite all the moaning I’ll be doing in the future the game actually does look okay, the game has seven screens; the main map where you’ll be spending the least amount of your time is quite interesting. It consists of multiple branching pathways for you to walk along, and since the 2600 hates going sideways you’ll be making the trek going up the screen and here’s the kicker, it scrolls along with you, if I were to hazard a guess it’s about ten screens tall, and is dotted with various bits of scenery. The fight screens are fairly boring, they consist of a large brown rectangle, which is supposed to be the path, it suddenly grew enormous, and a bit of scenery at the top of the screen denoting which scene you’re fighting in. Yes, according to the manual each of these fight screens have names and are built up like scenes in a movie, I won’t bother writing them down since that’s just a waste of time, but let’s just say that the scenery in these screens is fairly boring with one exception the monastary. The monastery is the overarching goal of the game and by the time you get there you’ll be tired of looking at the green and brown this game is slathered in, the monastery goes for the daring color palette of grey on grey, with a hint of purple in the wall sconces which is actually a welcome change. I remember saying a while ago that I thought Sir Lancelot was the most simplistic of the Xonox titles, but I think Superkicks has taken its place if only because Sir Lancelot had more to it than green and brown.
     
    Sounds are minimal; most of what you’ll be hearing is the ‘CHK-CHK’ of you walking on the map screen, and a strange rustling noise as you’re beset upon by enemies. The fighting screens are mostly silent apart from when you beat an enemy which is a strange bouncy sound, the sound of an enemy throwing a projectile at you, which is a loud scream, and the sound of you getting hit by said projectile which is a mocking ‘Nya-Nya’ jingle like the kids do. If you successfully beat a fight screen you’ll be gifted with seven notes from ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’ and when you make it to the next fork in the path you’ll be given several more. That’s about all there is, I’ve probably missed a sound or two but that just means they weren’t worth talking about in the first place.
     
    The gameplay is the definition of mundane and frustrating as this is a fighting game with hit detection that is highly biased against the player. I would almost classify the game as a puzzle game with how it approaches fighting enemies; since you have to hit the enemies with a specific attack to incapacitate them otherwise they’ll knock you flat on your ass, literally. Some enemies need to be hit by an upward punch or a downward kick, and later on you can use the super somersault kick to get rid of any enemy, but at the expense of you being able to block projectiles. It is very difficult to actually tell how an enemy needs to be taken down, the manual says that you can tell by the enemy’s arm movements but as far as I can see the sprites look exactly the same so it’s just a guessing game. Now this is where my biggest problem with the game comes into effect, we’ve all played Karate at one point or another, and we all know how awful it is to use the joystick to both move and attack, now take all the gameplay from Karate and shrink it down and put it into Superkicks and you’ve got how it feels to fight. The game plays like Karate, and while in Karate I can get past this flaw because your opponent moves just as slowly and as crippled as you are, in Superkicks the enemies seem to be playing a whole other game. Enemies only have to make contact with you to knock you down while you have to execute a complicated series of controller movements just to miss your hit because the game feels the need to play an animation of you punching or kicking, freezing you in place as the enemy walks into you for the eighth time, and don’t even get me started on the throwing knives! Occasionally an enemy will throw a projectile at you, usually their aim is way off but they have a habit of throwing one at you as you are walking directly towards them or are a few pixels away setting up for your punch, or have just been knocked down again, and in the later screens where there are three enemies at once you can guarantee that your blood will be boiling. The final thing that irks me immensely is the time limit that completely ruins the game for me, you start with six minutes and the time is slightly replenished after you make it to another fork in the path, if you stray off the path or even put a foot in the grass you’ll lose a bunch of time as it suddenly drains faster than a wallet at a casino. Being knocked down in the fight screens wastes time as you spend your sweet time getting back up again and getting hit by a projectile will jettison you from the fight screen and take 20 seconds off for good measure. Once you get to the monastery you get to spend the rest of your time fighting the enemies there until the time runs out and then the game is over, there is no looping around and starting again like in Robin Hood or Sir Lancelot, it just ends unceremoniously and that’s it, it couldn’t even go the Ghost Manor route of playing a cutscene and some music, it just ends, you vanish off the screen and have to turn the console off and on again to try again.
     
    This game annoys me because I can see what they were going at, I can see the game this was meant to be but they fells so short that the game winds up being an unpleasant mess that makes me slightly absolutely livid. I would recommend against actually buying this game, but unfortunately Xonox has a workaround to that. Since it is most commonly found on Double Enders that means Superkicks is surgically attached to another (probably better) game. It was released as a standalone cartridge (which is the one I have); it was also bundled with Spike’s Peak (That makes me shudder), Ghost Manor, and Artillery Duel. The Superkicks/Artillery Duel Double Ender is the most common of the bunch with prices as low as 15 bucks for a loose cart, and I haven’t found pricing info for the Ghost Manor or Spike’s Peak carts which are a bit rarer. I got my Single Ender for about 20 dollars, which seems to be a good deal since somebody paid over $75 bucks for one back in December. No matter which cartridge form it takes, I condemn Chuck Norris Superkicks to the depths of the Collector’s Zone for being Karate, but worse.
     
  7. DoctorSpuds
    Hooo boy! How did they get such a good game THIS stupendously wrong? The Miner 2049'er that was released on the Colecovision was fantastic whereas the version we got on the 2600 is rather legendary for it's inferiority for it's home computer and Colecovision counterparts. I saw this game cheap on Ebay and thought to myself 'why not?" and bought it... I put it in my 2600 and was immediately disappointing, this was nothing like what I was expecting, I'd played the Colecovision version and was expecting something different, and while I'm not opposed to differences between console releases I at least expect them to have a baseline of quality. Now this game was ported over to just about every major computer back in the day, I don't have any of these versions, but after looking through screenshots of most of then I have noticed that almost all of them, with the exception of the VIC-20, have one major difference to the 2600 version... they all look better.
     
    While I know that the graphics are not end all be all to a game, especially when it comes to the 2600. This game just looks sad, Bounty Bob is a blue rectangle with a goofy little head and goofy little feet, and is that grey line on his head supposed to be his helmet? And the enemies... are those the spies from Apollo's Infiltrate, or the Sneakers from TCF's Fast Eddie? I suppose that this criticism could be applied to the other versions of the game but it's just so glaring here. The Iconic first level is gone, instead it has been replaced with the iconic second level, which due to something, which I shall address in the gameplay section, is nearly impossible to complete. The background is black... I which it wasn't but there is nothing I can do about that since all the versions had black backgrounds. Otherwise the platforms which you walk on are at least comparable to the other versions, but then again none of the other versions were overly complicated. My real sticking point is the collectibles, they look extremely basic, I can barely figure out what they're supposed to represent... What is that a candy bar? A briefcase? A clothes iron? Some are obvious but others... you got me.
     
    Sounds are fairly basic, there is a decent tune that plays at the beginning of the game, the walking sound is crunchy and satisfying. There is one sound that gets on my nerves though... and that's the jumping noise, it's high pitched and unpleasant to listen to. But here's the thing... you may end up hearing the jumping sound more often than the walking sound for one game breaking reason...
     
    You move so slow, you move ridiculously slow, in the Colecovision version you're given thirty seconds to complete the first level, in the Atari version you get over six minutes. Here's the kicker... the only way to move faster is to jump everywhere, which means you're listening to that awful jumping noise. The main goal of this game is to walk over every inch of the stage, changing the girders to solid colors, you will have to also work your way around the little ghost dudes, who will take a life and reset the whole stage if you touch them, if you collect an item you will gain brief invincibility where you can destroy the ghost dudes and get on with the stage. If you moved faster I would have no qualms with any of this, I love the Colecovision version, it's one of my favorite games for the system. But this... here on the 2600 is just plain awful, if you make a single mistake then the entire stage is reset... all your progress is gone... if you accidentally slide down one of the many slides, it's over a minute to get back up to the top. This is a game for turtles, and I never want to play it again...
     
    This game is awful... but the crazy thing is... this game got a sequel! And it fixed nothing, it's just as slow and here's the real kicker, it's over seventy bucks for a loose cartridge. This game sucks and deserves to banished to the Collector's Zone, I can think of no other place to throw it.
  8. DoctorSpuds
    I like me some Seaquest, it’s just one of those games that is so simple in premise but absolutely masterful in its execution. The premise is simple, collect stranded treasure seeking divers while blasting away sharks and enemy subs who are pursuing them. As the game progresses the enemies come in larger numbers and are more aggressive while divers are fewer and farther between. You also have an oxygen meter that will deplete far too quickly for your liking, you can resurface to fill your meter but as a trade-off you will lose one diver in your possession. Watch out! When you’re surfaced you momentarily lose control allowing for enemy patrol subs to dart from the right of the screen and take one of your precious lives so it is recommended you resurface right as they go past. In my opinion at least, Seaquest may just be Activision’s best title for the 2600, or at the very least in the top five, the amount of polish and replayability on display is incredible, it just nails that one more time mentality. The game doesn’t have any variations apart from a turn-based two player mode, and rapid fire by fiddling with the difficulty switches, and honestly I don’t think it needed any since the game will present a challenge to players of any skill level. Even if the game is too easy for your liking it is still entertaining until the challenge finally ramps up. Seaquest is also the first Activision game where I’m eligible for a patch with a hard won high score of 104290; unfortunately they haven’t done that for 30 years but it still feels good knowing that I could’ve gotten one. If my singing its praise isn’t obvious enough Seaquest is spared the Collector’s Zone, the game is fairly cheap ranging from 6-16 dollars on Ebay and with boxed copies going from 35-62 dollars (ouch). Due to its commonality though, you’re pretty likely to already own a copy or be able to find one in the wild.
     
  9. DoctorSpuds
    I’ve been thinking back to my Spacechase review that I posted all the way back in June, it was my second review and I feel it is one of my worst. There is almost no talking about the game itself just me bashing it for being a bad game, and holy crap the second and fourth paragraphs are just one sentence each! That’s terrible! So I think it’s about time to go back and give this review a facelift.
     
    Spacechase by Apollo is an unabashed and shameless copycat of Demon Attack that totall- Wait what? Spacechase came out before Demon Attack? Well then that changes things somewhat. Spacechase is Apollo’s bestselling game and for a fairly predictable reason, vertical space shooters were in. Space Invaders had released on the 2600 the previous year, 1980, and became the new ‘Killer App’, and Apollo knowing that this was the new hotness decided to jump on the bandwagon and holy crap they picked the perfect year for it. For 3rd party releases Spacechase was the first vertical space shooter on the market, beating similar games like Demon Attack, Astroblast, and GORF by a year and even beat Atari’s Phoenix and Space Invaders’ sequel Galaxian. Spacechase filled a small void in this particular genre of games and since this was indeed the IN game of the time I can understand why it sold like hotcakes. Unfortunately this still doesn’t make Spacechase a very fun game, and now it’s time to really delve deep into it, let’s start with the graphics (like we usually do).
     
    That background must have blown people away in 1981, heck it’s still pretty impressive even now, but that’s where the creativity ends unfortunately. Ship designs are basic, really basic; enemy ships are large chunky shapes that vaguely resemble a spaceship, or in later difficulties they are also green faces or even the face design of a Creeper from Minecraft (not exactly but still remarkably similar). The friendly ship, you, looks like a blue Christmas tree, I can’t imagine it as anything else, you’re a big blue Christmas tree shooting green faces and Creepers in space. Credit where it’s due, I do like the amount of movement they managed to get on screen, games like Demon Attack and GORF have a tendency to make me a bit sleepy since it’s only the enemies doing the moving against a black background and nothing else, but now that there’s a moving background I have something else to direct my gaze towards which is highly appreciated.
     
    This game has the bare minimum for sounds; you have your basic shooting sounds that are different for both the enemies and yourself, and an explosion, that’s pretty much it. I do have to remark on the rather odd explosion noise though; it’s different from your standard crunchy explosion sound, instead of a chunky kaboom you get a hissing trilling explosion that is minimal on the necessary amount of crunch needed for a proper explosion sound effect.
     
    Gameplay is as basic as can be, you shoot the enemies as they move side to side above you and occasionally they fire back. The enemy movement speed and firing rate changes as you get more and more points though I’ve never found a difficulty threshold that makes the game impossible. Strategy is minimal usually you can get by pretty well by holding the fire button and waiting for an enemy to intersect with one of your shots. Something I brought up before was the choppy enemy movement and even though it doesn’t harm the game’s playability it really just makes the game feel like it’s running slowly or at half speed. As noted earlier there are three different enemy types the basic purple ship thing that appears in groups of four, the green faces that appear in groups of five, and the black bug-like things appear in groups of six. The different variations do little to spice up the bland gameplay, you can chose between getting more points per enemy or less points per enemy, starting on any of the three enemy types, or having a daytime or nighttime battle where the background turns blue, as well as turn based multiplayer. You can also change your shot speed with the difficulty switches but as far as enemy behavior or other difficulty settings you’re out of luck.
     
    Apart from the cool background Spacechase is a big ‘ol nothingburger of a game, it brings nothing new to the table, it doesn’t shake up the formula in any particularly unique way and even though it was second out of the gate it’s still last overall. There are plenty of these on Ebay if you don’t already have a copy, they’re absolutely everywhere, loose copies range from $7-$20 and boxed copies are usually around 25 dollars in varying states of destruction. There is only one reason why I won’t send Spacechase to the Collector’s Zone and that’s due to its commonness, chances are you already have a copy laying around, it’s just one of those universal games that manages to wriggle its way into everybody’s collections.
     
  10. DoctorSpuds

    Battlezone (Atari)

    By DoctorSpuds,

    Battlezone is one of my absolute favorite arcade games, and as we all know when it comes to the 2600 arcade conversions can be rather hit or miss. Battlezone 2600, fortunately, hits it outta the park, it is seriously an amazing conversion. The graphics on display are, at least in my opinion, better than the arcade’s sparse vector lines, it just so full of color and detail that it’s a treat to the eyes. I think Atari borrowed from Activision a bit though since that sunset seems a little bit familiar. Everything from the tanks to the landscape, and even the sprite scaling are done superbly. The game is so complex that it will even shows enemy shots whizzing past you in a convincing display of 3D. The movement has been altered from the arcade, which had the twin sticks that independently controlled either tread, to both treads being controlled by a single stick, it works fine but it lacks that fluid sense of control from the arcade. The sounds are rather sparse with only the sounds of your engine and gun accompanying you for most of the game. When you start you’ll hear a very brief excerpt from the 1812 Overture and when you get hit the screen will scramble and fill with the sound of static, which is also an amazing graphical effect. The difficulty scales pretty well though I feel around the 30,000 mark the enemies are a bit too quick on the draw while you cannot move fast enough to avoid their shots effectively. This is a very common cartridge thankfully so loose copies will only cost you about $10 while boxed copies are currently being sold for 10-20 dollars which if you ask me is pretty cheap. This is one of the few games that I would tell you to go get CIB it is most definitely worth it.
     
  11. DoctorSpuds

    Spike's Peak (Xonox)

    By DoctorSpuds,

    Alright… So I promised that I would never review this game a long time ago in my Ghost Manor review but I feel that I now know enough about the game to give it a proper review. Spike’s Peak makes me cringe; I can find zero enjoyment from this game no matter how much I play it. Right now Spike’s Peak is the only Xonox game I have that I’ve yet to review and there is a very good reason for that, because playing this game puts me in a bad mood, so I must approach this game while already in a bad mood to actually find any drive to play it. I must warn you… This review is going to be remarkably negative and biased towards my raging dislike for this game so if you’re looking for a fair and impartial review then run away.
     
    Spike’s Peak is graphically impressive in places and downright awful in others. Take the opening screen as an example, Spike himself is large and made up of over ten different colors, the mountain in the background shows different terrain as it gets higher and higher, starting green and grassy transitioning into grey and rocky finally turning white with snow, that’s all pretty impressive. Screen two has some impressive elements but starts to show a bit of crap, like the bears which are white like polar bears and also lack a midsection so they are hilariously stumpy. The eagles on screen two are pretty awesome looking and so is the overall layout of the screen with zig-zagging pathways traveling up the mountain. Apart from the strange bears you also have strange lump no.1 and strange lump no.2 these, according to the manual, are caves and canyons but actually look more like tree stumps and boulders, actually one looks like a cigarette butt but we’re trying to be realistic here. Screen three is rather nonsensical, the background is transitioning through colors while a bunch of pixels fall on your head and a (I assume) boulder bounces down a bunch of ledges, there are also several strange spiky green balls which I learned are cactuses. Screen four I feel is the worst looking screen in the game, the pathway is only a line a single pixel in width that also feels the need to be flashing different colors, the abominable snowman looks like an angry panda bear and large white blankets are falling on your head, the screen is just so sparsely populated that is almost looks nonsensical just like screen three. Screen five is the top of the mountain, there isn’t really any way they could mess up a mountaintop so it looks fine, Spike is there looking normal, and one tough that I really do rather like is how the sky transitions from being lighter at the bottom of the screen to being darker at the top indicating extreme altitude.
     
    The sounds in Spike’s Peak are incredibly obnoxious consisting mainly of farts and screams. The little jolly tune at the start raises your hopes somewhat only to have them beat down by screen two; the walking sound is just a constant farting noise reminiscent of Combat while the bears make a noise akin to the sounds of crushing eggs in Alien whenever they’re moving. The eagles in screen two may have the most annoying sound though, just a bunch of screeches that might be somewhat accurate to what an eagle would sound like but it’s so squeaky that it becomes an ear sore. Screen three is just filled with weird noises, first it starts with a sound akin to a rocket engine only to be replaced with several melodical tones whenever the boulder bounces followed by some chirping noises only to be replaced with a constant shrieking noise, I actually became worried that my Atari had stopped working until I played it in the Jr. and the same sounds played. Screen four is just more egg crushing sound effects with a few squawking farts thrown in for good measure. Screen five has what I think is the best sound effect even though it sounds extremely out of place since it is a large segmented explosion noise that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Star Wars game. Overall the sounds are just a bunch of unusual and oftentimes unrelated squeals and screeches that seem to play unbidden and for no real reason, especially in screen three, but what about the gameplay?
     
    This game is unrelentingly hard and difficult to figure out sometimes bordering on cryptic. Screen one has almost no interaction; you simply walk right and are immediately thrust into the pits of hell. In screen two you must avoid polar bears and giant eagles to get to the top of the screen, you can hide in canyons (the brown lumps) by holding down on the joystick while standing in front of them, you’ll most likely walk right past them and get killed though, or you can hide in the caves (the grey lumps) by holding up on the joystick while standing in front of them. Be wary of the bears though, they like to hide in the caves, you’ll be able to see their eyes peeking out from inside. When the eagle is about to appear you’ll hear the squawking noise which tells you to find cover quick, the bears also hide when an eagle is about to arrive, be careful there may be two or even three in a row and if you’re really unlucky you’ll be confronted by one as soon as you enter the screen costing you a life if you’re not fast enough. With a bit of practice you’ll be able to get to screen three every one out of three attempts where you’ll immediately get confused and crushed by a rockslide or thrown off the ledge by the boulder. I don’t know what to do in screen three and always end up losing all of my lives on it no matter what I do, I’ll just try to make a beeline for the top by climbing and I’ll be tossed around by the rockslide and then thrown off by the boulder or I’ll try to jump across the ledges and get stuck on the cacti then thrown off by the boulder. I’ve never gotten to screens four or five so I can’t comment on them but it sounds like screen four is just as difficult as screens two and three combined, and despite it being the final screen you can still die on screen five despite there being no enemies there. The second reason I greatly dislike this game is because of the cold-o-meter, it’s that thing beneath the score, if you stand still for too long or stay hidden for too long it will deplete and you will lose a life and in the case of screen five it will deplete automatically so you better shift your ass over there and plant that flag before you die on the reward screen.
     
    Even on the easiest mode Spike’s Peak is too cryptic and too hard for me to find any enjoyment from it, it also takes too long to reach the difficult bits meaning you’ve wasted a bunch of time getting there only to be beaten back to the beginning of the game due to you losing all of your lives. This game is filled to the brim with bullshit and frankly I hate it. Spike’s Peak is one of Xonox’ most common Double Enders being bundled with Ghost Manor while also being their rarest Single Ender game, you can find Ghost Manor/Spike’s Peak carts on Ebay for $15-20 while the only Single Ender that sold recently went for an eye watering $250 dollars with the manual. So… I would normally condemn a game like this to the Collector’s Zone and for the Single Ender I will indeed do just that, it’s a crappy game that’s all too expensive, but for the Double Ender I can’t do that since it’s surgically attached to one of my favorite games, damn you Xonox!
     
  12. DoctorSpuds
    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…
     
  13. DoctorSpuds

    Combat (Atari)

    By DoctorSpuds,

    What the hell… Let’s review Combat… This review is neither overdue nor actually expected I was just looking at my game shelf and thought the first six words of this review. Combat is iconic; people who’ve never even held a game controller know about Combat, it is for many people the epitome of the word videogame. Combat was the pack-in game for almost every single Atari VCS up until 1982, with the main exception being the Sears brand consoles that had Target-Fun (Air Sea Battle) as the pack-in title. This is quite literally the most common game for the 2600; every game store that sells Atari has a small stack of them sitting on the shelf, once I went to my local Pre-Played and counted how many copies they had, the total was 47 Combat carts. If you buy game lots you’ll have Combats up to your knees, just bins of them, but the real question is… Does Combat actually hold up? The game is turning 42 this year (2019), that’s older than some of the folks who frequent this forum, and is even older than myself (I jumped on the Atari train very late), but does it show it’s age? Or is it truly timeless? Let’s find out…
     
     
    Despite being an overall simple looking game Combat manages to pack quite a bit into such a small amount of data. I will admit that this game is extremely simplistic, but the amount it manages to do is rather amazing. We’ll start with the first game mode, and the one everybody knows, Tank, the standard playfield is empty with no obstacles, just a red tank and a blue tank, as you move through the variations obstacles will be added to liven things up, sure the obstacles are just tan blocks but they do the job and they do it well. The plane modes Biplane, and Jet Fighter are largely the same except for the plane sprites being different, you can chose between and open playfield or one that has some mild cloud cover to hide your plane it. In different variations you can fly multiple planes at once or in the case of the friend you really don’t like the single giant plane, but I’ll get to that later. All the sprites used in Combat are simple but recognizable, you know that’s a tank, and you know that’s a plane, which is more than can be said for some games. I also have to mention the amazing innovation set forth by Atari, when you’re not playing the game it will automatically shift through a bunch of different colors to prevent screen burn which was and still is something dreaded by CRT owners, that’s some real forward thinking on Atari’s part and I feel we should all thank them for one of the earliest implementations of the screen saver.
     
    Combat has the bare basics of sounds, which is understandable. All three modes have a different sound effect representing their engine type, for Tanks you have a real crunchy sort of grumble, for Biplanes you have a higher pitched noise that sounds like the coasting noise in Enduro, while the Jet sounds are just higher pitched white noise. A nice touch that they added was a change in pitch whenever you’re either moving in the tanks or accelerating in the planes. Another nice tough is how each player’s tank/plane uses one of the 2600’s audio channels, so the engine noises don’t remain a constant while playing. All the game modes share the same shooting and explosion noise, the shooting noise is fine but I feel that the explosion noise could have been a bit chunkier, but that’s just me.
     
    Combat is just bursting with unique game ideas across all 27 of its game variations, though it’s fairly obvious that they spent more time on the tank modes than the plane modes. In tank modes 1,2,4,10, and 11 you have guided missiles that will follow your joystick movements allowing you to maneuver your shot across the screen to hit your opponent, something that many other games used in the future. The ever favorite Tank-Pong, games 6-9 and 12-14, has it where your shot will bounce around the maze, and in the Billiard hit mode you have to bounce your shot at least once to hit your opponent. Invisible Tank and Invisible Tank-Pong are completely self explanatory and encompass games 10-14. Biplane Mode simply has you flying around the screen shooting at your opponent; the main differences are the speed increase, automatic movement allowing for acceleration and deceleration, an open playfield that allows your shots to wrap around the screen, and the ability to hide behind view obscuring clouds. The clouds aren’t really that much to write home about and only offer fleeting cover, especially in the jet variations where your speed is increased even more. The one mode that everybody knows and hates is game 19, 1 vs. 3, where player one has to fly that stupid giant plane around that only fires one shot while player two gets three planes that each fire individually making for a very unbalanced game.
     
    Combat is Combat, it is the eternal classic, this game started the home console market, it was the first game for millions of gamers across the world, and yes I would say that it is indeed timeless… I won’t tell you to go out and buy it because you already have a copy or twelve. Just… play it every once in a while, and try to take yourself back to Christmas 1977, 3D games were beyond mortal comprehension, home computers cost an arm a leg and several thousand dollars, the internet was two decades away, and the best thing in the world was two tanks slowly crawling across the screen.
     
  14. DoctorSpuds
    I feel it’s time to finish this up, the final Data Age game, the only one I have yet to review, Bermuda Triangle. Judging from the model number Bermuda Triangle is the second to last game Data Age produced before going belly up, which is a pity since around this time is when Data Age was beginning to get good. Journey Escape, Bermuda Triangle, and Frankenstein’s Monster are all decent games in most respects, which is quite a shift from previous games like Sssnake and Bugs which are viewed as some of the worst games on the system. Even though this is only wishful thinking it would be nice if Data Age started with these three games, they would have set themselves apart from most other companies for their advanced gameplay and originality. But by the time these games were released larger companies like Activision, Coleco, and Imagic were dominating the industry and poor money management with Advertising Journey: Escape led Data Age to quietly die pre to mid crash leaving only a small catalog of games as their legacy. At least they died with a bang and not with a whimper as their final game Frankenstein’s Monster is seen as one of the best games on the 2600, and even though Bermuda Triangle isn’t quite as good as that it still holds up.
     
    Upon starting the game you’ll see probably the best looking submarine that the 2600 has ever rendered, it’s large, detailed, and multicolored. At the bottom of the screen you’ll see a submerged skyline zooming past at high speed which is somewhat impressive since the 2600 didn’t like going horizontal. The enemies on display are varied and actually somewhat interesting, sure there are the clichés like the giant squid and man-eating shark, but the original enemies are actually rather interesting. You’ll be battling against ancient drones still defending their lost civilization, mines that will explode on impact and ancient bombs that will destroy your sub if you try to pick them up. Amazingly enough, the pictures in the manual look exactly like what they look like in-game, there is no embellishment whatsoever, which is rather unusual for a game of this time period. Overall the game looks great, especially when you consider that it was released in 1982, but since it’s Data Age I’m sure they’ll find a way to screw something up.
     
    This game will hurt your ears, quite badly in fact. Upon turning on the game your ears will be graced with a terrible buzzing noise that never really goes away, you can minimize it by firing constantly but the firing noise is only somewhat more tolerable. There are actually very few sounds to speak of; the only other two that immediately come to mind are the explosion noise, which is oddly violent sounding, and the sound that plays when you have cargo which is also a fairly terrible series of noises. Actually the cargo sound may have been on purpose so you don’t forget that you have something, in fact the sound is so very annoying you’ll be making a beeline for the research ship as fast as you possibly can.
     
    The gameplay is a mix of Seaquest and Defender; you must collect ancient devices from the bottom of the sea and take them to the research vessel on the surface whilst avoiding rabid wildlife and the city’s automated defense system. Bermuda Triangle is unique in that you can play it multiple different ways, you can go on a no shooting run where you simply transport the technology without shooting he enemies, or you can shoot the enemies while ignoring the technology though I find the most fun option to be a mix of the two as it was meant to be played. To collect the ancient unknown technology you must first make your way to the bottom of the screen where you’ll see several objects scrolling by, with the exception of the kelp you can collect them all, but you must be wary if you collect the red Bermudan Bomb your sub will go poof and you’ll lose a life. To collect points for the treasures you collect you must make your way to the top of the screen and make contact with the research ship that’s floating above, if you touch any of the wildlife or the drones you’ll drop the tech and lose 100 points. It’s not all smooth sailing however since an unidentified enemy vessel is prowling the waters above hoping you mistake it for the research vessel, they’ll steal the tech and blow up your sub for good measure. Since gameplay like this can get stale after a while, especially for skilled players, at 10,000 points a laser beam will randomly shoot from at one of the ships every so often vaporizing it, if you are caught in the crossfire you’ll be destroyed as well, also it looks pretty.
     
    All in all Bermuda Triangle is a fairly fun game, I won’t go out of my way to play it but if I’m in the mood and don’t feel like playing Seaquest there’s nothing better. Sure the sounds are annoying but that’s what the mute button is for, and besides you won’t be noticing them once you get into the game. Despite its slight rarity this is not an expensive game, you can get loose copies for $8 or less and boxed copies range from $20 to $40 dollars, though if you’re patient I’m sure you’ll find one for cheaper than that. No Collector’s Zone today, the game is too cheap and too good to get thrown there.
     
  15. DoctorSpuds
    I have created a monster… Perhaps it was the fumes from my previous review but recent circumstances would have led me to this sooner or later. Recently I killed my 2600 as well as one I had gotten that same day at a local game sale, a word for the wise, if you have a 6-switch 2600 DO NOT re-seat the chips it will murder the console. As a test to see if my hypothesis is correct I took a system that was at death’s door, somebody had spilled soda in it and it would only play Congo Bongo and Warplock and nothing else, and when I re-seated the chips it displayed the same garbled mess as the previous two. It was unsalable anyway so it was no great loss, also it got my hands both sticky and stinky, it smelled of sour rot so I don’t think anybody would have wanted it. This all leads me on to the beast I have created, I decided that if I was going to have a 2600 that wasn’t a Jr. it would have to be a four switch due to the simplified design, my local game store has one for sale for 45$ but since I know the owner he let me dig through his basement and take whatever I wanted to build a system with for 5$, and boy was it worth it. After a bit of work I narrowed it down to two boards, one gave off a clean video signal but nothing would play on it, the other gave off an incredibly staticky signal but would play games also it was missing it’s channel switch which in the long run really doesn’t matter. I swapped around the chips until I found the culprit, a shorted TIA chip which is basically responsible for just about everything, which explains the lack of video. There is something deeply wrong with the system though, it will play games, but the graphics are all wrong, you can still make out some of the original sprites but usually they are warped or fractured, the sounds are also a chaotic hodgepodge of squeals and screeches. This is unlikely to be the TIA chip’s fault since I have put over five of them in the machine and the output was the same for almost all of them, with the exception of one that was well and truly dead, I believe this may be due to a bad RIOT chip but I’ve also tested out several of them and still get the same issues. Still though, most games are playable, sure the graphics are screwed up, the sounds are screwed up, some games implode on themselves, and the system really wants everything that was white to be yellow for some reason. Also the channel select switch doesn’t work so it’s permanently set on channel 3 so that’s a drag. Some games are worse than others, some are entirely playable while some others will be glitched to high heaven, or be perfectly playable until you reach a certain point and then simply combust. But… for $5 this thing certainly delivers a weird and fascinating time, I’ve never played so many games in one sitting before just waiting to find the next mother of all glitches. I’ll include a video that was taken on my phones potato camera that shows off the horrendous sounds and screwy visuals. If anybody knows for certain what’s wrong with it please let me know it would be nice to have this fixed. Also for no real reason I have named the console Phillip, I suspect that Phillip doesn't have much more time in this world though...


  16. DoctorSpuds
    After a bit of persistence I finally managed to complete the Data Age collection, that’s right, now I have a copy of every single Data Age Title. This is probably one of the easiest and cheapest publisher collections to finish due to the fairly low number of games released and how common most of them are. The only other publishers I can think of that might be easier to complete are Mythicon, and Vidtec/U.S. Games for the same reasons as Data Age. But… almost every publisher has that one game that for some odd reason is rarer than all the rest, or at least more expensive, and in Data Age’s case that game is without question Frankenstein’s Monster. This is likely their final game, which would account for its overall rarity, but what can’t really be explained is how good it is, especially when compared to Data Age’s previous releases. If you haven’t seen the second catalog released by these guys then you’re missing out, mainly because they were advertising games based on Smokey Bear, Mr. Bill, and Mr. T, man screw Secret Agent I wanna see what these guys could have done with Smokey Bear, no wonder these guys self destructed, just the licensing fees alone for big names like Mr. Bill and Mr. T would be exorbitant, and just look at how these guys handled Journey. In fact, I’m surprised that they didn’t try to license this game with Universal so they could make it a tie-in game for a 50(ish) year old movie. Enough chattering about hypothetical games though, let’s take a look at Frankenstein’s Monster.
     
    This game looks incredible, not only is the screen covered in color, it’s covered in wonderful gradients. I didn’t know the 2600 was capable of displaying this many colors simultaneously, I counted about 28 different colors, that’s just awesome! I don’t really know where to start first, uh… how about the character and enemy sprites. Your little dude is comprised of five colors clearly distinguishing his clothing from his shoes to his hat. The enemies are far more basic in design being monochrome and in the cases of the spiders low-res. The environment is fairly basic in design, there are two tall brown walls flanking the monster, and some nice gradients representing the floors. At the bottom of the screen you’ll see what appears to be a log floating in a pool of water but don’t be deceived it is actually a pool of acid. There are several nice graphical effects when the lighting flares and the top of the screen flashes white, and the monster slowly turns green. This game also has a game over cutscene but I’ll talk about it in the gameplay section. So… this game has the graphics, but does it have the sounds?
     
    This game isn’t sparse on the sound effects, most movements have a designated sound effect from running to jumping to climbing, but the only sound effect really worth mentioning is the thunderclap fallowed by the ominous DUN-DUN. By far though the best sound in the game is what plays in the game over cutscene, the crunchy terror it conveys is truly masterful.
     
    This is a basic single screen platformer where you must get from the top of the screen to the bottom of the screen whilst avoiding several different obstacles. On the top level you’ll be harried by an adorable ghost who’s incredibly bad at his job of harrying people. On the second level you’ll face off against some large spider creatures that walk from side to side, and pits that can actually be quite handy, or might just send you careening into a pool of acid. On the third level, the basement, you must jump onto platforms floating in the pool of acid whilst avoiding spiders that descend from the ceiling, the pits above can be handy since they sometimes line up with the platforms below saving you time you desperately need. The reason you’re making this dangerous trek to the basement is to gather stones to barricade Frankenstein’s Monster which is slowly being filled with Ecto Cooler after every thunderclap. Every time you get a stone up to the monster you will have to play a short minigame where you are being assailed by an ungodly number of bats. Making contact with a bat will stun you briefly so you must make your way up the screen, avoiding bats, and stand by one of the brown bars on either side of the monster, this will increase the height of the wall. You must make the trip six times before the monster is fully barricaded with every trip becoming more and more difficult. If you run out of time or lose all three of your lives the monster is released to wreak havoc across the countryside, a cutscene will play showing the monster slowly walking toward you until your entire TV screen is flashing green, then it’s back to the beginning to try again.
     
    Overall Frankenstein’s Monster is a fun game with a fairly unique premise executed very well. This is by far Data Age’s best game; you can really see the blood sweat and tears that went into making this game great, it’s too bad not all of their games were treated as well as this one. Due to its overall rarity and high quality people see fit to charge quite a bit for this game, copies on Ebay range from 28-35 dollars not counting shipping, but I recommend you check Amazon as well since I managed to snag my copy there for $19.99 free shipping. If you can find it for 20 bucks then I’d say Frankenstein’s Monster is worth the cost.
     
  17. DoctorSpuds
    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…
     
  18. DoctorSpuds
    I made an executive decision to skip Pepsi Invaders since it is just Space invaders with the aliens replaced with PEPSI, with infinite lives and a three minute time limit. I've already reviewed Space Invaders, which is basically the same thing, except with those few changes, so I'm just going to skip straight to The Music Machine
     
    I actually have surprisingly little to say about Music Machine, it was sold in religious bookstores alongside the record of the same name, it is likely that to shift stock they were sold together at some point because that’s the only way you should have this game in your possession, if somebody gave it to you. This is a ‘Kaboom!’/Eggomania/Lost Luggage/Beat ‘em & Eat ‘em clone, where a series of items will fall from the top of the screen and you have to catch them in some sort of receptacle. The only thing this game has going for it really, is the catchy tune that plays at the beginning of the game because playing the game itself is not at all pleasant. What is the most important thing in a game like this? Control… Music Machine uses paddles so it gets a pass, what’s the second most important thing in a game like this? The items… unlike any of the four games I listed before Music Machines items to not fall smoothly down the screen, they jump down a set vertical amount which gives the game a very stilted and awkward feeling. The only thing this game does that’s original is the introduction of trap items that will cost you a life if you catch them, otherwise it’s as basic as it gets. Overall, the graphics are colorful, and the music is catchy but the game just sucks to play, I would actually play Beat ‘em & Eat ‘em before playing Music Machine, and that says it all, doesn’t it? This is one of the most affordable R10’s out there with loose copies as low as $280, and there’s even a factory sealed copy for $5,500 if you want it to be pristine. But… if I had the money I WOULD buy the least expensive loose copy, if only to say I own an R10, but that’s only because it’s the cheapest of the bunch.
     
  19. DoctorSpuds
    Over here in Madison we have a chain of thrift stores known as St. Vincent DePauls, St. Vinnie’s for short that has a big game sale every six months at one of their locations around the city, I have attended one previously and the one today, and as a collectors you all know how great it is to get good games for cheap. Sadly though, and I hate to admit it, but this St. Vinnie’s game sale was a bit of a bust. I arrived at 8:30, they opened at 9:00, in the freezing cold and wind only to see through the window that they only had a tiny stack of Atari 2600 games and even from a distance I could tell that they were just common Atari’s with a couple of Activision titles. I get over to them and my suspicions are confirmed, they’re all common titles, which I only found out later were priced at $5.50 per cart which is a huge markup from 6 months ago when they were sold indiscriminately for $2.50 apiece, nobody wants to pay $5.50 for Freeway are you crazy? There were no boxed Atari games or even NES games, and it seems a majority of the games were for the Wii, 360, and DS, which is to be expected. I still managed to find a few things though, I got a Light Sixer, power supply (Broken), standard Atari Joystick, and some Paddle controllers (completely fried judging by the smell) for 30 bucks. I didn’t have high hopes for the paddles or the power supply but the system cleaned up nicely and gives a nice clean signal so I might swap out the board on my Sears Heavy, which is getting a bit fuzzy. I met a nice guy there, I didn’t catch his name but is seems he was a fairly serious Atari collector as well since he had two in his cart, we chatted for a bit about how the previous sale was far better and he got a good laugh from my story about putting down a CIB Final Approach for Barnstorming. I just hope that subsequent sales have a bit more in them, or that St. Vinnie’s doesn’t let the employees grab the good stuff before the sale like they have done before, and quite obviously did here.

  20. DoctorSpuds
    I recently had an idea about what to do on Mondays when I don’t write reviews, I want to fill that day with something but I just didn’t know what, until like four minutes ago. As is fairly well known I am a collector of 2600 games, and for most of the time I’ve been a collector I’ve tried to collect my games complete in box (CIB), mainly because it just adds that extra ‘wow’ factor to the collection, and it just makes me happy. I recently realized that I’ve only been focusing on a tiny part of my actual collection since I’ve rarely ever brought attention to the packaging the games come inside of, the box, the manual, and the cartridge, only the game itself, so every Monday for the foreseeable future I will be looking at and giving my personal opinions on the boxes of a particular publisher. This little series will not be sustainable since I don’t have boxes from a large amount of publishers but I think I can make it go on for at least a little while. Now, which publisher to start things off with… Hmmmm, well how about something a bit special, Commavid!
     
    I only have a single box from Commavid, but that single box really is quite a treat to the eyes. The first thing that you’ll notice is how absolutely short the box actually is, this is due to it being an early release, they did release standard sized boxes afterwards, they’re basically the same thing but taller and with a colored strip beneath the title proclaiming it for the Atari VCS. The second thing you’ll notice is how gorgeous the artwork is, from what I found on the forums it was done by a European artist named Noel Berry, preliminary Google searches don’t turn up anything but that’s not surprising. All of the box arts save for two were done by the mysterious Noel Berry, and they all follow the same pattern.Situated around the center of the box there is an angled rectangle with some element of the game jumping out at you, in my Room of Doom box it’s a grey clad fellow who looks straight out of TRON dodging gunfire. It is generally accepted that Mines of Minos is the best of these box arts but personally I’m a fan of Rush Hour’s art. There were two games from Commavid that weren’t drawn by the mysterious Noel Berry, they were Cosmic Swarm and Video Life (as an aside Magicard did not have any artwork) they were done by a local artist and are regarded as being rather crappy, though it seems that Cosmic swarm gets a majority of the criticism, even being called ‘abominable’ by Digitpress in their article about Commavid. I also feel the need to remark about how fantastically sturdy these boxes are, mostly due to the shape of the cartridge and the overall size of the box (for the short ones) coupled with the box insert, which is by far the most complex and solid that I’ve seen in any box thus far. The final thing I want to mention about the box is a particular pet peeve of mine that is avoided… When you open almost any 2600 box the top flap will usually get caught on either the cartridge, or those little cardboard tabs on the sides that are meant to keep it in place, which usually causes it to bend and fold leading to irreparable damage to the flap, which usually leads to more damage since it doesn’t fit properly back down. Due to the unique design of the box insert in the Commavid box, the top flap is held in place more by the insert than the cardboard tabs allowing you to open it without damaging it, which is fantastic since it keeps the box looking nice.
     
    Unfortunately I don’t actually have a manual so I’ll just have to jump to the cartridge. These are the tallest cartridges in the 2600 library, excluding Xonox Double Enders, and are by far the most solid as well; there is an audible thump when you put these things down, not a clatter. They are an inch taller than the standard 2600 cart, heck, they’re even taller than an M-Network or Konami cart but still feel solid enough to break windows with. The cartridge is about an inch and a half shorter than the box it comes in and perhaps two and a half inches shorter than a standard sized box. The label is a standard size wraparound label like those found on Activision carts, and it just shows a picture of the box art, and the basic game and company info that is standard on most carts. On the older carts that had the art drawn by the local artist the labels showed an artist rendition of the game much like the Activision carts did.
     
    Overall these boxes are just beautiful to look at, and coupled with their odd size make an exotic addition to any collection. The main problem is that that all of these games place very high on the rarity scale, with the most common being a six and the rarest being a ten. You’d be hard pressed to find anything on Ebay priced below $80, this stuff is just that rare, I got lucky with my copy since it didn’t have a manual which lowered the price considerably, but now I have to find a manual for cheaper than 20 bucks, and considering the only one I’ve seen is up for 45 dollars, I may have gotten the short end of the stick on this one.
     
  21. DoctorSpuds
    Gamma-Attack, much like Air Raid, has languished in obscurity and myth for many years until its eventual discovery in 2008. From the get-go this game was set up to have a very limited release, and to truly understand HOW limited we have to briefly take a look at the company that made it, Gammation. Gammation was a one man company out of Ohio that made and sold turbo attachments for the 2600 through mail-order. The only way to get business would be to have ads in the large gaming magazines, and from what is known Gamma-Attack was advertised in a single ad that was in a single issue of Electronics Games magazine in 1982. So the only way to get your hands on this game would be to find an ad for a rather obscure turbo peripheral and then read the fine-print at the bottom of the ad to see that there was a special game on offer, it’s no wonder that this game is as rare as it is, apparently Gammation had their own brochures that I assume were mailed to previous customers, but that’s still a very small number of people. We must not however forget about the fellow who programmed this game all those years ago Robert L. Esken, Jr., since this was not his only game on the 2600, he actually programmed Z-Tack that was later sold by Bomb and bootlegged by whoever manufactured those Taiwan Cooper games, which is a big plus since I actually like Z-Tack. He actually came back and released 100 more Gamma-Attack cartridges with signed certificates of authenticity, verifying their legitimacy, as well as his prototype copy. Currently there is the one known legitimate copy, the repros, and Robert’s own cartridge, though there are likely several more copies floating around in garages or storage lockers, but it’s hard to put a concrete number on it since not even Robert remembers how many he sold, or at least he has not divulged a concrete number. It’s time however to move on from the backstory of the game to the game itself, so how does Gamma-Attack hold up?
     
    I would say that Gamma-Attack is visually interesting, but not visually appealing. It has some impressive scrolling mountains in the background, but that’s about it, the rest of the game is pretty basic. The four sprites this game contains are very basic, monochrome blobs that take a bit of imagination to see as anything else. The yellow football is a flying saucer, though it is the most recognizable of the three, the weird black lumps that more so resemble an old-fashioned crane or excavator are actually tanks, there is of course the explosion graphic, and the final sprite is that of Gammy, who appears in place of your ship when you get a game over, I assume that he is the company’s mascot, but I’m not really sure. We can’t forget about the ‘shots’ as well, the enemy tanks spit out a paltry three pixel missile while your saucer spits out a friggin lightning bolt. I can’t help but feel that this game is only held together with bits of string and masking tape since it can behave somewhat weirdly, it often flips between running at 265 and 266 scanlines which leads to the copyright info at the bottom of the screen jumping up and down slightly, and occasionally it will jump very quickly between 265, 266, and 267 scanlines which makes the whole screen vibrate, and can be very distracting. I know I’ve never brought them up before, but what are those black bars on the left side of the screen, I know they have something to do with the placement of the sprites, but why does Gamma-Attack have so many of them? It seems they are located on every horizontal location where a sprite would be present, could any of you 2600 programmers please explain this to me, because I’m just confused… with that, let’s move onto the sounds… yay.
     
    This game contains around four sounds, and one of them is just the mixing of two existing sounds together, so I’ll say three sounds. All there is is the sounds of them firing, the sounds of you firing, and the sounds of them getting hit and subsequently exploding, the sound of you getting hit is simply a mashup of the sound of them firing and the exploding noise. I will give the sounds a pass though, despite their overall scarcity they’re not making my ears bleed so I can’t really complain.
     
    Despite this being a rather generic shooter style game, it shakes up the formula enough to be unique. You do not have free movement and are in fact stuck in the top right of the screen though you do have free vertical movement. You can only shoot at a 45 degree angle down at the surface, the same goes for the enemies, if you are hit by an enemy you do not lose a life, you only lose altitude, once you touch the planet’s surface its game over. Unfortunately this game appears to be either broken or extremely cryptic, since in the manual it says that there is an underground enemy base and an enemy mothership to destroy but as of yet nobody has found out how to access these other levels, or even know if they exist on the cartridge. Despite all of the issues this game has it’s still rather fun to play, the concept is unique enough to keep it fresh and the difficulty ramps up enough to keep you engaged, so as a game Gamma-Attack actually succeeds.
     
    As far as I can tell there is one verified copy in the hands of a collector and since it’s never actually been sold at auction it currently sits on the podium of “Priceless”, though estimates have put it at a maximum of 20,000 dollars, though it could go higher. The reproduction copies that were sold were originally at 60 bucks BIN, but they’ve resurfaced for much higher, I believe I saw one a while back for a thousand bucks BIN (it didn’t sell), but I can see them getting expensive. If I had the money I would buy one of the re-releases, but not the original, I actually wish I could go back in time and order it then, but that is unlikely to happen.
     
  22. DoctorSpuds
    As is common with many rare games from the first few generations, they were just one-offs from no-name companies trying to either break into the market, or simply to advertise themselves. I honestly have no idea where Eli’s Ladder falls in the spectrum of one-offs, but as one-offs go this one’s pretty darn good. Eli’s Ladder is a math tutoring game that teaches the player addition, subtraction, and counting, it also came with a console overlay for both six and four switch Atari’s which leads me to believe the company behind this game, Simage, had a good amount of dedication behind it. The game starts off with a basic menu where you can select which game variation you want as well as how fast the timer runs, you can also change between addition and subtraction with the difficulty switches, and when you get into the actual gameplay area you’ll be mildly impressed with the amount of colors on display. There is a large black rectangle where the math problem will be displayed, lower down the screen there are four numbers from which to choose from, if you select the correct number you will be taken briefly to a screen where a strange creature, who I assume is Eli, jumps up a single rung of a giant ladder. If you answer 17-20 of the twenty math problems correctly you will be awarded with a bright blue screen and Eli jumping up and down saying WOW, apparently he will jump 100 times before you’re booted back to the menu screen but I didn’t wait around to find out. Oddly enough the game is mainly controlled by the right controller, which would be the one that the child is using, while the left controller would be used by the adult to start the game, advance to the next question, and activate the counting function, though I’ve never actually managed to get it to work for me. Honestly there isn’t much else to talk about with this one, it’s just a fairly good math game, I can understand why parents would like it but apart from that it has almost no play value. Due to this game’s staggering rarity it doesn’t come up to auction very often, but one actually sold this past December for $1,301.78+7.45 shipping, which is a pretty good deal considering it’s about the same price as a college math textbook. If I had the money I would pass on Eli’s Ladder, since I don’t need to relearn my basic math, maybe.
     
  23. DoctorSpuds
    We are going to start with the defacto ‘rare’ game in the 2600 library, Air Raid. Very little is known about this cartridge, and it seems that every step taken towards finally knowing who created this oddity leads further down a rabbit hole of craziness, and red herrings. I have browsed through several Air Raid centric threads and it has been suggested that the creators were drug smuggling members of the Cuban cartel, or even participated in slavery. But it seems that the only promising lead has turned up cold since the only guy who seemed to be going any earnest research into the game has not divulged any further information, which would lead one to assume that there was nothing at the end of that particular tunnel. It is generally assumed that all 25 known copies are pre-production promotional copies that would have been sent out to stores to drum up interest in the game, this would also explain the bright blue coloration of the cartridges since they likely used any plastic they could come up with. It seems however that nobody wanted this game since no orders were placed and the company likely folded shortly afterwards. I remember reading somewhere (so you know it’s true) that employees were trying to give these away for free, so you know it’s gotta be a good game. Then again Men-A-Vision did pick a horrible time to try to break into the games market, as I recall 1982 was a bit of a company killer. Sadly the story of this game overshadows the game itself since there is really very little to talk about when it comes to playing the actual game itself.
     
    I’ve heard it said that Air Raid is a highly modified version of Space Jockey, but I honestly don’t think so. There is very little to look at with this game, and for some reason Stella is acting a fool when it comes to this game in particular, since it flickers between B&W and color except the background is a vibrant magenta when it’s in color, so I was forced to use Z26 to play this game properly. There are several different enemies you will be fighting against in this game, first are the upside-down rocket propelled houses, then there are the stick figure airplanes, the generic flying saucers, and the propeller propelled jumbo jets. Most of the sprites are fairly colorful, but all are chucky beyond compare, and then there is you, an attack jet of some sort, that has its wings constantly fall of and reconnect themselves, it truly is a baffling animation. At the bottom of the screen you have a life counter and some large brown buildings smoothly scrolling left to right, believe it or not these four buildings are supposed to be the city of Manhattan, these buildings are essential to the gameplay so I’ll talk more about them there, but so far this is looking pretty grim.
     
    Thankfully the sounds are absolutely blissful. Air Raid has some of the chunkiest firing and explosion noises I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing, there aren’t many sounds, but the few this game has are fantastic.
     
    This is a shoot ‘em up, simple as it gets, but Air Raid somehow get’s it very wrong. The goal of the game is extremely simple; shoot all the enemies before they fall to earth, if several enemies get past you the buildings will slowly crumble more and more before exploding in a blaze of glory. There are a maximum of three enemies on screen at once, some will fall faster than others, the houses and the saucers tend to fall slower than the planes. Enemies will also fire on you to make your life more difficult, occasionally an enemy will have a vertical white line flash through it, and I have no idea what that means, but it frightens me. The one thing though that kills this game for me is the hit detection, it’s completely random, and for the propeller planes I’m pretty sure you have to hit the direct center pixel for it to register. You will see plenty of shots pass right through the enemies, though it seems that your hit chance is increased if you keep your ship directly beneath the falling enemies when your shot makes contact, at least, that’s what it looked like to me.
     
    Air Raid is a simple game that is broken by a simple issue, the inability to actually hit your targets, couple that with repetitive gameplay that doesn’t really escalate in difficulty and you have a prime recipe for disaster. Thankfully the game does have some replay value with the game variations, but since I can’t find a single manual scan I have no clue what they change. Normally such a game would be seen as worthless by the collecting community at large, but rarity has a tendency to inflate the perceived value of a game, and it truly has here since a CIB copy of Air Raid sold for over $30,000 at auction, and loose copies have sold for at least a tenth of that which would still place them in the thousands of dollars. If I had the funds to buy this game, I would not, since I would also need a safe to keep it in, and what’s the point of a game that can never be played? Just buy a reproduction copy off of Etsy or something… Also are all the copies in PAL? I’ve seen that it runs at 290 scanlines, while a standard North American game runs around 260, and a PAL game runs at 300+, I’m askin’ for a friend here.
     
    Useful threads
    http://atariage.com/forums/topic/204931-the-secret-of-men-a-vision-revealed/page-1?hl=%20men
    http://atariage.com/forums/topic/204249-10-17-2012-found-air-raid-with-original-box/page-1
  24. DoctorSpuds
    I’ve had a little idea… How about I do another week of, but instead of reviewing games that I own, I review games that I will NEVER own, ever. And what games would these be? How about some R10 games! Due to the fact I’d have to pawn off my kidneys to even afford a single one of these cartridges I’ll have to forgo the “Own It to Review It” rule I’ve been working under. Unfortunately many of these R10 games are there simply to them having a rare cartridge shell, I’m looking at you Xante, or being actual pieces of developmental software like Magicard... or being Atlantis II. So here’s a list of the game’s I’m going to review.
    Air Raid Eli’s Ladder Gamma-Attack Gauntlet Mangia Pepsi Invaders The Music Machine Video Life

    Why not everything?
    I will exclude everything from Xante, since they’re all fairly common games inside of extremely rare cartridges (yes I do know the backstory behind them), this also covers the ECPC Cartridge from Romox since It’s the same basic Idea. As well as Asterix since it’s just Taz except it’s the European version that was converted to NTSC. Birthday Mania will be ignored since it is not a game. BMX Airmaster since you can just buy the TNT version. I will skip Atlantis II since it is just a slightly modified version of Atlantis, and I just don’t like Atlantis. The Copy Cart from VidCo is not a game, and would likely be classified under ‘utility’. Karate get’s a big ‘ol skip, for the same reason as the Xante games, common game in a rare shell, and besides, I've already reviewed it. And I cannot feasibly review Magicard since it is programming software and I don’t have the time to read the 100 page manual.

    This is gonna be fun!

  25. DoctorSpuds
    UHHHG! Where to start with this one… Well let’s start with a basic trigger warning, 35 years on and this game is still highly offensive, so if you have strong opinions I would recommend that you avoid this one, even though I’m going to lambast this one as much as possible, it does actually have one or two positives. Let’s begin with the company itself, Mystique, it was founded by the Caballero Control Corporation, who originally, and still do, produce pornographic films. With the emergence of the video game craze CCC jumped on the bandwagon peddling their games under the ‘Mystique’ brand. If I have to give the company credit for anything it’s that they packaged their games in striking and unique boxes. The boxes are a little taller than the average box and a centimeter wider and thicker, inside the gatefold box would be the warranty card fastened to the inside cover, while the instructions and game itself is housed in a plastic and leather case, I’m not sure if the leather is real, but I wouldn’t doubt it. It all gives the impression that this is meant for the adults, it’s time to put the kiddies to bed since this is strictly for adults. And, of course, since these were meant to be sold in reputable establishments there were no pictures on the back of the box, or even in the manual, all you had to go on was innuendo of the lowest caliber, I just gotta say… Hoo boy this is some shit right here, this is Custer’s Revenge.
     
    I really hate to say it, but on a technical level the graphics in Custer’s revenge are actually pretty impressive, I don’t like what is being displayed, in fact I feel dirty just knowing I have to write it down. The two sprites that will draw your attention are Custer and ‘Revenge’ who is standing next to a cactus, both of them are large and ‘detailed’, with Custer himself boasting a whopping four colors, blue for his hat, red for his ascot, brown for his boots, and pink for everything else. It seems however that the programmers decided to make Custer an ugly bastard, since with his large hooked nose and shit-eating grin he looks more like Gonzo from the Muppets than an actual human being, he also has one hell of a beer belly. Revenge is vaguely human shaped, she is bald, her head is shaped like Pac-Man, and she has anti-grav boobs. She is boasting three colors, but they’re relegated to her skin color and her headband and feather. Honestly the best part of the graphics are the background elements, there is a large rock formation reminiscent of a Road Runner cartoon, and the little teepee sending smoke signals is actually rather cute, if this background was used in any other game it would great, but this is what we’re saddled with.
     
    Custer’s Revenge is a very musically inclined game, using mostly military tunes, like Charge when you score, and Taps when you lose a life, there is also a song that plays when you start the game but I don’t know the name. When you’re playing the game there is a driving beat, perhaps trying to emulate tribal drums, but it simply comes off as the console rhythmically farting. The only other sound I can think of is the sound made when you either run into a cactus or are hit by a spear, it’s a fairly chunky explosion noise that makes running into spears all the more rewarding, since by the end of the experience that’s all you will be doing.
     
    The main goal of the game is to get Custer from one side of the screen to the other while avoiding falling spears and in games three and four a randomly materializing cactus. When he gets to the other side all you have to do is mash the button while avoiding the occasional spear. When you get to 50 points you gain an extra life and are moved back to the far side of the screen, now you move faster and the spears fall faster. This game already annoys me just with the set up, since if you want the spears to fall slower initially you have to put the difficulty switches to the “A” position, which is usually used for the higher difficulty modes in almost any other game, Hell, the Sears systems even labeled that as “Expert”. Conceptually the basic premise is actually rather solid, avoid obstacles while moving towards a goal on the other side of the screen, when you score the allotted amount of points you start back at the beginning but you and the obstacles move faster, this was done to a certain extent in ‘Lady in Wading’ and ‘Night on the Town’, problem is that those are also Pornographic games, and therefore are automatically shit. Also the means by which you avoid the spears is somewhat stupid, they won’t fall all the way to the ground, actually they will barely make contact since they vanish on the same line as Custer’s hat, so as long as the bottom pixel of the spear doesn’t make contact with the top pixel of the hat you’ll be fine, even though most of those spears would have impaled the bastard, and I wish they would.
     
    I don’t need to explain to you why people find/found this game is highly offensive and in poor taste. Custer is a very controversial figure in American history, and he represents a side of America best relegated to the past, but here he is doing one of the worst things that can be done to a woman. This game is worse than bad, it’s offensive, I know it was released as a joke, but my goodness it was in poor taste. I know I sent X-Man to the boiler room of the Collector’s Zone, so I’m gonna send Custer’s Revenge to the boiler of the Collector’s Zone. Watch it burn!
     
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