kirin jensen

Dang! How'd I miss that? Time to get a real 2600, then.

seemo, when are you going to start releasing your games on carts? The day you do is the day I buy a real live 2600. No joke. Pleasse talk to whoever is responsible for cart releases here, please! I want to see omicron, Lead and your others on an actual cart!

I truly needed the laugh this exchange provided.

Ineffable? or perhaps...cromulent? I agree with leaving out the video/pics if that's a demotivator for writing your blog. I'd rather have a Chronogamer sans multimedia than no Chronogamer. I needs me my Chronogamer fix! Great installment, wanting moremoremore. Of course.

When it comes to sheer ass-uglitude, it's got to be the original heavy sixer. Clear the spunk of nostalgia out of your eyes and take a look. Be awed. One seriously butt-skank-booty-ugly machine.

Pitfall II and River Raid. River Raid's controls are kludgy as hell, and the game is horribly repetitive. And Pitfall II is a major pain in the ass.

Play it, and you'll remember the love. The Challenger series was all about the game play. And don't forget Killer Bees!

The platform stages disappearing make it difficult enough. There's fewer places to catch a ladder (but fewer places for a ladder to appear as well), and with all that empty space, the boulders are really unpredictable. Plus, the longer a boulder sticks around (i.e., doesn't smash into your axe or another boulder and doesn't go through a door) the faster it starts to move. Plus the patterns are so damn hypnotic it's easy to get distracted by them while a boulder hits ol' Pete. If you're so convinced that I don't know how to play the game, then why don't you show me how it's done by posting a clip of your breaking the thousand point mark on YouTube? I'd love to see how you manage to avoid all the cheap hits, dodge the completely unpredictable bouncing boulders, and collect the stupid key that vanishes just before you can reach it. I'd love to, but I don't have a way to record (unless I can tape the game to my VCR - I'll check) and even less of a way to post it. I'm pretty lo-tech, frankly. And quit trying to reach that key if it's more than half a screen away horizontally. It'll definitely vanish before you get there, and there's always a new key coming up. The boulders are fairly predictable so I'm not what you mean. Concentrate on running away from the ones you'd need to duck until you've had some practice. Ducking is trickier than jumping in PAP. Maybe you need not to run around so much in the game. PAP works better as a gam,e where you wait for your opportunities: running after a key or ladder is usually a mistake. Congratulations, my highest score actually is 1126. How you use to play it. Do you enter in a door immediately after get the key or after catch the key you break some rocks before into the door? Immediate after, unless I get a new pickaxe right away. Though if I think my score's too low (I like to score at least 50 points per level) I will hang around just to get a new pickaxe and smash more boulders.

Actually, my point is the same as it has been: You don't seem to have a clue how to play this game. Further, you don't seem to be able to play PAP very well, and instead of figuring out the gameplay, you decided "it's another stupid O2 game". I didn't like this game the first few times I tried it. Then I reread the manual and played it again. Vast difference in playing it. My high score is in the 1700 range, and at that point the game is incredibly wild. The game really changes play as early as the 400-600 level and that experience alone would make this a classic. So. What's your high score? Most versions of O2 emulators allow you to set up the keys you want to use. I'd start there and with the 'readme' document that came with the emulator. Hope you enjoy Pickaxe Pete once you get it running!

Unavoidable deaths? Hardly. The game only allows five boulders at one time on the screen. The key flies to the top of the screen, but fades after a while and a new one shows up if you don't get the one that's there. Both the pickaxe and the key show up after a collision between two boulders, so you can catch either one by watching for collisions. But from the sound of it, you haven't realized how to control jumping up or down, si the rest of the game doesn't matter much anyway. At that point I have to ask (and yes I hate sounding like the E.T. cultists): Have you read the manual?!? Jeez, you do know you're supposed to njump through the doors once you have the keys, right? And what's your high score?

Okay: 1) What's your high score on this? It sounds like you've played it maybe twice and have bitched about it ever since. 2) It ain't Donkey Kong. Attempting to play it as if it were Donkey Kong would be akin to trying to apply the strategies of Space Invaders to Megamania and then deciding the game is stupid because you never seem to get the mothership. 3) Good luck. The display on the O2 allows a lot of objects on the same scanline and any port of PAP to the 2600 has to deal with this problem in some manner.

I'd have to say Flash's Rogues Gallery is probably the absolute hardest non-prototype cart to find for the 2600, it being dumped on the market at the same time as E.T. I understand most of the copies ended up in the same landfill. Too bad, too. It played like a cross between Superman and Moondust for the C-64. Loads of fun. I always liked the Mirror Master level the best, but usually a;ll anyone who's played it talks about is the Gorilla Grodd fight.

There definitely would be a lag between PB buying ads and publication. Plus most comics in the '80s and earlier were released before the cover date.

And the refrain of 'E.T. doesn't suck, you're just a moron not knowing how to play it' rears its ugly head yet again. Well, the ET cult members are wrong. It sucks. SucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucks ucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksS cksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSu ksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSuc sSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSuck SucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucks ucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksS cksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSu ksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSuc sSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSuck SucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucks ucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksS cksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSu ksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSuc sSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSuck SucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucks ucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksSucksS cksSucksSucksSucksSucks.

The O2/G7000 game? Definitely doesn't get the love it so richly deseves.

Ah, you anticipated where I was going next: Top Five Underrated Games for the 2600 1. Carnival It's just a death from above game, but what a solid realization. Miss something and it counts against you. Let something go by and it counts against you. Let the duck eat your ammo and - well, you get the idea. Albeit somewhat repetitive, there's enough variety to keep me playing until I turn turn the score over - which is hard for me to do. 2. Jawbreaker Ms. Pac-man and Junior Pac-man get all the praise for not sucking as much as Pac-Man, but this is the real gem on the 2600. Stripped down to the basic play mechanics, you get a fast, furious, flicker-free fest of fun. 3. Sorceror Easily as fun as Pitfall! Continually listed as a crappy game, more out of habit I suspect than out of experience. 4. Space Jockey At the higher difficulty settings this game is up there with Chopper Command for sheer hardness. Nice mix of enemies, though punishment/reward factors could use improvement. 5. Fast Eddie What Donkey Kong could have been on the 2600. Platform jumping galore, fast flicker-free graphics, solid steady 'ramping-up': a great game lost in the hubbub of complaints about DK.

You and me both.

A bit of a different list. Not a “best of” or “worst of”, but a list of the games that get far more praise than they deserve. Which means it includes games you might consider ‘classics’. You might. Top Five Overrated games for the Atari 2600 1. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Ooo, it's Star Wars! Ooo, it's got the Star Wars theme! Ooo, it's poorly controlled and repetitive! Frankly, Space Jockey was more fun to play than this. Still is, too. 2. Kaboom It's the Mad Bomber What Bombs at Midnight! Instructions: 1) Catch the dang bombs 2) Lather 3) Rinse 4) Repeat At least as repetitive as The Empire Strikes back and yet continually praised. I didn't understand its popularity then or now, though at least in the past there were fewer games to choose from, so they were all 'special'. 3. River Raid Looky, a 2600 game that scrolls! And the control kinda... sucks. Of all the entries on this list, this one is likely the most controversial choice I could have made. Still, it gets far more praise than it probably deserves just for scrolling vertically. 4. Fishing Derby Not the most highly praised game ever, but it surely doesn't deserve the praise it so often gets. 5. Spiderman "Yay! I'm Spideyman! I'm kicking the Gween Gobwin's ass! Wait! I DON'T get to kick his ass? Maybe on the next level! Damn! Maybe there's another supervillain on the next level! No? This blows." Seriously. One bad guy you never really fight, one level that just repeats, graphics so bland you could turn this into an Odyssey2 game and STILL have memory left for a title screen? If this were Generic-man's game, it would be mentioned in the same breath as Sorceror. As in, "Sorceror's not a bad little game. At least it's not Generic-man."

I have to say, Firefly and Sorceror are similar but seem like two different games to me.

Rushed? Yes. Programmed by amateurs to pay them less? Hell, no. They paid the programmer of Pac-Man assloads of cash. He had to have been walking out the the contract signing thinking, "Thank God this is a million dollars crammed up my ass because I'm gonna be paying a proctologist a helluva lot to remove it." The INTV in some ways is actually inferior to the 2600. There are some things it does very well. But the problem is, you're talking about a machine that wasn't set up explicitly for a port of Donkey Kong(INTV) versus a machine that was(CV).

I was playing Carnival today, and as so often happens, I turned over the score. I've known for a while there's some sort of message flashed for second when you turn over the score, but this time I turned it over to exactly zero. Suddenly up in the score area it said : S. Kitchen. I checked on atariage's page, but it only shows a completely different way to reveal the programmer's name. So, does everone know about this already?

Damn. No love for Space Fury? That's cold, man.

Really? I thought Mr. Do! wasn't too bad for the 2600. And O2's Q-bert may not look as purty as other Q-bert ports, but it plays exceptionally well.

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Reflex. Then again, I'm also surprised it's not on a cart yet.

Dangit, Simone, when are your great games coming out on cart? I want an actual cart in my hands!