Raiu

That brought back memories of when I first binge-played an Atari 2600 at the house of one of my mom's friends. I tried to avoid Paddle and Keyboard games because I didn't want to switch controllers.

I've heard that the second film, Wrath of the Dragon God (a distant sequel with only one character, a villain, returning and a reduced budget) was better than the first, but not by much, while the third film, The Book of Vile Darkness (a sequel in name only, with nobody returning and an even lower budget) was actually decent. Not great, but decent. So I'm interested to see how this plays out.

I don't mind sliding in some types of games (for example, platformers a la Super Mario Bros), but after trying the two ROMS, I much prefer the no-slide version (especially since you plan for those gaps in the walls to eventually get smaller as the game goes on). Trying to do precision needle-threading while the sprite is sliding all over the place sounds like a bad combination.

This looks almost like a port of Atari's Fire Truck (slightly simplified for the Atari 2600). ... not that that's a bad thing. I still like Fire Truck. It was one of the first games that I played. (Though, at the time, I think I enjoyed playing it wrong more than I enjoyed playing it right - I loved that full screen flashing effect when you crashed).

I have all these games already, but I was still a little excited... until I saw there was to be no Mac port (and no 3DS port). Ah well. Maybe next time. Meanwhile, there's still OpenEmu and MAME.

Taping a phone showing that image to the front of the thing, of course.

I'm late, but if they really want to capture the 1980s, they also need one that's still all black, but whose power indicator isn't just a simple light...

... I seriously want this game now, but I think I only want it because I know it won't ever be released again. Plus, I don't actually have an Atari 2600 to play it on. Or a TV that I could even connect an Atari 2600 to if I had one.

That's not what the pitches mean - there's five different tones, and each one represents where the hole in the upcoming wall of seahorses will appear. Most people seem to prefer just jumping over every wall, though. What speeds you up and slows you down are "currents" in the water, represented by a series of arrows pointing left or right. The trick is to catch all the good currents while avoiding the bad ones (while then leading the octopus into the bad ones, because they'll slow him down, too).

I don't see that option anywhere on Stella 4.2. Where is it? Edit: Oh, I found it. It's Backspace. I used to love frying games back in the day. I considered it an extra game variation (or sometimes many game variations). Some games just didn't fry well, though. (Most M-Network games didn't have interesting frying results, if memory serves. A lot of the earliest Atari games didn't do anything interesting, either) It's been way too long. I don't remember any specific effects for specific games, beyond ones mentioned here, and the "infinite" lives trick on Phoenix. I seem to remember Fast Eddie doing something interesting, but I can't remember what.

As a child during that time period, I never thought for even one second that the artwork was an accurate representation of the game inside. That's what the screenshots on the back of the box were for. So, yeah. Not "on point" at all for me. Just someone mocking something they have no clue about.

Well, the problem with trying to figure out who its audience is supposed to be is that the movie is clearly aiming to cash in on the nostalgia for early 1980s arcade games by including all these characters, while simultaneously mocking nostalgia for early 1980s arcade games by making such gamers losers and psychopaths. (And that's in addition to getting many of the details wrong, like Nintendo and Namco - two companies that weren't very big or well-known in the early 1980s, especially in the US - running a tournament in 1982, with games that wouldn't be released until 1983 or later)

Oh, yeah. Notice I didn't mention going there for the food. The food was what my brother and I had to choke down before we were allowed to go play the video games.

When it first opened in NE Philadelphia, it was arcade game paradise All the main areas were on the right of the entrance. There was a large main dining room with the animatronic stage show in the back (furthest from the entrance), a much smaller and quieter dining room in the front (which had some sit-down arcade games in place of a few of the tables), and in between was a gigantic game room filled with just about every early-80s arcade game you can imagine. There are games there I'd never seen before, and haven't seen since, including Mouse Trap, Baby Pac-Man, Cliff Hanger, Kick, Fire Truck, and Thief (still one of my favorite Pac-Man clones), in addition to more well-known games like Defender (and Stargate), Popeye, Pac-Man (and Ms. and Super), Centipede (and Millipede), Missile Command, Frogger, Q*Bert, Dragon's Lair, and so forth. It was frequently updated with the newest games. Name a game from that era (except, oddly, Space Invaders), and it was probably there. It was arcade heaven, and I loved every chance we got to go (which wasn't that often). I still rememeber that era fondly. Then, one day (maybe 1984 or 1985?), they replaced the back area of the arcade room (which had some of the more obscure games - I remember Star Wars Arcade, Major Havoc, and Mouse Trap being back there) with a ball pit and removed some of the more obscure games (including all the laserdisc games - I guess they were too high-maintenance), and it was all downhill from there. The remainder of the arcade room remained for some time, but without updating any of the games anymore. Still, I considered it a "classic" arcade and still swung by every now and then over the next few years - by this point, I had more independence and could get there on my own on my bike. My trips were less and less frequent, though, and I eventually stopped going entirely. The last time I was there was around a decade ago for my niece's birthday party, and by that point the middle room and the small dining room had been merged into a giant pit of redemption games (mostly skee-ball and claw games), with one or two generic-looking driving games, and the ball pit still in place from two decades before. I haven't been back since.

For Tron Deadly Discs, the button simply threw the disc in the direction of movement (or of most recent movement, if not currently moving). I'm not sure what other controls it would need, but I never played the Intellivision version (which seems a lot more complex).

That's why it remains one of my favorite Atari 2600 games. It was the first game to ever feel like a world to me. Small and crude by today's standards, but a world nonetheless. I like Raiders of the Lost Ark for the same reason (it's smaller, but more complex). It feels like a new discovery could be lurking around any corner, and there are a lot of odd nooks and crannies that seem to have little relevance and are more mysterious for it. I don't get the same "world" feel from other Adventure Zone games, because they're either too small and too quickly explored - like Haunted House - or are too interconnected - like E.T. and Superman, where every room can be exited in any direction and so there aren't any dead ends or obscure corners.

My mother used to enjoy playing Pac-Man every now and then, but nothing else. She'd never played the arcade game to compare, so she had no issue with the quality of the port. She tried Ms. Pac-Man, but didn't like it. It wasn't due to considering them too childish or anything - she was an avid cartoon watcher, particularly superhero cartoons until she died - but more due to not being very good at them and getting frustrated. She held the joystick rather uncomfortably, despite my brother and I trying to show her how we held it, so she wound up hurting her hand when she played for too long. My father died before the Atari 2600 was released (though I suspect he would have enjoyed playing it and later consoles).

So many years later, I like Pac-Man more now than I did at the time, when I felt it was not a great game. (That said, it was one of the first games I and my brother had for the console, so we played the heck out of it) These days, I still think it's a terrible version of Pac-Man (doubly so considering it was the official version for one of the most wide-spread consoles in the world at the time), but I've come to enjoy it as its own thing. If I want to play the arcade version of Pac-Man, there's plenty of ways to do so now that I didn't have access to then. I play the 2600 version on its own merits.

Atari 2600 Popeye was actually the first version I played seriously (I'd played it a few times in the arcade, but never managed to pass the first level), and it's not actually bad. It doesn't look great (even by the standards of the system), but it plays extremely well, if not exactly like the arcade game.

Huh. That's too bad. I've been meaning to get into Atari 2600 programming, but I keep getting stymied by the tools (or lack thereof). This sounded like exactly what I wanted.

I'm just flat-out confused. I don't see any of these programs mentioned on Random Terrain's site - sprite editor, playfield editor, compiler, etc - in the package, especially not in the Linus/MacOS package. How do I make it... go?

... hoping to get a new Atari 2600 and games to replace the ones I had to sell five years ago (and hoping I can get them for a price reasonably close to what I had to sell them for, which was about $50 for the console and nearly 100 games. Protip: when selling things at a flea market, don't let in-laws watch the Atari "just for a minute")

This is amazing. I wish I still had an Atari console to play this on.

Story time! My mother had a friend who had a teenage son, and that son usually got all the latest electronic goodies first, so he had an Atari and all the early games for it. We went over to visit them one day when nobody was there but my mother's friend. While they chatted for hours, I played just about every Atari game they had. Breakout, Combat, Surround (I enjoyed watching the two sides smash into each other simultaneously more than I enjoyed playing the game correctly), Codebreaker, and, most memorably, Star Ship. Like Surround, I enjoyed it more playing it wrong (I really liked the full-screen flashing "explosions"), but I enjoyed it nonetheless. And then, two or three years later (right around the time Pac-Man came out), I got my own Atari, and was never able to find Star Ship. Even my cousin, who had a lot of the early games and who we used to borrow games from, didn't have it. It wasn't until the mid 1990s, at a flea market, that I was finally able to snag myself a copy (technically, it was the Sears Telegames release, Outer Space, but close enough!) and play again. It hadn't aged well (or I hadn't aged well - it was a good fifteen years since I'd last played it), but I still found it fun. And I continue to find it fun in small doses.

I got Basic Programming as part of a two-pack (the other game being Brain Games) which also included the Keyboard controllers. I actually really enjoyed it. I made lots of simple games, but I enjoyed just tinkering with it, seeing what it was capable of, pushing the limits. Yeah, there were better BASIC programming tools available on computers, but my mother considered computers just an expensive toy, so it would be a good five years (an eternity when you're 12) until I got my own Commodore 64 to program on.