Raiu

Tyson wasn't even arrested for the rape until nearly a year after the Mr. Dream version of the game came out, so, judging by the timing, it was more likely losing his title to Buster Douglas and Nintendo not wanting to renew the contract when it ran out. (He lost the title in February 1990, Punch-Out!! with Mr. Dream came out in August 1990, the rape arrest was in July 1991, and the rape conviction in February 1992) ... but, yeah. The NES Punch-Out is my favorite, partially because it's the only one of the four that I can actually beat, so fun eventually gives way to frustration with the others. I never got the timing down for either of the arcade games, and I can get most of the way through the SNES game, but Hoy Quarlow (the old Chinese guy who beats you with a cane) always gets me. -DS-

Or you remembered it right, but were doing it wrong back then -DS-

"Dealer wins all ties" means you have the right Difficulty Switch set to B; set it to A if you want to have Pushes. The differences between B and A are explained in the manual: http://www.atariage.com/manual_page.html?S...p;currentPage=4

Seriously, that does sound like Blue Print, as vague as the description is. -DS-

Well, given that Big Boss is from the very first Metal Gear game, I'm not sure how that applies. Also, Pokemon is actually a pretty good game series on its own terms. The problem is that Nintendo took Gamefreak's rather deep strategy game originally designed for late teens and up and marketed it to 5-year-olds with an insipid cartoon that replaces all the strategies with "power of love/friendship" platitudes. Judging Pokemon based on the cartoon is like judging Metroid based on Captain N: The Game Master or Pitfall based on Saturday Supercade. Is it really that surprising that a character from a game series that continues to turn out hit games is more popular than a character whose height of popularity was nearly 30 years ago?

E.T. is not a perfect game, but it doesn't have terrible collision detection. One of E.T.'s little green pixels has to touch one of the pit's black pixels. That's the only way to fall in. There is no way to fall in when you're not near a pit or for "no reason whatsoever". That said, there's an animation issue in that E.T.'s legs animate before he starts to move when you push the joystick in any direction. That's why he usually falls back into a pit when you just push up. (E.T. lands safely, his feet flush with the pit edge. Then, since you're still holding the joystick up, he starts to move. Before he actually moves, however, his legs animate - one foot goes down, touches the pit, and he falls right back in) The game isn't perfect, but it's not totally flawed, either. -DS-

I played it on Colecovision before the Atari version, and it's somewhat better (having two fire buttons helps), but it's still a frustrating and unrewarding game. The C64 version isn't much better than the Atari version, as I recall.

That's a cool find, and it is, indeed, extremely rare. I'm not sure I'd call it the Holy Grail, though. If you found an Airworld prototype, that'd be the Holy Grail. -DS-

I wait until they go WAY down, to $20 at most. Though I do buy cheap Greatest Hits games, too. The only games I buy brand new have "Breath of Fire" (or "Katamari", but only the first two) in the title.

Neat hack, but a small bug I noiticed: It's possible for each "Robot" to shoot themselves! (Looks like their shot is hitting that stray rotating "ball" pixel, destroying them as soon as it's fired) Or is that intentional? ("Ha, that wizard is so stupid, his spell backfired and blew him up!")

I've always liked the Atari version of Phoenix better than the arcade game. It feels smoother and easier to control. I think I'm going to go play it now. -DS-

That's the one! Thanks! -DS-

Here's one for you: It's a blatant Metroid clone, with a twist. You start out on the surface of a jungle planet, and unarmored. The first step is to find the armor; until then you're stuck with throwing rocks. I think the game name begins with an "M", but I'm not 100% certain about that. I never got very far in it (in fact, I never actually found the armor!), but I'd like to give it another try. I can't really look up screenshots on Lemon without knowing its name. -DS-

Slightly off-topic, but has anyone ever heard the song Dig-Dug by Digital Air? It was apparently Gary "Dream Weaver" Wright's attempt to jump on Buckner and Garcia's bandwagon. I'd love to find a digital copy of that. (I could, I suppose, buy the 45s I see advertised here and there, but then I'd have to also find an actual record player to listen to it on). -DS-

According to an interview with Howard Scott Warshaw, the game actually sold about 1.5 million copies and is the eighth best-selling 2600 game of all time. However, according to that same interview, about 4 million copies were produced, leaving 2.5 million copies unsold, and so, the high cost of producing cartridges (especially with more unsold than sold) combined with the high cost of the licence meant that, even with such stellar sales, the game was a financial flop of epic proportions. (I know those numbers clash with the "five million E.T. cartridges" that were supposedly buried in the landfill, but I'm guessing that that number includes other games that didn't sell as well as hoped — Pac-Man, for example — not just E.T. I'm more ready to trust HSW's numbers than urban legend) =DS= Edit: clarified that I meant eighth best-selling Atari 2600 game, not overall eighth best-selling game.

You're not the only one, no. You know, most of the games on the Pac-Man Fever album had sequels (with the exception of Mousetrap)... Still, while they did release more songs (an entire album, in fact, though it was only released on the pre-CNet MP3.com), they never made any new video game songs, just reworkings of Pac-Man Fever with different arrangements (instrumental, unplugged) and lyrics ("Pokemon Fever"?). Their second album, Now & Then, had songs about Pogs and other fads instead. I e-mailed Buckner some months back, and he did say that they were trying to get Now & Then into the iTunes store, but I haven't seen it there yet. Also, if you can find their Mr. T song, snap it up. (It was on their website for a brief time, but it's long gone now). It's definitely in the vein of the Pac-Man Fever songs, even if it isn't about video games. It even has gunfire sound effects and Jerry Buckner pretending to be Mr. T between verses, like Pac-Man Fever's sound effects. -DS-

Just as a note - the ghosts don't slow down in the tunnels while blue in the arcade version, either, but that's because the blue ghosts always go at the same speed that the non-blue ghosts go through the tunnels. This looks and plays really great anyway. (Though, to be quite honest, I rather prefer the 5200-style ghosts of the original kernal demo) =DS=

I have quite a few consoles, mostly Nintendo, and none of them current generation. (I'm always one generation behind, it seems) Coleco Telstar Ranger Odyssey^2 NES SNES Sega Genesis N64 PS1 PS2 I used to have a Coleco ADAM, but it didn't survive the trip from Philadelphia to Atlanta. I'm still looking for an Intellivision, a new Colecovision, and a Vectrex. ... I'm trying to remember whether the Commodore 64 came with me or my brother during the move, but I think my brother has it. (There's a lot of stuff I still haven't unpacked, even after two years of living here) The N64 and PS2 were bought in Georgia, so they didn't have that problem.

Not quite relevant to the topic, but... the music on Frogger was changed? For which version? (Is Yankee Doodle copyrighted, or something?) -DS-

That list isn't even close to complete, because Pac-Man is also included in the Namco Museum collections, which have been released for the N64, Gamecube, Wii, GBA, DS, PS1, PS2, PSP, and Dreamcast. The PS1 Namco Museum, in addition, has six volumes, with a different Pac game in each of the first five (Pac-Man, Super Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Mania, and Pac-Land). -DS-

I have fond but fleeting memories of Pac-Man Plus, because I only saw it once or twice as a kid, and it fascinated me. (For many years I thought it was a hack along the lines of New Puc-One or Hangly Man, until I learned otherwise). Pac-Man itself still gives me a large nostalgic kick, as does Ms. Pac-Man and Junior to lesser degrees. That said, my favorite one to actually play is Super Pac-Man. Just complicated enough to give it an edge, but still simple enough to be fun. =DS=

And the label is torn right before the word "store" so you can't read which store to take it to

Two more: Fast Eddie lets you pause with the Color/B-W switch. (The action stops and the maze flashes different colors until you move the switch back the other way) Superman lets you pause with the select button. (The screen dims and it cycles through the different background areas until you move the joystick to unpause it; there's a well-known cheat using this pause in that you can put Clark in the Daily Planet right away by positioning him at the center of the screen, pausing the game, and then waiting for the Daily Planet background to be shown before moving the joystick to unpause it) -DS-

Perhaps ironically, the only game company to bring home a real arcade port of Donkey Kong (albeit with the Japanese board order) was Rare, as part of Donkey Kong 64. I say "ironically" because Rare is now owned by one of Nintendo's biggest competitors, Microsoft. -DS-

As it was explained to me, the game doesn't actually only have 18 predefined object layouts, but it has a bad random number generator. So it picks one of 18 choices for the first object, and then the numbers for all the other objects, which should be random, instead follow a predefined "random" sequence, and they wind up being the same every time for each location of the first object. -DS-