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One is a puzzle game with colored blocks that you make disappear! And the other is a puzzle game with colored blocks that you make disappear! Chetiry (Chris Walton, Zach Matley, Fred Quimby) Full disclosure: I worked on this game, designing the title screen and cut-scene graphics, and creating the artwork for the label, manual and box. Chetiry is a 2600 version of the classic game Tetris. I probably don't need to explain it, but in Tetris there are falling shapes, each comprised of four blocks in different arrangements, that you must manipulate so that they build solid rows across the screen. When you complete a row, it disappears and any blocks above it move down. The more rows (up to four) you can complete at a time, the more points you get. If you leave gaps, those rows don't disappear but build up higher and higher. If the rows reach the top, the game ends. The longer you play, the faster the pieces fall, and the less time you have to react. Chetiy isn't the only 2600 attempt at Tetris. There's also Edtris, Tetris26 (which is an unfinished tech demo), Cubis, Z-Blocks, and 2600Tris. A key element of being able to play Tetris is knowing exactly the size and shape of a gap you have to drop a piece into. Of the other efforts, only Cubis and Tetris26 clearly define individual rows, and only Tetris26 shows both rows and columns. The rest all show the assembled blocks as single-colored masses, making it difficult to judge how wide or deep a particular gap is. Chetiry is unique in that it gives each different shape its own color and retains those colors after they're dropped, so you can easily gauge exactly what's needed to fill each gap. Besides all of the colors being visually impressive, this adds to the authenticity, and more importantly the playability, of Chetiry. If that were Chetiry's sole selling point, it would still be a significant one, but the game goes far beyond that. Chetiry also has incredible music, familiar to anyone who's played the Gameboy version of Tetris. The title screen has its own music, plus there are three other songs you can choose from during gameplay (or you can turn the music off and just listen to the sound effects). Chetiry also features the cut scenes of rockets launching from the Gameboy version, a lavishly detailed title screen, and high-score saving on the cart - no AtariVox or SaveKey is required. During gameplay, a single line of text shows your score, the number of rows cleared (depending on the game), the game variation you're playing, the current level you're at, and an optional preview of the next shape that will appear. It's a very dense but very useful display, and its inclusion speaks to the level of detail put into this game. As technically accomplished as Chetiry is, the important thing is how well it plays, and Chetiry is excellent. The controls are perfectly responsive, and the difficulty ramp feels just right. There are four game options: Marathon (which is the default classic Tetris mode), Sprint 25 and Sprint 40 (your goal is to remove 25 or 40 lines and get the highest score in doing so), and my favorite: Ultra! in which you race against the clock to score as many points as possible in 3 minutes. This is an absolute blast if you start at level 9 (and a great way to practice for Marathon). You can start any game at any level from 0-9, and choose from 6 starting depths where some of the rows are already partially filled with blocks. There's also a pause feature, and an option to "fast drop" pieces - but since that's controlled with "up" on the joystick it can be triggered accidentally if you're not careful. Chetiry is by far the most feature-packed version of Tetris for the 2600, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention a couple of minor (and they're very minor) shortcomings with it. Since the 2600 joystick only has one button, you can only rotate the pieces in one direction. An option to select clockwise or counter-clockwise would have been a nice option, or better still, support for Genesis gamepads so you could rotate either way using two buttons. The only other shortcoming is a lack of a two-player mode, but I didn't miss that at all. Chetiry is an outstanding, faithful, feature-packed port of one of the best and most iconic puzzle games of all time. Very highly recommended. Chetiry gets a 5/5. Chunkout 2600 (James Todd) Chunkout 2600 is a puzzle game that's based on SameGame (aka Chain Shot!). You start with a screen filled with patterns of colored blocks. Selecting a group of two or more adjacent blocks of the same color will make them disappear, causing any remaining blocks above them to fall down and fill the empty spaces, creating new patterns. The more blocks that you clear in a given turn, the more points you will score. To win, you must completely clear all of the blocks from the screen, but the game will also end if the only remaining blocks can't be paired up and removed. There are four difficulty settings in Chunkout 2600, which determine how many different colors of blocks there are (2, 3, 4 or 5). The more colors there are, the harder it is to clear out a screen since there is a higher likelihood of individual blocks becoming isolated. The settings are selected using the Difficulty switches, but pay careful attention to the manual because the easiest difficulty is with both switches set to A, which is opposite of how Difficulty switches are typically used. Speaking of the manual, the author went to great lengths to craft an elaborate science fiction backstory for Chunkout 2600 - much like Atari did with some of their games. Unfortunately, the manual never "breaks character" and the story is so convoluted it actually fails to clearly describe how to play the game. Fortunately, it's easy enough to figure out once you start playing it. Sound effects are very sparse, including a short fanfare that repeats over the title screen. Graphics couldn't be simpler - it's a field of colored blocks with a score beneath it. Chunkout 2600 has a very minimal presentation, but that's okay because at its heart is a solid, enjoyable puzzle game, and one that's appropriately challenging at its highest difficulty setting. It's a classic "minute to learn, lifetime to master" game, and the easiest difficulty settings give you a safe place to develop strategies and win some games before moving onto the tougher ones. Where Chunkout 2600 falls short though, is that there are no preset puzzles. The puzzles are always generated randomly, so you never have an opportunity to go back and replay one. A different but unreleased 2600 version of SameGame - Matchie (by John Payson) had 10,000 preset puzzles that you could choose from, letting you develop strategies, improve your scores, and work out solutions for specific puzzles. While 10,000 is a bit much, had Chunkout 2600 added some preset puzzles as an option, it would have greatly improved its replay value. As it is, it can be frustrating when you get within just a block or two of clearing a puzzle, and don't have the opportunity to go back and try it again. Even without preset puzzles, Chunkout 2600 is still a fun, challenging puzzle game that's right at home on the Atari 2600. With a good range of difficulty settings, players of all ages and skill levels can enjoy it. Chunkout 2600 gets a 4/5 (3.5 on a half-point scale) Up next: Paddle Battle < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

It's time to get out the contact cleaner and get those paddles working! Or is it... ? Brik (Atari 2600) Brik by Repixel8 features two paddle-based games on one cartridge. Or rather... one paddle-based game, and one that should have been. The main game, Brik, is an attempt at an Arkanoid clone. You move a paddle (called a "bat" in the manual) back and forth across the bottom of the screen, bouncing a ball off it to knock out patterns of blocks above you. If you let the ball get past you, you lose a life. There's an enemy that comes out and floats around, sending your ball off course if you hit it, and there are two bonus items that fall from some of the blocks: extra points and an extra life. However, there are no actual "power-ups" like catch, multi-ball, expand, and so forth. So even though the level layouts resemble Arkanoid, much of what made that game unique is missing - even the original Breakout had a "catch" feature. There are two display modes for Brik: flickering and non-flickering. Flickering is used to draw vertical lines between columns of blocks to divide them up to be more brick-like. Unfortunately, it not only causes flicker, but it actually makes the entire screen vibrate annoyingly. Fortunately, you can shut that off, which is what I would recommend. Once you do that, the graphics behave themselves and still look decent. Sound is minimal, but adequate. There are no continues, so you always have to start a new game back at the first level. Brik would be a decent enough game in the Breakout genre, except for one fatal shortcoming - you can only play it with a joystick. There is no paddle controller support. The whole point of a ball-and-paddle game is how it plays, and paddles are essential for the speed, control and precision needed for this type of game. I don't know what sort of compromises would have been needed to add paddle controller support, but it puzzles me why someone would develop a game like this without it. Brik is somewhat playable with a joystick, but even that is poorly implemented. Traditionally in Breakout (or Pong, for that matter), the ball will change its angle and direction based on where it hits the top of the paddle. But in Brik, the ball usually just bounces off continuing in the same direction and angle it was already traveling - regardless of how you hit it. To get the ball to bounce in the opposite direction actually requires hitting it with the very edge of your paddle, and the controls (and collision detection) in Brik are nowhere near precise enough to do that reliably. The second game on the cartridge, Brik 180, actually supports paddle controllers (making the lack of them in Brik all the more puzzling). Brik 180 appears to be a cross between Pong and Breakout. There are Pong-like paddles on both sides of the screen that move vertically, and between them, running down the center, are patterns of blocks that you knock out with the ball. So you have to clear out the blocks, and not let the ball get past you. Two great tastes that taste great together, right? Except Brik 180 has even more problems than Brik. First - despite its Pong-like layout, it's a one-player only game. You control both paddles simultaneously (they're linked together), so you're effectively playing Pong by yourself with some Breakout blocks in the middle. While this would be fine as a one-player variation, Brik 180 would have been far better as a two-player competitive game (or one player vs. AI). Second - if you're used to playing any of Atari's Pong variants (eg. Video Olympics on the 2600), you'll note that when you turn the paddle counter-clockwise (left), you move down. If you turn it clockwise (right), you move up. Always. Even on the original Pong console. But in Brik 180, it's backwards - you turn left, you move up. If you turn right, you move down. This may seem trivial, but it's not. The games were designed the way they were for a reason: it was intuitive. Plus, you don't just throw away 45 years' worth of peoples' muscle memory for the sake of a lack of research. Consequently, using a joystick to play Brik 180 actually works better. Finally is the collision detection. It's catastrophically bad. I can't count the number of times "something weird" happened, and the ball went through the corner of my paddle. After awhile, I had to adapt how I was playing just to finish reviewing the game. Brik 180 seems buggy and unfinished. Even the ball distorts as it moves across the screen, as if you were viewing it through a chainlink fence. Brik and Brik 180 are based on solid ideas, but the execution just isn't there. They seem only half-finished. Even the manual has issues, in that the pages (which aren't numbered) were out-of-sequence. It took some flipping back and forth to figure out which page belonged to which game. There's a real need for more good paddle games on the 2600. When well made, they offer a unique gaming experience you can't get anywhere else. Unfortunately, Brik just isn't one of them. Brik gets a 2/5. Crazy Brix (Atari 7800) Crazy Brix by Bob DeCrescenzo is a paddle-based game that's essentially a successor to Super Breakout. You move a paddle horizontally across the bottom of the screen to hit balls upward and knock out patterns of blocks. If you let the balls get past you, you lose a life. Clear all the blocks, and you move onto the next level and a different pattern. The level layouts resemble those in Arkanoid, but there are no power-ups in the game. You always start off each level with two balls in play, and you have to lose both of them before your turn is up. While this can make it easier to clear more blocks out, it also serves as a distraction if you focus too much on trying to keep both of them in play. On some levels you'll also be given two (stacked) paddles to use, adding another element to the game. The action gets very fast pretty quickly, even on Normal difficulty. So to get used to how the angles work and get a look at some of the later levels, you might try practicing on Easy. Crazy Brix is built to use paddle controllers, and the responsiveness is precise and silky-smooth. You can optionally use a joystick, but I wouldn't recommend it. Crazy Brix has crisp graphics and nice sound that makes good use of the 7800. The level designs are generally well done with a few nice tributes to Atari mixed in, although there are a few (such as a series of back-and-forth horizontal tunnels) that become more of a grind than a fun challenge. The game seems to help you out as you get near the end of a level, as if there's AI changing the path of the ball slightly to favor hitting those last few stray blocks (but I could be imagining that). One feature Crazy Brix desperately needs is a Continue option. There are 32 levels in this game, and being able to start your next game where (or near where) you left off would have been a welcomed addition. As it is, you have to work your way through every single level, every time you start over. If you have a good set of paddles, and enjoy Super Breakout, then you'll enjoy Crazy Brix. If you're looking for an Arkanoid clone, you might be disappointed. It's nice to see a dedicated paddle game developed for the 7800, and while the extra paddles and multi-balls are a good start, there's a lot of untapped potential here. Crazy Brix actually started out as a port of Namco's Bomb Bee - a cross between Super Breakout and Video Pinball. Had that been brought to fruition, it would have made for more interesting and varied gameplay, and given the 7800 a truly unique title (and possibly paved the way for a multi-cart featuring Gee Bee and Cutie Q). For what it is, Crazy Brix is very well done, but I would've liked to have seen it taken further. Crazy Brix gets a 4/5 (3.5 on a half-point scale) Up next: Arcade Assault, Vol. 1 < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

Yet more mini-arcade action! This time, it's all about racing games: Pole Position actually has a tiny little steering wheel... but it's actually just a steering wheel shaped joystick. No analog controls. Although for this version, analog isn't really needed. You also don't need to shift, the buttons just accelerate and brake, but really, adding shifting to something this small would be a little ridiculous. (Get it? A little ridiculous? ) It's hard to justify being picky on something so small and so cheap, but Pole Position is one of the less-successful Tiny Arcade games. The game plays okay, but there are a few issues such as enemy cars disappearing, spotty collision detection, and the fact that you really can't lose. Even if you run off the track or crash, you get so much bonus time per lap, you'll likely still win every race. Plus, the cars kind-of look like bathtubs. New Rally-X (not to be confused with Ye Olde Rally-X, I suppose) translates much better, and plays very well. The animation is surprisingly smooth, given the choppiness of some of the other titles. The one downside is that the dots on the radar screen are single pixels, and they're so tiny, it's nearly impossible to see where your car is. There just isn't enough contrast (at least for my tired, olde eyes). Still, you can't have an arcade without some racing games! And my arcade is getting so big, I may have start up a second shelf! It's also getting a lot harder (and noisier) to get a decent photograph of everything. So I just decided to be "artistic" and leave the ones in the distance out-of-focus. I'm tempted to make a little arcade diorama out of these, but that requires more creativity than I have the energy for at the moment. But maybe later... I'm thinking it would be fun to re-create arcades from some classic '80's movies: WarGames, Joysticks, Tron... I might need some more games though. Get to it, Super Impulse! Bosconian, Scramble, Joust, Berzerk... they're calling you!

And my home video arcade grows! Last time, I added three new Tiny Arcade games: Galaga, Dig Dug and Frogger. This time, it's Q*bert and Tetris: In my first review of these, I mentioned Q*bert as a good candidate for becoming one of these Tiny Arcade games. I didn't think they'd make it though, because it requires the joystick to be turned 45°. Well, they actually did it - and it plays really well! Q*bert moves pretty quickly, and Ugg and Wrongway come out almost immediately in the second level, so the difficulty isn't quite right, but as I've mentioned before, these aren't meant to be exact, accurate re-creations of the arcade games. They're novelties and collectibles. They're completely playable, but really not intended for hours-on-end of gaming. Tetris is a little odd to have as one of these, because I never really considered it an arcade game (although it certainly was). I always just considered it a computer or console game. But of course, I had to buy it anyway. It plays perfectly, although because the controls are backwards (I'm used to playing Chetiry right-handed), I keep accidentally fast-dropping pieces when I don't want to. My muscle memory is refusing to be re-trained. These are still fun little cabinets to collect, and if anything, the playability is improving. Super Impulse will be releasing two more of these in June, too: Pole Position and Rally-X. And of course, I'll buy them. I'm going to need a couple more inches of shelf space though... (The hardest part of taking this picture was to get all of the cabinets to stay on long enough. They go into power-saving mode pretty quickly once a game ends.) I wonder what they might make next? Xevious? Scramble? They've already licensed some games from Namco and Konami. Berzerk and Phoenix would be great, too. There are a lot of possibilities.

More fun with really tiny arcade games... Super Impulse just released Galaga, Dig Dug and Frogger, as part of their Tiny Arcade series. I have the first four and really liked them, so as soon as these showed up on Amazon, I grabbed them. I suppose if I would've waited, the price would've dropped. But I've been bitten by the collector bug with these. Can you blame me? Check this out: Seven classic arcade cabinets, all in a space only 11 1/2" wide. And no refrigerator dolly needed. As incredibly tiny as these are, they're still remarkably playable. Even though Galaga has comically large sprites and the animation isn't very smooth at times, you still get everything that makes Galaga what it is: recovering a stolen ship for extra firepower, challenge stages, those aliens that split off into those three weirder-looking aliens. It's pretty complete. Frogger plays very much like the arcade game. Konami can't use the original music anymore, so the distinctive songs aren't there and were replaced by something a bit generic, which is too bad. But the rest of the game looks and plays like Frogger. I do wish they'd used the original arcade cabinet artwork though, rather than an updated version. But hey... Konami didn't even let Disney do that, so I can't be all that surprised. I may try to make my own reproduction artwork for it though, and see if I can restore it to its proper look. Dig Dug fares the best of the bunch. While it's a little difficult adapting to playing on a screen about the size of a large postage stamp, it's the most arcade-faithful of the three. Ironically, I never cared much for Galaga, Dig Dug or Frogger back-in-the-day. But I couldn't resist having these set up on my shelf as my own tiny little video arcade. Of course if they make more of them, I'll probably buy them too - as long as the games are from the early 80's. I have no interest in the Street Fighter era stuff. As with the previous four, these are novelties. Collectibles, conversation pieces. They are certainly playable, but don't expect true arcade accuracy. Not at this size. Nor at this price. If I had one complaint about them, is that they power off too soon when in demo mode. Yes - it saves batteries. But it would be nice if there were a way to just leave them running for awhile, so you could see and hear your own little arcade running in the background. Just like 35 years ago.

A couple of things I didn't mention about the mini-arcade games from Super Impulse that I've been collecting: First, they're sold with keyrings attached. They're a bit too large and impractical to be a keyring though: Second, they don't have a coin door on the front sticker. It would've been that much cooler had they added a little coin door and had the coin slots backlit. But that probably would've been cost-prohibitive. The irony is, you couldn't actually fit a quarter into the cabinet anyway. For that matter, they're a little too small even for saving "next game": But having a coin door would've been a nice extra touch. Which brings me to the point of this post. Some months back, a company named Replicade announced they'd be crowdfunding their own mini-arcade games. One of the rewards backers could get would be a coin slot keyring. I thought, "Cool - that'd almost be worth the $25 pledge to back the project!" But then I remembered I don't do crowdfunding. So I didn't get one. But then they showed up on Amazon anyway. So I got one. For $15. Saved myself 10 bucks. So, here it is: It looks just like a classic arcade coin slot. Except you can't put a quarter in it. It's heavy cast metal, too - just like an original coin slot. Which unfortunately, makes it entirely too heavy to use as an actual key ring. Plus, it's pretty big. As big as a large car alarm key fob. It's also over 1/2" thick, and the screws which hold it together stick out of the back a little bit. But - and this is the important thing - it does light up. Practical? No. Cool? Definitely.

Ever wanted your own arcade at home? Well, it's time to dust off the 7800 again and give it some much-needed lovin'. Here are three classic arcade shooters for your 7800, brought home by Bob DeCrescenzo. Astro Fighter Astro Fighter was an early vertical shoot 'em up developed by Data East. It was one of the earliest multi-stage shooters featuring different enemies and even a boss battle, pre-dating both Phoenix and Gorf. Your mission was to blast your way through four waves of enemies, then fight the Master ship, all the while keeping an eye on your ever-dwindling fuel reserves. If you ran out of fuel - regardless of lives remaining - your game ended. The Master ship required a very precise hit to destroy, and once you did you could then steal its fuel and continue on, fighting your way through the enemy formations at a higher difficulty. Astro FIghter sits somewhere in the era between black-and-white Space Invaders knock-offs, and better-remembered shooters like Galaxian, Phoenix, Gorf, or... just about anything. Within a year of its release, Astro Fighter already looked and sounded primitive and was largely consigned to the back row of arcades next to the likes of Starhawk and Space Encounters. Initially released about a year and a half after Space Invaders, it was only marginally a step up from there. Graphics were simple and flat-looking with only a handful of primary colors, and the sound effects were sparse, sounding like leftovers from Space Invaders. Dated presentation aside, Astro Fighter has to be given credit for having multiple enemies, varied attack formations, and a boss stage. Unfortunately, despite the thought put into those elements, its biggest weakness is its gameplay. The rate of fire is agonizingly slow and the controls feel sluggish. Compounding that is if any single ship gets past you, you have to take on that entire formation all over again, and the game doubly punishes you by moving your spaceship up higher on the screen, giving you even less of a chance to clear them out. It only takes a couple of missed ships to burn through all of your fuel reserves, and then your game's over. Sometimes it actually makes more sense to collide with an enemy ship, since if you lose one of your ships, at least you don't lose any additional fuel. Astro Fighter is one of those homebrews I find difficult to review. Bob DeCrescenzo did an excellent job porting the arcade game over to the 7800. The graphics, sounds and gameplay are all intact. Unfortunately, I just couldn't find anything about Astro Fighter that made me want to go back and replay it. It's an interesting relic of the past, but the gameplay is tedious. I can acknowledge it's an excellent port, but it's an excellent port of a very outdated game. If you like Astro Fighter, you should definitely pick this up. If you're looking for a fast-action vertical shooter, you may want to look for something else. Astro Fighter gets a 3/5 (2.5 on a half-point scale) Moon Cresta Moon Cresta is one of those games that I don't remember from the arcades at all. I'm sure there were some around, but I don't think I ever played it until it was emulated in MAME. It was one of just a handful of arcade games that Nichibutsu produced, along with their more well-known Crazy Climber. Moon Cresta is a vertical shooter with a variety of aliens swooping down at you, trying to collide with your ship. Initially, you're controlling just a small ship with a single slow-firing laser cannon. If your ship is destroyed, it's replaced with a larger one with two slow-firing laser cannons. And if that one gets destroyed, you get an even larger ship with, again - you guessed it - two slow-firing laser cannons. Each time you die - your ship is essentially replaced by a larger target, with your two guns spaced farther apart. However, if you can clear enough enemy attack waves, you'll be given the opportunity to dock your ship with the one that's the next size up. While this makes you an even bigger target, it greatly increases your firepower, especially if you get all three ships stacked together, since you get to use all of their guns. Even though the fire rate of each set of cannons is still slow, you can now effectively fire them off in rapid succession. It's this ability to stack up ships and pile on more firepower that makes Moon Cresta stand out (and it did this over a year before Galaga). Your advantage is short-lived however, since as the game cycles back to the first set of enemies, you're reduced back to a single ship and you have to start building it up all over again. I played Moon Cresta a lot for this review, both on the 7800 and in MAME. The reason isn't because I like Moon Cresta - it's because I don't. In fact, I don't like it a lot. I'm not sure what a "Cresta" is (besides an old Toyota or a soft drink), but if I had to guess, I suspect it means "Cheap Death". Moon Cresta was designed to steal quarters. The game takes cheap-shots at you - including materializing aliens literally on top of you, or throwing planets at you without any warning. Plus the collision detection seems suspect - both in the arcade version and the 7800 port. There are times I'd swear my shots passed right through an alien. If you lose your first ship, the subsequent ships' guns are so far apart, they can actually bracket an alien and miss it entirely. Finally, there's the aforementioned fire rate - it's agonizingly slow unless you can survive long enough to stack up your ships. At that point, the game becomes playable. Fun, even. That's why I kept playing it - to try to get back to that point. But it's such a tedious, frustrating grind to get there, I'm not sure it's worth it. More often than not, I just found myself getting not only frustrated, but angry. At that point, it's time to put the controller down. There are certainly people who like Moon Cresta and have fond memories of it. Those who have put the time into it to get good enough at it to overcome the frustration factor and avoid the cheap deaths. I'm not one of them, and as I said, I've been playing this game a lot, trying to give the game every chance. Bob DeCrescenzo did an excellent job porting Moon Cresta to the 7800. The quirky-looking graphics are almost spot-on, as are the unique sounds and music. It plays almost exactly like the arcade game - including the sluggish laser cannons and cheap deaths. Fortunately, you can switch to "Easy" and the game becomes somewhat less frustrating, but even then I got to the point where I simply didn't want to play it anymore. It had worn out its welcome. Despite that, the 7800 version of Moon Cresta is a treat for fans of the arcade game. I can't deny the amount of effort and attention to detail put into this port. One minor complaint unrelated to gameplay - Reset doesn't work while your ships are appearing on screen between lives. While not a big issue, I was reaching for Reset a lot while playing this, and it was annoying to have to wait for the game to finish it's "You just lost a life and now you have this many ships left" routine before I could get out of it and start over. Because it's a such a well-made port, and because it has the potential to be fun at times, Moon Cresta gets a 4/5 (3.5 on a half-point scale) Astro Blaster "Fighter pilots needed in sector wars... play Astro Blaster!" I didn't see Astro Blaster in the arcades much back-in-the-day, but when I did, I played it. The distinctive voice was calling me to action - I was needed! For sector wars! How could I refuse whoever these poor people were who were clearly under assault by... whatever those things are? Astro Blaster is a vertical shooter where your ship is blasting away at a huge variety of enemies, each with different attack patterns, all dropping tons of firepower on your head. But you're not just sitting idly there waiting to die - your ship has a ton of firepower at its disposal too. But there's a catch - if you fire too much too fast, your lasers will overheat and shut down until they can cool off. This presents a bigger problem than just being temporarily disarmed, because time is against you too. You're burning through fuel, and if you take too long to take the enemies out, you'll run out and your game is over. If you get through enough enemies, you'll fly through a meteor shower where you can shoot flaming meteors to regain a little extra fuel (because you know... video games), and if you make it through that - you'll have a chance to dock with your mothership and refuel. But there's no rest for the weary - as soon as you've topped up your tanks they throw you right back into action against even fiercer enemies. Astro Blaster had distinctive, detailed graphics unlike anything else at the time, and absolutely frenetic gameplay that begged you to overheat your lasers. It also had something still rare in arcades at the time: voices. From its call for pilots during the attract mode, to in-game speech warning you of your fuel level and other threats, Astro Blaster was packed with distinctive and actually understandable voice samples. Astro Blaster had two other tricks up its sleeve, too: limited use of a "warp" button which would slow down all of the enemies for several seconds, giving you a chance to accurately mow down tricky enemy formations; and secret bonuses that you could earn depending on how you played the game (not overheating your laser, shooting enemies in a certain order, not moving during the refueling stage, etc). All of these added up to an incredibly challenging, fun, and surprisingly deep shooter. Activision apparently thought it was influential enough - they based Megamania on it. Bob DeCrescenzo has done an impressive job bringing Astro Blaster to the 7800. All of the enemies are there, all of the frenetic gameplay, the secret bonuses, the distinctive sound effects, almost everything is remarkably intact. He even uses the difficulty settings to let you choose between the different ROM sets that the arcade game had. The only places the adaptation falls short are that the graphics (notably the enemies) aren't quite as colorful, and sadly, most of the speech didn't make it into the game. The only phrase that survived is the opening call for pilots during the title screen. Fortunately, Bob did include that one (it wouldn't be Astro Blaster without it), and he managed to make clever use of onscreen text to fill in for other phrases that would normally happen during the game. Astro Blaster is a classic shooter that never got much recognition back in the day. Perhaps there was just too much competition at the time for it to stand out. But now you can give it the attention it's due and bring it home for your 7800. Astro Blaster should be part of any 7800 owner's game library! Astro Blaster gets a 5/5 Up next: Bob brings even more arcade games home to the 7800 in Arcade Assault, Vol. 2 < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

Well, this brings us to the halfway point of the current crop of Homebreviews! The frequency of these will be slowing down some, as I have other projects piling up that need my attention. But I'll still continue to piece away at the rest of these in the coming months. Meanwhile, here are two of the best arcade ports ever to grace the 2600. And no, I'm not biased at all. Draconian Full disclosure: I worked on this game, designing the in-game graphics, converting the arcade level layouts, and creating the artwork for the label, manual and box. Draconian is Darrell Spice, Jr.'s port of Namco's arcade classic Bosconian. Your mission is pretty straightforward: blow up every space station in a given sector, then move onto the next sector and repeat. Each station is made up of six weapons pods and a main core. To destroy the station you can either shoot all six pods, or fire a shot into the station's core when its protective shielding is open. The pods will fire a steady barrage of shots at you, and periodically the core will fire a large missile at you if you get in its way. The enemy has homing missiles patrolling around that will try to crash into you, attack formations which will mercilessly hunt you down, and Spy Ships that will report your position if allowed to escape. If that happens, the enemy will throw everything they have at you as your on-board computer yells "Condition Red" over and over. The space stations are smack-dab in the middle of an asteroid field, and the enemy has laid explosive space mines everywhere - making navigation treacherous. All you have to fight back with is your trusty spaceship and its laser cannon. In most games you'd be hopelessly outgunned, but in Draconian your laser fires out of the back of your ship too! That'll teach 'em to tailgate! Draconian is an amazing port of the original arcade game. All of the elements, enemies, gameplay, and action have been squeezed into the 2600. The number of objects on screen is truly impressive, including a parallax scrolling starfield. At times there is significant flicker, but whenever that happens you're likely to be so busy you won't really notice it. There's great attention to detail - the station cores open and close revealing reactors and missiles inside, the attack formation indicator and radar display are both included, all of the arcade levels from both the Namco and Midway arcade versions are there, and in what may be Draconian's most notable feature: the game features digitized voices! Now, digitized voices aren't entirely new, even for the 2600. Quadrun had a digitized voice in 1983, although it only spoke one word, and had to blank the screen when it played. But Draconian manages to bring all of the original arcade voice samples to the 2600, and does so without interrupting the game. From "Blast Off!" to the dreaded "Condition Red!" they're all here, and they don't require any external hardware. Mike Haas did a fantastic job converting the voice samples, as well as recreating the arcade game's other music and sound effects. Draconian is a real audio and visual treat! As great as the game looks and sounds, it shines equally as bright in terms of gameplay. Draconian perfectly captures the intense action of Bosconian, including lightning-quick controls, pixel-perfect collision detection, and difficulty ramping that challenges you without feeling unfair. A slick onscreen menu lets you choose from four difficulty settings; support for NTSC, PAL or even SECAM; the option to start in any of the first 16 sectors; and which quadrant you want to play. Each quadrant features different sector layouts: Midway arcade, Namco arcade, two sets of custom-designed levels (including some submitted by AtariAge members), and one where layouts are generated randomly. Effectively, you should never run out of new sectors to play. Draconian also has a Continue option - so you can start your next game where your last one ended, and a Pause feature. The only thing missing is high score and progress saving with an AtariVox or SaveKey. But adding that would have meant compromising elsewhere, and given how perfect everything else is, it wouldn't have been worth the trade-off. I can happily just write my scores down. Bosconian never seemed to garner the sort of attention other games of its era did. It was always a favorite of mine though, and despite one of my blog posts being the inspiration that prompted Darrell to make Draconian, I never could have dreamed it would turn out like this. This is about as perfect of an arcade port as you can get. The fact that it's on the Atari 2600 is all the more incredible, and it makes you wonder if there is anything homebrewers can't make this system do. Draconian gets a 5/5 Super Cobra Arcade Full disclosure: I worked on this game, designing the in-game graphics, converting the arcade level layouts, and creating the artwork for the label, manual and box. Super Cobra is Konami's follow-up to their classic arcade game Scramble. Instead of a spaceship, you fly a helicopter across even more challenging terrain, through tighter caverns and down twistier tunnels. There are twice as many stages to fight through, with new and more aggressive enemies: guided missiles, saucers that shoot back at you, meteors that actively try to crash into you, tanks that fire at you from below, and mines that drop from the ceiling above. As with Scramble, you still need to refuel your copter by blowing up enemy depots or you'll run out of fuel and crash. Your goal is still to get through all of the stages, but instead of merely blowing up the target at the end, you now have to use your copter to carefully scoop it up and steal it. The arcade version of Super Cobra is incredibly difficult - as if it were designed to punish players who had gotten too good at playing Scramble. Being one of the first arcade games to let you add more credits to continue your game made Super Cobra a true quarter-eater. Unlike Scramble, Super Cobra had been ported to the 2600 back-in-the-day. But the Parker Bros. version had terrible controls, the scrolling was chunky, and most of the enemies had been consolidated down into just a handful of generic shapes. It wasn't the worst arcade port ever, but like many of its day, it was certainly lacking. Not so with Champ Games' Super Cobra Arcade. John Champeau has followed up his already impressive port of Scramble with an even more impressive port of Super Cobra. The "Arcade" in the title isn't simply an affectation, it's serious. As with his version of Scramble, John brought the entire Super Cobra arcade game to the 2600 intact. Every piece of terrain, every building, every enemy, every tunnel, they're all here. The enemies look and move like the originals as well: from the arcing missiles, to spinning drones, and even the tanks that chase along the ground (which is a fun enough stage to make a game all by itself). No detail was missed - the progress bar, fuel gauge, background stars, level indicators and more are all here. Even the terrain and buildings are rendered in multiple colors, faithfully reproducing the arcade game. Despite the amount of action, objects and explosions onscreen at any given time, John has done a masterful job of keeping the flickering under control. Controls and collision detection are perfect. As he did with Scramble, John made using a single fire button work brilliantly for both guns and bombs, while also including support for gamepads with dual fire buttons. The mostly-auto-fire "burst mode" makes a welcomed thumb-saving return as well. Audio by Mike Haas and Bob DeCrescenzo is excellent, from the music to each enemy's distinctive sound effects. Super Cobra Arcade also has a Continue option (no quarters required) - allowing you to work your way further through the game without having to start over, a Pause feature, and AtariVox/SaveKey support for saving high scores and game preferences. Super Cobra Arcade is an outstanding port of the original, fully earning its "Arcade" moniker. Even including Pac-Man, Super Cobra Arcade is the most dramatic improvement that a homebrew has made over a previous 2600 release. There's just no comparison between it and the Parker Bros. version. Even more impressive, John's version actually improves on the original arcade game in one key area: difficulty. Super Cobra Arcade has four difficulty settings: Novice, Standard, Advanced and Expert. Advanced is effectively the same as the arcade game: brutally hard. The enemies are numerous and aggressive, the passageways tight and unforgiving, and you will be hard-pressed to get to the base even using all of your continues. But set the game on Standard, and suddenly you feel more at home. At that point, the game feels truly like a continuation of Scramble: new terrain, new challenges, new enemies, but without the insane jump in difficulty. The enemies are fewer and a little less aggressive, the passageways are a little more open, and there's a nice balance to the whole game. Once you think you've got the hang of Standard, then you can move onto Advanced and practice up for the arcade game. If that's not enough challenge for you, try Expert, where rockets launch on every stage and tank turrets track your movement. If you manage to get far enough - even the terrain will change! The manual is laid out as comic book, written as a sequel to the one from Scramble. Super Cobra Arcade also features what may be my favorite Easter Egg ever: you can play the game using the ship from Scramble! Finally, after over 35 years, Super Cobra is a true sequel to Scramble! Super Cobra Arcade takes everything that made Champ Games' version of Scramble great, and doubles it. More stages, more enemies, and more challenges. By giving you the option of a more playable version while still keeping the arcade difficulty intact, this is everything an arcade port should be, and makes the perfect companion to Scramble. Buy them both! Super Cobra Arcade gets a 5/5 Up next: Two unrelated games without an alliterative or rhyming catchphrase < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

Now it's the 2600's turn for some arcade action! But the ol' gal has some new tricks up her sleeve, even though two of these games have been on the 2600 in one form or other for over 35 years. And yes... I copy-pasted some of my Scramble review from the 7800 version. Nice to see you're paying attention. I probably need to make my reviews a little more succinct though. My review for Pac-Man 4K is actually larger than 4K. Pac-Man 4K I probably shouldn't have to describe Pac-Man any more than I should have to explain Pong, but in Pac-Man you move a yellow pie-shaped character through a maze of dots, eating them as you go. Your goal is to clear out all of the dots, and move along to the next maze. There are four monsters that chase you around, and if they catch you, they'll kill you. If you eat one of four energizers in the maze, you can turn the tables on the monsters and eat them too. There are also bonus fruit items you can pick up for extra points, and after clearing a certain number of mazes, the game will show you short little intermissions featuring the game's characters. I remember the first place I played the arcade version of Pac-Man - the Fred Meyer store on 185th and Aurora, just north of Seattle. My friend Martin and I were already in the habit of riding our bikes over there during lunch, getting a hot dog or pretzel at the cart parked out front, and then playing the handful of arcade games they had inside. We started playing Pac-Man before hearing anything about it becoming popular - we just played it because it was fun. We began developing our own patterns too, without knowing about other people doing it. By the time Pac-Man became a phenomenon, we were already moving onto other games (Battlezone and Defender, in particular). But it was still a favorite of mine, and when Atari announced they were going to make Pac-Man for the 2600, I had to have it. The store I frequented for video games at the time (Video Hut) was primarily a videotape rental place that had expanded to carry video games. The guy who worked there was a great source to hear from about the latest games, because he played them all and got a lot of feedback from customers. Despite his warning that the 2600 version of Pac-Man was awful, I bought it anyway. I was so disappointed with it, I returned it for a refund and bought something else. People often knock Atari's version of Pac-Man as being awful... but why is it awful? For me, it was just that it was so far removed from the arcade game. Pac-Man himself didn't look right. He never faced up or down, had an eye, an his mouth animation was weird. The controls felt sluggish. The maze looked nothing like the arcade game and the colors were all wrong. There were no fruit bonuses (just a square). The monsters were difficult to see. And the sound was terrible - even annoying. Since then, hacks have proven that even simple changes like altering the colors (providing more contrast), or making Pac-Man look more arcade-like, significantly improve peoples' perception of the game. It wasn't that Atari's version of Pac-Man was irredeemable, but rather that by effectively ignoring all of the details from the arcade version that made Pac-Man what it was, you were left with something that could only disappoint fans of the original. There have been previous attempts to bring an improved version of Pac-Man to the 2600 - at least one homebrew and numerous hacks - but nothing has yet come as close as Dennis Debro's Pac-Man 4K. Dennis set out to create the most accurate port of Pac-Man possible within only 4K - the ROM size of Atari's version - and what he was able to pack into that space is impressive! The first thing you'll notice is the maze - the layout from the arcade version has been brought over intact. This is no easy task, given that the arcade game uses a vertical monitor, and the 2600 a horizontal one. The monsters, Pac-Man, and even the fruit items are faithfully reproduced from the arcade game as well - you even see the point values pop up wherever Pac-Man eats a monster. The opening music is nicely reminiscent of the original, as are some of the sound effects. But what matters most is the gameplay. The attention to detail doesn't end with the presentation either, as Dennis put a lot of effort into making Pac-Man 4K play like the arcade game too: tight controls, difficulty progression, even having the monsters' behavior mimic that of the arcade game. There are no difficulty settings, but you can choose to start at different levels. As an aside, I've always found it interesting how people have long used different colloquialisms to name the bonus items. In the manual Dennis uses Peach rather than Orange, and Mush rather than Bell. He also uses Grapes instead of Melon, however right up until I looked it up for this review, I always thought they were grapes, too. (I still think they look more like grapes.) Dennis describes Pac-Man 4K as "no frills", and there were are a few compromises he had to make for the game to fit into 4K: points aren't displayed when you eat fruit, there are no intermissions, no title screen or high score saving, and everything flickers at 20 Hz (which is perfectly acceptable, and a definite improvement over Atari's version). To me, the game feels just a little bit fast (although this may have to do with the maze being squished to fit a horizontal monitor); also the distinctive "wakka-wakka" sound has been reduced to a simple "blip", and the Galaxian level icon has been replaced by an AtariAge logo. Really though, all of these are insignificant. Pac-Man 4K plays like Pac-Man, it looks like Pac-Man, and it's the Pac-Man game Atari should have at least attempted to make in the first place. Now, you can play Pac-Man on your 2600 the way it should be played. Very highly recommended! Pac-Man 4K gets a 5/5 (4.5 on a 1/2 point scale) Space Rocks Full disclosure: I worked on this game, designing the in-game graphics. Space Rocks is Darrell Spice, Jr.'s version of Asteroids. As in the original arcade game, you fly a space ship around the screen, blowing up asteroids. Your goal is to clear out all of the asteroids without colliding with them, or being shot by UFOs which appear from time to time. Atari's original 2600 version was an impressive conversion for its time. I owned it and played it a lot. So much so that I built two five-button controllers with a friend of mine, so we could play the game with proper arcade-like controls. A joystick just wouldn't do! As fun as the 2600 version was though, it did have some limitations - the rocks generally just moved vertically, the asteroids looked like floating blobs of ice cream, you could only fire two shots at a time, and there just couldn't be enough objects onscreen to really replicate the arcade game. Space Rocks fixes all of that... and more. Darrell has managed to put an astonishing number of objects on screen. Even though the asteroids do flicker, you're so busy trying to survive you rarely notice it. The rocks (which rotate) are rendered in high-resolution detail and move in every direction, fully bringing the mayhem of the arcade version to the 2600. There are options to play the game with either solid or outline ("vector") graphics, and to either have multi-colored asteroids or choose from one of over a dozen colors. This let's you mimic the look of the original 2600 Asteroids (multi-colored, solid graphics), arcade Asteroids (white vectors), Asteroids Deluxe (cyan vectors), or customize the look to your choosing. The options don't end there though. The Killer Satellites (renamed Magna-Mines) from Asteroids Deluxe are here too - if you shoot one of these, it splits into six smaller ships that chase you down. Your ship can have shields, hyperspace, or instantly flip 180°. There are several two-player options including Co-op and Fight!; gamepad support; selectable friction and bonus life settings; and even a few Easter Eggs! The gameplay is flawless. Controls are precise and collision detection is pixel-perfect. Your ship rotates smoothly and has 32 firing angles for precision destruction (the 2600 version of Asteroids had only 16). Your ship can fire four shots at a time, and you'll need every one of them. Sound effects are excellent. Difficulty progression is nicely balanced. And there may be no more satisfying moment in video gaming than when one of those tiny UFOs that has just taken out your ship with a cheap shot, gets pulverized by colliding with a big honking space rock. Space Rocks is a must-have for the 2600. It brings home the frenetic arcade action from Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe, with even a little bit of Space Duel thrown in for good measure. There are enough options to keep you from ever tiring of the game, and they're all presented neatly in an intuitive and simple menu. The only (minor) knock is that there is no AtariVox or SaveKey support for saving high scores or your favorite game options. But given everything else Space Rocks offers, those are non-issues. Dave Dries' label and manual artwork nicely evoke the original Asteroids arcade cabinet, adding just the right touch to an already outstanding game. This one is simple: buy it. And get yourself a proper controller, too. Space Rocks gets a 5/5 Scramble (2600) Full disclosure: I worked on this game, designing the in-game graphics and converting the arcade level layouts. Scramble is Konami's classic side-scrolling shooter where you fly a spaceship over different terrains and through tunnels, destroying ground targets, avoiding enemy missiles, and shooting down enemy saucers. Along the way are bonus targets to take out for extra points, and fuel tanks that you'll need to destroy in order to replenish your own dwindling fuel supply. Get through all five stages and you'll enter the enemy base. If you can destroy it, your reward is a quick congratulatory message before getting sent right back out to do the whole thing all over again at a higher difficulty. The more bases you destroy, the faster the enemies will be, the faster you'll fly - giving you less time to react, and the faster you'll use your fuel up. If you run out of fuel, crash, or get hit by an enemy, you'll lose a ship. Lose all of your ships, and your game is over. John Champeau did an amazing job bringing Scramble to the 2600. The 2600 doesn't usually handle horizontal scrolling very well, and even though this version of Scramble effectively "pulses" along rather than scrolling smoothly, it doesn't matter. All of the gameplay is intact, and the game is so faithful to the arcade version, you can actually practice on one version and improve on the other. A rare feat for any 2600 game. While the resolution of the 2600 is dramatically reduced from the arcade version, all of the terrain, tunnels and caverns from the arcade game are present. If you're familiar with the arcade game, the 2600 version is a screen-for-screen match. Even the dreaded tunnel level has all of the same twists, turns and obstacles of the original. The multicolored graphics vividly reproduce all of the details of the arcade game including enemies, explosions, buildings, the progress bar, fuel gauge and even background stars. John has managed to fit an impressive number of objects on the screen at the same time, all with negligible flicker. The sound effects and music by Bob DeCrescenzo and Mike Haas are excellent, nicely bringing the atmosphere of the arcade game home. As great as Scramble looks and sounds, one of its most impressive feats are its controls - especially compared to Parker Bros.' version of Super Cobra. Scramble's controls are perfect. The ship feels just like the arcade version, even down to the ground-scraping collision detection. Best of all though, are your ship's weaponry. Somehow, John has managed to make a single fire button work for both lasers and bombs. It feels completely intuitive - you're actually firing both at the same time, yet you can still bomb or shoot exactly when you need to. John also included a much-welcomed "burst mode", which is a rapid-fire feature that will save your thumb a lot of work; and there's also support for Genesis gamepads - so you can have separate buttons for lasers and bombs - just like the arcade game. If all of that wasn't enough, John added multiple difficulty levels, including an Expert mode which ramps up the challenge to Super Cobra levels; high score saving with an AtariVox or SaveKey; and even a Pause feature. Dave Dries' fantastic label artwork recalls the look of 70's-era blacklight posters, and the manual is written and illustrated as a comic book, spinning a backstory for the game while also describing how to play it. Scramble is an all-time classic arcade game. I was always disappointed that it was never brought to the 2600 back in the day. Had it been, I probably would've been disappointed with the results. Now, I can fully enjoy a no-compromise version that's every bit as good as the arcade original. It was well worth the wait, and is something that belongs in everyone's 2600 game library. Scramble gets a 5/5 Up next: because I didn't want to write five reviews for this entry, we'll have Arcade Assault, Vol. 4 < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

Bob DeCrescenzo continues to bring your own personal arcade a few steps closer to reality with more classics for the 7800. This time: two games from Cinematronics and three from Stern. (Okay... Scramble was only licensed to Stern. But a link is a link. ) Armor Attack II Armor Attack is the classic vector arcade game by Cinematronics in which you control a Jeep with a gun mounted on it, and your mission is to take out as many enemy tanks as possible. It will take two shots to do it - your first shot only disables a tank, but leaves its turret free to track and fire at you. It will eventually self-destruct on its own, but you don't get any points for that. For full points, you need to make both shots count. Complicating things are enemy helicopters that will fly overhead and make strafing runs at you. Fortunately, you can take those out with just a single shot. Take down five copters, and you earn an extra Jeep. Run out of Jeeps, and your game's over. Armor Attack II is Bob DeCrescenzo's 7800 sequel to Armor Attack. All of the original gameplay is there, but Bob also added different terrain layouts to the game, adding much more variety. You get a different layout at random each time you start the game, and after completing a certain number of rounds, you move on to a different layout. While the extra layouts are great, I wish they were numbered so you could more easily choose a favorite. Another change is that more tanks will come after you - the arcade game topped out at just three (although that was plenty once they got moving fast). Graphics are decent, although I would've liked to have seen an attempt at mimicking the original's vector graphics. Sound is adequate, although to be fair, there's not much sound in the original either (although I do miss the "squeaking" of the tank treads). Tanks are less forgiving in the 7800 version in that they're fatal if you touch them at all with your Jeep. In the arcade version, you can bump them from behind or the sides without issue. But I suppose since this is a sequel, you would expect the tanks to up their game a little bit. Armor Attack has always been a favorite of mine, and Armor Attack II nicely builds upon the original. While a solid single player game in its own right, where both versions really shine is in two-player mode. Cooperative games are often more fun than their single-player counterparts, and Armor Attack II is no exception. I'd highly recommend that you use proper five-button controllers (like a Starplex), since that's really the best way to play a game like this. My only real complaint about Armor Attack II is that I wish the Jeeps had more than 16 angles of rotation. I'll often find myself bracketing an enemy tank on either side with my shots, forcing me to move out of a safe spot in order to hit my target. For a sprite as small as the Jeep, it's difficult to make unique-looking shapes for each position. However, less important is the appearance of the sprite itself, than where the shots are going. So even if no intermediate sprites could be drawn for additional positions, the angle of where you're firing could still change in finer increments. Armor Attack II is a worthy successor to the arcade classic, especially with a second player. The additional terrain layouts add a tremendous amount of replay value to the game, as you have to formulate different strategies for each one. Highly recommended. Armor Attack II gets a 5/5 (4.5 on a half-point scale) Rip Off Rip Off is a classic vector arcade game by Cinematronics where you must protect some triangular fuel cells in the center of the screen. Enemy tanks will come out and try to steal the fuel, and you must use your own tank's cannon to stop them. The enemies will fight back though, as they have short-range pulse lasers that will destroy your tank in a flash. You have unlimited tanks, but once the fuel cells are all gone, the game is over. If you add a second player, you can team up to fight the fuel thieves together. I always felt that Rip Off was built to rip off quarters from arcade players. In single player mode it's a pretty brutal game, accelerating rapidly in difficulty. The enemies get smarter, faster, and more accurate within just a few attack waves. Without a second player, you don't stand much of a chance. With a second player, the game becomes much more playable because the odds are improved, plus you're less likely to have both players die at the same time. About the only two suggestions I have for a single player game are: when new tanks are about to appear, rotate in a circle while rapid-firing shots around you - you might just hit something by accident; and if you're having trouble shooting an enemy tank - ram him! Sometimes you can shoot one tank while ramming another, and if they're the last two in a wave, your new tank will appear before the next enemies do. Bob DeCrescenzo's 7800 port of Rip Off is about as close to the arcade game as you could hope for. The pseudo-vector graphics mimic those of the arcade nicely, making each type of tank distinct and recognizable. As an added plus, the graphics are in color. Sounds are minimal, as they are in the arcade game. The only minor gameplay difference I noticed was that in the arcade version, running over the fuel cells causes your tank to slide around, and in the 7800 version it doesn't. Rip Off's weak point is that you can't rotate or aim precisely. The arcade version had effectively limitless angles of rotation, but the 7800 version is limited to only 16. As it is now, I often have trouble zeroing in on an enemy tank when firing at it, and it gets progressively worse as distances increase. While having to defend something adds a unique twist to the "thrust, rotate and fire" genre (rather than just blowing stuff up), as a single-player game Rip Off doesn't offer a lot of replay value. The gameplay is pretty shallow and wears out its welcome quickly. However, as a two-player game, Rip Off is transformed and comes alive. A much-welcomed "Easy" setting helps novice players adapt to the difficulty of the game. As with other games that use a similar control scheme, a five-button controller (like a Starplex) is an absolute must. If Rip Off were a single-player only game, I wouldn't have much to recommend about it. But if you can find a second person to team up with, it's worth checking out. Rip Off gets a 4/5 (3.5 on a half-point scale) Frenzy Frenzy is the sequel to Stern's arcade hit Berzerk. In both games, you start out in a maze of rooms and your goal is to fight your way past enemy robots and escape to the next set of rooms. The robots will fire lasers at you and move in your direction, closing in on you. If you linger too long in a set of rooms, Evil Otto - a bouncing smiley face - will come out and chase you down. Berzerk and Frenzy are effectively the same in terms of gameplay, but Frenzy changes things up by adding: different robots, walls that reflect shots back at you, walls that can be destroyed (and escaped through), an Evil Otto that can be stopped temporarily, and four special maze rooms each with a unique gameplay element. Bob DeCrescenzo brought both Frenzy and Berzerk to the 7800 in a single cart, which makes this a terrific value. All of the gameplay elements from the arcade games are here, including the games' distinctive sound effects and digitized voices. Berzerk was one of the earliest arcade games with voices, and the 7800 version just wouldn't feel complete without it shouting "Chicken! Fight like a robot!" as you escaped from a room. The graphics are spot-on recreations from the arcade games, although a little less colorful. Both games play so much like the originals, that my best scores on the 7800 and arcade versions are effectively identical. The only significant knock I could find with Frenzy and Berzerk is that whenever the digitized voices play, the game action pauses briefly. To minimize the disruptiveness of this, the voices are restricted to those that happen near the end of a level. Welcomed additions to both games are two-player cooperative and competitive modes. This lets two players either take on the robots as a team, or take each other out for extra bonus points (the arcade versions only had turn-based two-player games). Missing from the game are different difficulty settings, so novice players may feel frustrated without an Easy option to learn the game, and expert players may find themselves wishing for a Hard option to really challenge their skills. Frenzy for the 7800 contains two excellent arcade conversions in one. Minor shortcomings aside, Frenzy is highly recommended for any 7800 owner looking for some arcade action. Frenzy gets a 5/5 (4.5 on a half-point scale) Scramble Scramble is Konami's classic side-scrolling shooter where you fly a spaceship over different terrains and through tunnels, destroying ground targets, avoiding enemy missiles, and shooting down enemy saucers. Along the way are bonus targets to take out for extra points, and fuel tanks that you'll need to destroy in order to replenish your own dwindling fuel supply. Get through all five stages and you'll enter the enemy base. If you can destroy it, your reward is a quick congratulatory message before getting sent right back out to do the whole thing all over again at a higher difficulty. The more bases you destroy, the faster the enemies will be, the faster you'll fly - giving you less time to react, and the faster you'll use your fuel up. If you run out of fuel, crash, or get hit by an enemy, you'll lose a ship. Lose all of your ships, and your game is over. Bob DeCrescenzo's 7800 version of Scramble is a near-perfect rendition of the original. All of the terrain and objects are replicated exactly, and the game plays exactly like the arcade game down to the smallest detail. The sound effects and opening music sound like they were lifted right out of the arcade game. The only minor differences is that there aren't quite as many colors used for the graphics, and along the left and right edge of the screen the terrain "pulses" as it enters and exits the screen. However, that's quickly and easily ignored as soon as you start playing the game. The game offers three difficulty settings for players of different skills. Scramble is as good as arcade ports get. If you're a fan of the original or just want a good, fun shooter for the 7800, this is must-have. Scramble gets a 5/5 Up next: the 2600 strikes back in Arcade Assault, Vol. 3 < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

I picked these up the other day: There are quite a few of these mini-arcade cabinets on the market. Different manufacturers make their own versions with various games being available. Some are available at Target and other stores, but I decided to pick up these particular ones from Amazon after seeing Ben Heck hack one of them into a multi-game keychain: There have been a number of reviews of them online, most of them being pretty favorable. To me they just looked... cool. I liked that the marquees lit up, that they were fully playable games, and I wanted all of the cabinets to match. Because that's important. Plus, most of them are only around $12 on Amazon and they come with batteries that are actually replaceable (3 AAA's). Even the Flashback Portable didn't have that! So I bought two of them to just check them out, and liked them well enough to buy the other two. The games aren't arcade-accurate, but neither were the old Coleco mini-arcade games from the early 80's. If you think of them in that context, they're pretty amazing. These little cabinets (and they are tiny) actually have little LCD screens, and are fully playable adaptations of the arcade games. They all play surprisingly well, too. It's not going to give you the same experience as MAME, but that's not the point. These are super-cool little things to have on a shelf or a desktop to play once in awhile and show off to other gamers (or people who just like cool stuff). For that, they're awesome. And every once in awhile, you just need to buy yourself a toy. These particular ones are made by Super Impulse, and they're planning to release Galaga, Dig Dug and Frogger this year, too. Hopefully they'll be able to continue to release even more after that. Basically, anything with a joystick and two or fewer buttons would work pretty well. (Q*Bert would require them to rotate the stick 45°, so that may not be as likely to happen.) Frogger looks like it will use different artwork than the classic arcade cabinet. So I may have to see about replacing that... Anyway, these are worth checking out. I think of the lot, Pac-Man and Galaxian play the most like the arcade games. But they're all still good fun, and they put a big smile on my face everytime I look up at them on the shelf.

Well, after reviewing nine games in the previous entry, this time I'm just reviewing one... In the arcade version of Star Castle your goal is to destroy a rotating cannon in the center of the screen that's protected by a shield of rotating rings. You have to use your spaceship's guns to blast holes in the rings until you can punch through and destroy the cannon. But as soon as you have a clear shot - so does the cannon. The cannon also releases mines that aggressively chase your ship around the screen. If they hit you - you're a goner. With each of these Star Castles that you destroy, you gain an extra ship, but your enemy isn't sitting idly by... he's getting faster. And faster. Star Castle is an arcade icon. Its vivid vector graphics stood out from other games, and the howling sound of the pulsating castle was instantly recognizable, even across a noisy arcade. Its simple gameplay belied a fierceness that was rarely matched in games of the era, with the enemy mines approaching speeds that seemed impossible to defeat. So... how do the two 2600 homebrew versions do in recreating this iconic game? Star Castle 2600 (D. Scott Williamson) While not the first attempt at a homebrew version Star Castle, this was the first one completed. Former Atari Lynx programmer D. Scott Williamson had read how Atari 2600 programmer Howard Scott Warshaw had created Yars' Revenge basically because he didn't think a proper version of Star Castle could be done on the 2600. Williamson took that challenge to heart, and working over the next couple of years completed his own version of Star Castle. In keeping with what could have been released back in 1981, he chose to limit the ROM size to 8K. Star Castle 2600 manages to keep all of the key elements of the original arcade game: the castle's vector-like rings and cannon are effectively drawn using the 2600's sprites; ring segments can be shot away and the cannon will fire massive fireballs at your ship when it gets a clear shot; mines sent out from the castle will chase you relentlessly; the castle explodes in an appropriately spectacular way; and the audio does an admirable job of mimicking the arcade game (although it can't quite manage the same booming sounds of the original hardware). There's also a nice added detail where the castle gradually turns from yellow to orange to red, the more it gets damaged. The gameplay is essentially intact from the arcade version. The same tactics used for the arcade game can be adapted to work on the 2600... for the most part. Where Star Castle 2600 falls short however, is in the details: Each ring segment only takes one hit to destroy. This completely changes how you have to approach shooting at them, since you don't want to accidentally destroy an entire ring, causing it to regenerate. On the other hand, needing fewer hits can also make the castle much easier to destroy. I've actually blown up a few accidentally. If you destroy one of the inner rings, it will regenerate itself. In the arcade game, only destroying the outer ring should cause a regeneration. Destroying the outer ring completely regenerates all rings, regardless of damage. In the arcade game, this only causes the inner ring to regenerate, pushing the other two rings outward. You can only shoot three shots at a time. While this is true in the arcade version, the way Star Castle 2600 handles it is different - it actually cancels already in-flight shots if you hit the fire button too many times. So you may have a shot on target, only to have it disappear because you were a little too rapid with the rapid fire. Your ship's top speed is fast, but it turns and accelerates sluggishly from a standstill, leaving you especially vulnerable in the faster levels. The fireball that the cannon shoots at you is too fast. There's almost no way of avoiding it or outrunning it, as you can in the arcade game. When you destroy a castle, your ship is always reset to a default starting point. In the arcade game, you can position your ship strategically for the next castle. The difficulty ramp stays almost flat for the first five castles, then suddenly leaps forward to ludicrous speed. While the arcade version of Star Castle gets pretty brutal, the difficulty ramp there is more gradual. The mines fly in lock-step. In other words, they all fly at the same speed and direction, and usually they're bunched together. Consequently, they're typically pretty easy to avoid. In fact, if you want to take a break, you can park your ship and just tap fire over and over, and they'll all just keep flying right into your shots. The arcade game's mines move independently from each other. When you ricochet your ship off the rings, it will send you rocketing off at a much higher speed. The arcade game just gently bounces you off. Finally, the game's visual proportions are off. Compared to the arcade game, the 2600 player's ship is double the size, and the castle itself is full third larger. What this means is that you have far less room to maneuver, and you make for a much larger target for the cannon. Sure, the cannon is larger as well, but it doesn't have to fly around the screen dodging mines. This drastically reduces the amount of time you have to react, and how and from where you can attack the castle. Williamson went to great lengths to produce this game - including designing a circuit board that would flash LEDs during the game, and hand-molding and assembling hundreds of translucent cartridge shells. While the LEDs are a cool effect, they add nothing to the game itself and I found myself ignoring them as soon as the novelty wore off. Still, it's an intriguing idea that could perhaps be utilized for a more practical, interactive element. Such as green, yellow and red LEDs that gave you status warnings during a game. Star Castle 2600 is still an impressive effort, especially taking into account the ROM size, and that the programmer had never coded a 2600 game before. Had this been released in 1981 it certainly would have been a success. And while it plays enough like the arcade game to be passable for casual players, once you dive into the details of the game it falls a bit short. The abrupt difficulty ramp and lack of any game variations hinder its replay value too. Star Castle 2600 is not available in the AtariAge store, as it was only sold through Kickstarter. But you can download the ROM and read the story behind it here. Star Castle 2600 gets a 3/5 (Note: since reviewing these on a 5-point scale is like scoring with a sledgehammer, I'm implementing 1/2 point scores in my reviews where necessary, even though the AA store still doesn't support them. In this case, Star Castle 2600 would get a 3.5.) Star Castle Arcade (Team Antonym, aka: Chris Walton, Thomas Jentzsch, Ivan Machado, Richard Armijo, Nathan Strum) First, full disclosure: I worked on this game, designing the in-game graphics and creating the papercraft cabinet. Star Castle Arcade was developed as an attempt to get as close to the arcade version of Star Castle as the 2600's hardware would allow. And while this version uses 28K ROM and extra RAM to achieve this, what's most important is how it plays - and this plays very much like the arcade original. The controls, the speed, the frenetic action - it's all there. One important point though - enjoying Star Castle fully requires playing it with a five-button controller. A Starplex one will do fine, but I made my own from an old Atari joystick cable, a few arcade buttons bought online, and an old box with some holes drilled in it. The difficulty ramps up very similarly to the arcade game (it may be a little easier - but given how hard Star Castle gets, that's not a bad thing). To get past five castles, you will have to be a very good player. Fortunately, if you've practiced on the arcade game, it will actually help you with this version, and the reverse is true as well. A rare thing for an Atari 2600 game. The 2600's sprites are used nicely in recreating a vector-like castle, complete with a pulsating energy cannon. The castle is a little larger than its arcade counterpart, but still leaves your ship plenty of plenty of space to maneuver and employ strategies from the arcade game. The rings are each a different color, and each ring segment requires two hits to destroy (the first hit will dim a segment, the second destroys it). The castle even collapses and explodes in a display much like the arcade game. The player's ship is a bit small and mostly devoid of detail, but this was done to approximate the size of the arcade version. The ship rotates very smoothly, but perhaps a little too fast, making it difficult to always get it pointed in the desired direction. The mines that aggressively pursue you flicker and flutter around like their arcade counterparts. The fonts used to display your score mimic the appearance of vector graphics, and even the infamous "centerfold" star pattern is present. Sound is excellent, with the howl of the castle ascending and descending as it does in the arcade, although the fluttering sounds of the mines from the arcade game have been replaced with sonar-like "pings". The only negative I could really take away from the game is that the fireball that the cannon shoots at you is a bit too fast - in the arcade game you can actually outrun it. As it is, we're only talking differences of a split-second. From a strictly aesthetic standpoint, there's an enhancement where the ring colors change from castle to castle (and also as the rings regenerate), and while this does add some visual interest (and can help you remember which castle you're on), a "purist" mode where the arcade colors stayed in place would have been welcomed. Although for a true "purist" look, you always can run the game in black and white and tape a colored overlay to your TV. In the tradition of 2600 homebrews, Star Castle Arcade also adds some nice extras not present in the arcade game: four game variations - including making the castle fatal to collide with (for you hardcore players); switchable NTSC/PAL color palettes; a pause feature; a title screen with some rocking TIA music; and high score tables that are saved on-cartridge - no AtariVox or SaveKey needed. And while I typically don't review packaging as part of a review, Star Castle Arcade does come with a nice extra - a papercraft Star Castle cabinet that you can cut out and assemble. It would be cool if even more of these were available for other homebrew arcade ports (although I can tell you from creating this one - they take a lot of work). Star Castle Arcade is indeed as close as you can get to the original arcade game on the 2600. For that matter, short of the Vectrex, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more faithful console version anywhere. Star Castle Arcade gets a 5/5 Up next: Puzzle Pandemonium* *Note: May not actually contain any pandemonium. < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

Because reviewing five games last time wasn't enough... I really like mini-game collections. Sure, not all of the games in a given collection will appeal to everyone, but usually you can find one or two real gems on a given multi-cart, and they're typically good value for money. Plus the idea of a quick, simple game is part of the 2600's DNA, stretching back to the original nine games the system was designed to play. There are plenty of unissued, fun mini-games still out there in the forums, just waiting to be gathered and released together on carts. Simone Serra who created Lead, Sync and Omicron (you still out there, Seemo?) has enough excellent mini-games for at least two or three mini-game collections of his own. I'd love to see a new series of AtariAge Mini-Game Multi-Carts, to follow up the one from 2005. Maybe that would encourage more development of these smaller but still fun titles. In the meantime, here are two such collections. Unfortunately, one of them is no longer available... The Byte Before Christmas The Byte Before Christmas is a collection of four sometimes vaguely Christmas-themed mini-games, each programmed by a different author. The games are selected from a main menu featuring festive graphics and a nice rendition of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas". To return to the menu, you must power the console off and back on again. Santa's Scabs (Jarod Kitchen) I was going to make a joke about picking this one to review first, but then thought better of it. Anyway... Santa's Scabs is about an elf labor strike at Santa's workshop, and you - apparently being an out-of-work ninja - decide to cross the picket line to get a job. Your first objective is to collect three pieces of coal. This is done by kicking picketing elves in the face. You can't kick them in the shins, or in the back. Only the face. This isn't quite as easy as it sounds since you're a very short ninja (or they're very tall elves), your kick must be precise, and you can kick only one specific elf at a time. Any other contact with the elves at this point is deadly. When you do connect, the target elf will drop a piece of coal. Collect three of these, and you can then go through and gleefully kick the rest of the elves in their faces too, or just skip all of the face kicking and take on their boss. Then you have to kick him in the face until he stops twitching, and you can enter the workshop and move onto the next level. Santa's Scabs feels like a martial arts beat-'em-up game that was loosely re-themed as a Christmas game. If you just looked at it without knowing the backstory, it could take place almost anywhere, with only a few bars of "Santa Claus is Coming To Town" and some of the graphics to give it away (typically, reindeer aren't in beat-'em-ups). Even bearing in mind that this is a mini-game, there's still not much to it. You kick elves and bosses in their faces, then it just repeats. The graphics are okay, but the controls have one nagging problem - in order to help line up your ninja with the elves, the game automatically "snaps" you in line with them. The problem with that is that it's a bit too aggressive, and I often found myself being pushed up into a picket line of angry elves while just trying to retrieve a piece of coal. The snapping effect is a nice idea, but it shouldn't take effect until you're closer to being in line. The game is also a bit buggy, with some visual artifacts showing up from time to time, and one of the bosses I was fighting got "stuck" while jumping in mid-air, forcing me to hit Reset and start over. Santa's Scabs doesn't offer much in the way of variety, so some different formations of elves or more locations would have been welcomed. The game suffers from a lack of fine-tuning as well. It's passable as part of a mini-game collection, but calling it Christmas-themed is stretching the concept. Christmas Adventure (Todd Holcomb, graphics by Illya Wilson) Christmas Adventure is a mix between Adventure and How The Grinch Stole Christmas, but rather than being just a graphics hack of Adventure, this one was programmed from scratch. This makes a huge difference, since the layout isn't as restrictive, the flicker is dramatically reduced, and the graphics are an order of magnitude better. Not only are the sprites absolutely first-rate (and look like they should have come from a far more advanced console), but even the low-resolution playfield backgrounds have been transformed into beautifully detailed street scenes, rooms, and the Grinch's lair. The game itself plays just like an appropriately mini-sized version of Adventure. Max (the Grinch's dog) plays the role of the object-stealing bat (and is just as annoying), and the dragons have been replaced by toys that have run amok. Your weapon of choice is a stale candy cane (probably sharpened into a shank), and there are other objects and goals as well, which I'll leave you to discover. Suffice it to say I had a great deal of fun playing this, discovering how to solve it, and really relishing the attention to detail. It's not a huge game, but it doesn't need to be. I found this to be a truly delightful Christmas-themed game, despite writing the review for it in the middle of July. Bell Hopper (Tomas Härdin) Bell Hopper is a game in the vein of the smartphone hit Doodle Jump. In Bell Hopper, you control a bunny that hops upwards, aiming to land on bells floating in the air. As you land on each bell, the bell disappears and you're propelled even higher. If you miss a bell, and there are none below you, you fall all the way back to the ground, and your score resets to zero (but your highest score will still be displayed). There are no deaths - you just start hopping again. I actually found that a refreshing approach. After all, who wants to be mean to bunnies? There are also birds that if you hop on them, they'll double your score. If you're playing for points, you can rack up some incredibly high scores this way, to the extent that after awhile they'll be shown using scientific notation. Well, bunnies are known for multiplying. Bell Hopper is an incredibly fun, addictive game. The graphics are charming, and while the joystick control is already very good, the game really shines when you plug in a paddle. Yes - Bell Hopper supports paddles! And since you plug the paddle into the right controller port, you can leave the joystick plugged in for the other games. Bell Hopper doesn't really have much to do with Christmas, but the manual features a backstory that (sort-of) ties the game in with the rest of the collection. Really though, Bell Hopper is an outstanding mini-game that you can enjoy any time of year. Naughty List (Mike Saarna) Naughty List is another game that makes me wonder if it actually started out as a Christmas game, because thematically it's also a little bit weird. In this game you play Santa Claus, flying his sleigh over the city, and dropping presents full of explosives on buildings, destroying them. It's an odd cross between Rampage and Canyon Bomber, but with a rage-filled Santa Claus causing the mayhem. There's only one control - the fire button - so Santa's sleigh is on auto-pilot. As you fly repeatedly across the screen, your reindeers descend with each pass, making the buildings a threat to navigation. If you don't take out all of the buildings in time, you'll crash and lose a reindeer. Lose all three reindeer, and the game ends (apparently the others are still out playing reindeer games). You must avoid dropping packages onto innocent pedestrians, and on some levels indestructible bulldozers will come out to add to (or repair) buildings, making them even taller and more of a hazard. Naughty List has the same sort of potential for fun that Canyon Bomber has, but there are a few shortcomings with it. First, you have to bomb the exact center of the base of the buildings. There are no off-center hits. It would have been more interesting if near-misses inflicted varying degrees of damage, but here it's all or nothing. Another issue I had is with the trajectory of the falling packages - they don't follow a proper arc. This may seem trivial, but details like that really help a game feel polished. Instead, the packages just drop almost straight down, to the point where you can line up your shot by waiting until part of Santa's sleigh is over the building you want to hit. Once you adapt to this, it takes much of the challenge away and the game becomes pretty repetitive. For more variety, it would have been nice to have seen additional ground targets to either take out or avoid, or add the challenge of making the player duck under oncoming airline traffic. The graphics are very well done, and while there are a couple of short bars from Christmas tunes, thematically the idea of Santa leveling entire cities is still a bit odd. The game plays well enough for what it is, but like most of the packages that Santa drops, it ends up falling short. The verdict I already liked the idea of mini-game collections, and having them linked thematically (even if it's a bit forced at times) makes for a nice way to package them together. While Santa's Scabs and Naughty List are playable, they're merely okay. The real standouts on this cart are Christmas Adventure and Bell Hopper. Those two alone make The Byte Before Christmas worth owning. Consider the other two games a Christmas bonus. The Byte Before Christmas gets a 4/5. Piñata Piñata is a collection of five games created using batari Basic by AtariAge member Cybearg. The games are selected through on onscreen menu, which can be returned to from any game by holding Select and Reset. High scores can be saved using an AtariVox or SaveKey. Heartbreak Heartbreak is the sort of game that instead of being limited by the 2600's capabilities, finds a an interesting way to exploit them to come up with something unique. You use the joystick controller (or driving controller) to rotate a ring made of 16 Pong paddles. A ball bounces across the center of the ring, and each time it hits a paddle, the ball bounces off it, removing that paddle, leaving a gap in the ring. The goal is to remove all of the paddles without letting the ball through a gap, so you're constantly rotating the ring back and forth to make sure you can hit a paddle. It's a bit like a cross between Breakout and Radial Pong, but there's more to it than that. There's a heart beating in the center of the ring, and each miss reduces the size of the heart. When it's gone, your game is over. While this is a clever way to show your lives remaining, there's more to it than that. The heart also changes color as it beats, which is a key component to this game. The first level is all one color, so all you have to worry about is not missing. But after that, the paddles have different colors, and you have to change the color of your ball to match the color of the paddle you want to take out. But you can only change the color of the paddle to the current color of the heart, so timing and decision making become critical. In later levels, you deal with paddles that require multiple hits to clear out. So for example, to clear a purple block, you have to hit it with a red ball and a blue ball. It requires some thought and planning. Using a driving controller feels more intuitive, but it's still perfectly playable with the joystick, mostly because the ball will only ever hit the same four locations. In a way, this actually helps the game, since there's less guesswork involved in where you're going to have to position a particular paddle. But it would be nice if, as the game progressed, the number of possible angles would increase. There are a lot of untapped possibilities for a game like this, including different sizes and numbers of paddles, gravity or wind that would make the ball curve, and so on. Still, Heartbreak is a fun game as it is, and has a really inventive play mechanic. My one gripe with it is that the colors selected for orange and red look nearly identical on my TV. Pushing orange to a lighter shade would have helped distinguish the two. Ping Ping takes what can often be a frustrating game element - invisible mazes - and turns it into the centerpiece of a unique and addicting game. In Ping, you control a bat (named Ping) that you have to navigate through pitch-black caves, avoiding walls, dodging owls, and eating insects. But you can't see anything since you're, well, blind as a bat. But you can use echolocation to find your way. Pressing the fire button sends out a signal which briefly reveals (lights up) the cave for you. But it only does it for a second, and then it fades away. You have to move quickly to navigate through what you just saw. For each screen, you can press the fire button up to three times to echolocate, then you're completely in the dark until you can find your way to the next cave. The concept works brilliantly because of a phenomenon known as persistence of vision. This is what allows us to see sequential images (such as film or TV frames) as continual motion. In Ping, because of this effect, you see an after-image of the cave for a brief second or two after the image fades. The effect is even more pronounced on a CRT display. This allows you enough time to navigate through the mazes in short bursts. I'd love to see an effect like this used in other games with invisible mazes (I'm looking at you, Adventure hacks). It makes navigating in the dark actually a fun challenge, rather than just random flailing and frustration. It's not always easy, and some of the passageways are a bit too narrow, but Ping is a perfect example of a programmer thinking of a really cool way to approach a problem. It's a fun, innovative, and smart little mini-game. Joyride In Joyride, you're playing the role of a motorcycling daredevil, who is riding headlong into oncoming traffic. Your goal, simply put, is to stay alive by dodging cars. You can also pick up "flares" which can be triggered to clear the screen of all cars if you get in a tight spot. There's also a two-player cooperative mode where the game only ends if both players have crashed at the same time. Joyride is an okay game, but it's just not very interesting. It's repetitive, and reminiscent of some of Activision's dodge-the-obstacle games (Grand Prix, Barnstorming), but without a timer to beat or Activision's nicely detailed graphics. Joyride's cars and trucks are just featureless rectangles. The two-player version doesn't really add anything extra to the game, other than you have two people trying to dodge traffic at the same time. But you're not dodging each other - you pass right through the other player. I think there's a real missed opportunity here to have a two-player combative mode, where you'd push the other motorcycle into the traffic. Add some AI for a single-player version, make up a backstory about having to fend off a biker gang or enemy spies, and you'd be good to go. Fixer Fenix Sr. No that's not a typo. It's spelled Fixer Fenix Sr., but it should be obvious that it's a riff on Fix-It Felix Jr. from the movie Wreck-It Ralph. This is an attempt to bring the arcade game featured in that movie to the Atari 2600, and it meets with mixed results. The object is to climb around on a building, fixing windows that have been broken by a big, hulking brute, who is also dropping bricks on your head. You must also dodge flying birds, and you can pick up pies from window sills to gain extra lives. On the plus side, all of the essential elements are here, but for a game that was all about the characters, the execution just falls short. The character sprites are low resolution and completely devoid of any detail. The buildings are featureless, and broken windows aren't actually shown on the building - you have to look at an indicator at the bottom of the screen to see which ones need fixing. Sound effects are minimal and generic. The controls are decent - once you adapt to how long Fenix has to stay in place to repair a window - but the gameplay is repetitive. Fixer Fenix Sr. just doesn't have the level of inventiveness or polish of some of the other games in this collection. It's an admirable attempt, but perhaps an over-reached one. Flipside Rounding out the collection is Flipside. You play one of two combatants trapped in an arena by an evil alien overlord for his amusement. (Isn't that just always the way?) Your goal - be the first to collect four orbs. Simple enough. You (or your opponent) can also steal orbs from each other, which adds to the competitive nature of the game. But Flipside's real hook is that you can control your own personal gravity. Press the button, and you fall up. Press it again, and you fall down. This adds a really fun, unique element to the game, and it becomes intuitive (and addictive) very quickly. The AI opponent in single-player mode is a bit random, but persistent enough to keep the action going so you can still enjoy this game even without a second player. If anything, I wish Flipside were larger - with more arenas to play in, more objects to collect, and more goals to achieve. It'd be fun to have side-to-side gravity on some levels, or vary the strength of it. There's a lot of untapped potential in this play mechanic. As it is though, Flipside is still an excellent little mini-game, especially for two players. The verdict Piñata is a mixed bag, although three of the games: Heartbreak, Ping and Flipside make the collection worth checking out. Unfortunately, Piñata was removed from the AtariAge store by its author, likely out of copyright concerns about Fixer Fenix Sr. This is a real shame, since Piñata would be just fine without it. Hopefully the author will reconsider adding it back to the store in a modified form, maybe even with a few new additions. Piñata gets a 4/5 Up next: a review you probably thought you'd never see: Star Castle Showdown < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

After nearly eight years, it's finally time for... RETURN OF THE HOMEBREVIEWS!! (Cue dramatic music sting.) There are so many games I have to catch up on, I'm grouping them into thematic chunks. You'll see what I mean once I get rolling. Actually, I suppose I could just do these one game at a time. But grouping them together sort-of forces me to play some games I wouldn't otherwise be that interested in reviewing. Case in point... Haunted Adventure Trilogy (Atari 2600) Haunted Adventure Trilogy is a collection of three hacks on one cart, and continues the story from the original Atari Haunted House. However, none of these are actually hacks of Haunted House itself. I didn't own Haunted House back-in-the-day, nor Adventure nor Superman - the games these hacks are based on. While I do understand the appeal of those games, I can't say I share the same affection for them that many people do. That said, I decided to dive into this properly and not only review these hacks, but first I learned to play Haunted House, Adventure and Superman, in order to gain a better understanding of what these hacks were intended to be. Haunted Adventure I: Boo! The first game in the trilogy is a hack of Adventure, titled Haunted Adventure I: Boo! Effectively, it's still mostly Adventure in how it's laid out. The enemies have been altered to be more ghost-like and less duck, er... dragon-like. There are items to collect, use and fight with, but everything has been re-themed to be more in keeping with Haunted House. The darkened mazes where you can only see a circle of light around you are reminiscent of the look of Haunted House, but unlike Haunted House, there's no option for practicing those areas with the room walls visible. Even though these areas are holdovers from Adventure's catacombs, I found them to be far more frustrating here. Effectively, I just ended up stumbling around in the dark until through sheer trial and error I sort-of figured out how to get through it. I'm not sure if it was due to the different layouts, or if it was because of the placement of objects and enemies, but this became just an agonizing grind after awhile. It wasn't exactly what I would call fun - more of a relief when I finally got through it and didn't have to do it again. As with Adventure, there is massive flicker, at times effectively becoming more like flashing, and in the darkened rooms it becomes genuinely annoying. However, the most frustrating aspect of the game were the relentless and often unfair enemies. At times, I would find myself getting killed and the ghost that killed me would just sit there literally on top of where I respawned, killing me over and over again. As with Adventure, you can kill the enemies once you have the scepter, but until you have it, or if you lose it, you're going to find yourself respawning. A lot. I found Haunted Adventure I to be more frustration than fun, which is too bad since clearly a lot of thought and effort was put into this hack. There are some clever, unique additions which make this a nice homage to Haunted House. Having some way to illuminate the maze walls would have helped ease the frustration factor immensely. Even if it was just in the form of brief lightning flashes (which would be in keeping with the theme). Even then, I've never been a fan of mazes that don't logically line up from one screen to the next. That seems less like clever gameplay, and more like poor design. But above all else, the aggressiveness of the ghosts really needed to be toned down. At times, this felt less like exploring a spooky haunted house, and more like a relentless slasher film. Haunted Adventure II: Redemption The second game in the trilogy is another hack of Adventure, titled Haunted Adventure II: Redemption. Haunted Adventure II has a smaller first variation (level 4 on the cartridge) where the map has been restructured so the layout feels much more like the the original Haunted House. Its other two variations are larger and more in keeping with Haunted Adventure I, except in those you start outside of the mansion and have to work your way through forests and other new environments. While this does add depth and variety to the game, the cursed darkened mazes are back in full force in those variations, and are just as maddening as Haunted Adventure I's. Haunted Adventure II's first variation was the most enjoyable of any of the hacks in this trilogy, because the frustration factor was effectively eliminated, and it became more of a fun, exploratory puzzle to solve. The enemies were manageable, the darkened maze was less punishing, and the game was far more satisfying to work my way through. The layout was much more reminiscent of Haunted House, and the whole game felt more like a true sequel, making it the better spiritual successor to the original (so to speak). Haunted Adventure III: Witch's Flight The final game in the trilogy is a hack of Superman, titled Haunted Adventure III: Witch's Flight. The gameplay is effectively identical to Superman, but all of the graphics have been altered to feature decidedly Halloween-themed characters, with Superman replaced by a sexy-looking witch. Consequently, there's not really much to review for this game. The graphics are well done. It plays like Superman. Story-wise, it's only very loosely tied to the other Haunted Adventure games. It almost seems as if it was added to the trilogy as an afterthought. It doesn't detract from the collection, but it adds very little to it. The verdict At one point while playing Haunted Adventure II: Redemption, I lost a critical object inside a wall in one of the darkened mazes. I knew it was somewhere because of the flicker, but couldn't even see where it was stuck. The game became unsolvable at that point, so I had no choice but to completely restart. This is an issue with Adventure as well (yes... I know about the bats), but it would've been nice if they'd taken the time to address that in the hack. The best hacks don't just change the appearance of the original games, but should improve them - fixing bugs, improving shortcomings, and are more transformative than derivative. Haunted Adventure I and II do a nice job of merging Haunted House and Adventure, but for the most part the frustration factor of slogging through pitch-black mazes overshadowed the exploratory fun of Adventure, and the spooky simplicity of Haunted House. If you're already a fan of Adventure, you'll probably like the first two hacks in this collection. If you're a fan of Haunted House, you'll enjoy the first level of Haunted Adventure II. If you want a Halloween-themed game to play for a few minutes in late October, then Haunted Adventure III may be the ticket. Taken as a whole, this collection has a lot of value, and despite the frustration I had with some of it, I was able to find something redeeming that I was able to enjoy. Again, a lot of work was put into this by author Anthony Wong (and others). Not just the hacks, but the whopping 52-page manual that accompanies it. A lot of time was spent creating the stories, and the included tips to get through some of the games are absolutely essential reading. There are a few typos here and there, which normally I wouldn't mention, but I got a pretty good laugh trying to imagine what a gravy colored floor plan was supposed to look like. (That should have read "gray", incidentally.) Haunted Adventure Trilogy isn't something I'm likely to revisit. I just don't have enough interest in it thematically to grind through it and solve it all. But there's a lot to offer. If you're a fan of Adventure, Haunted House or Superman in drag, check it out. Haunted Adventure Trilogy gets a 3/5. Defender Arcade (Atari 2600) Defender is one of my all-time favorite arcade games. To say that I was disappointed in the Atari 2600 version is a massive understatement. To me, it missed the mark even more than Atari's 2600 Pac-Man did (which I also thought was terrible). When Atari came out with the 2600 version of Stargate a few years later, I was absolutely stunned. Like their version of Ms. Pac-Man before it, it was complete redemption. Two thoughts immediately came to mind though: 1) Why didn't they do it this way the first time? and 2) Now that they know how to do it, why not go back and make a proper version of Defender? I was never a fan of the arcade version of Stargate. It was so ridiculously hard it seemed it had been designed just to punish really good Defender players. I wasn't one of those. I loved playing the game, but I didn't have it beaten by any stretch of the imagination. Stargate was too busy, too cluttered, and too convoluted. And yet, Atari still managed to bring that to the 2600, better than they'd done with Defender. Bob DeCrescenzo has taken the 2600 version of Stargate, and hacked it to play more like Defender. Gone are the extra enemies, the Stargate, Inviso, and so forth, and in their place are just the elements that made up the original Defender. And from a strictly aesthetic standpoint, the hack has succeeded admirably (although it would be nice if the player's ship was white... but that would make the terrain white as well). Unfortunately, where the hack falls short is in the most vital aspect of Defender: the controls. The actual arcade version of Defender had an oddball control layout to be certain, but once you adapted to it, it felt completely natural and fluid. The ship could dance at your command and lay down a barrage of fire in a heartbeat. But in Defender Arcade for the 2600, there are three major shortcomings still left over from Stargate: 1) You can't fire fast enough. The player's rate of fire needs to be at least double what it currently is. 2) The ship feels sluggish. When you try to move vertically or reverse direction, your ship responds like it's carrying an elephant on its back. 3) This one can't easily be overcome by a hack, but it could be somewhat alleviated by it: there just aren't enough buttons on a 2600 joystick to play Defender properly. Atari got around this in Stargate by having the player use the second joystick. But this is incredibly clunky, and requires something like the Spy Hunter dual-joystick holder to even have a hope of working. A partial workaround for the Defender Arcade hack would've been to add Genesis gamepad support. Yes, this only gives you one more button, but even one extra assignable button (Smart Bomb in particular) would make a huge difference. If you want to play Defender on the 2600, this hack is the best way to do it. Had this been the original Defender for the 2600, it would've been amazing. But as it is, Defender Arcade falls a bit short, by not going far enough to fix the inherent problems that affected Stargate. Defender Arcade gets a 3/5 Crazy Otto (Atari 7800) Crazy Otto holds a unique place in video game history, as the most successful arcade game never released. Crazy Otto was created by General Computer Corporation as a conversion kit for the original Pac-Man arcade game. Before taking it to market, GCC had to present it to Midway who had the U.S. distribution rights to Pac-Man. Midway liked it enough to turn it into a true sequel to Pac-Man: they tweaked the graphics, renamed it, and Ms. Pac-Man was born. Crazy Otto in its original form was shelved. Crazy Otto for the 7800 is a graphics hack by Bob DeCrescenzo that takes the 7800 version of Ms. Pac-Man and regresses it back to resemble the original Crazy Otto. And... that's it. While well done for what it is, Crazy Otto is best suited for completists who want a glimpse of the historical curiosity that was the never-released arcade game. Other than that, there's really no reason to pick this up. If you don't already own Atari's Ms. Pac-Man for the 7800, you'd be better off picking up Bob's excellent Pac-Man Collection which includes Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man Plus, and many other variants as well, and would have been the best place for Crazy Otto to reside. On its own, there's just not much to recommend about it. Crazy Otto gets a 2/5 Up next: Return of the Homebreviews continues with Mini-Game Madness < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

I'll be updating this Index as I add new reviews. There are currently 132 reviews, arranged alphabetically, by score. The most recent reviews are noted with the date added. Atari 2600 reviews are listed first, 7800 reviews are listed afterwards. All reviews are for homebrew games, unless otherwise noted (hacks, hardware, etc). This index reflects the original scores I gave the games. After my initial reviews, I went and re-scored everything based on 1/2 point increments which you can read about here. But since the AtariAge store doesn't support those scores, and I didn't edit the original reviews to reflect the changes, I'm effectively just ignoring those for now. Recent additions: Draconian - 8/20/18 Super Cobra Arcade - 8/20/18 Pac-Man 4K - 8/11/18 Space Rocks - 8/11/18 Scramble (2600) - 8/11/18 Armor Attack II (7800) - 8/5/18 Rip Off (7800) - 8/5/18 Frenzy (7800) - 8/5/18 Scramble (7800) - 8/5/18 Astro Fighter (7800) - 7/27/18 Moon Cresta (7800) - 7/27/18 Brik - 7/22/18 Crazy Brix (7800) - 7/22/18 Chetiry - 7/20/18 Chunkout 2600 - 7/20/18 Star Castle 2600 - 7/13/18 Star Castle Arcade - 7/13/18 The Byte Before Christmas - 7/10/18 Piñata - 7/10/18 Defender Arcade (hack) - 7/8/18 Haunted Adventure Trilogy (hack) - 7/8/18 Crazy Otto (7800 hack) - 7/8/18 2600 Homebrews 5/5 2005 Holiday Cart: Reindeer Rescue 2005 MiniGame MultiCart 2007 Holiday Cart: Stella's Stocking Cave In Chetiry - 7/20/18 Colony 7 Conquest of Mars Draconian - 8/20/18 Duck Attack! Dungeon Fall Down Four-Play Gingerbread Man Harmony Cart (hardware) Hunchy II Juno First K.O. Cruiser Krokodile Cartridge (hardware) Lady Bug Lead Medieval Mayhem Missile Command TB (hack) Oystron Pac-Man 4K - 8/11/18 Power Off! Qb Scramble - 8/11/18 Seawolf Space Rocks - 8/11/18 Squish 'Em Star Castle Arcade - 7/13/18 Star Fire Strat-O-Gems Deluxe Super Cobra Arcade - 8/20/18 Swoops! Sync SynthCart Thrust+ Platinum Edition 4/5 2004 Holiday Cart: Holiday Qb 2006 Holiday Cart: Toyshop Trouble Allia Quest AStar AtariVox Speech Synthesizer (hardware) AtariVox USB Interface (hardware) Backfire Bee•Ball BLiP Football The Byte Before Christmas - 7/10/18 Chunkout 2600 - 7/20/18 Climber 5 Crazy Balloon Dark Mage Euchre Go Fish! GunFight Incoming! Okie Dokie Pac-Man Arcade (hack) Phantom II/Pirate Pick'N Pile (NTSC conversion) Piñata - 7/10/18 Rainbow Invaders Saboteur Sea Battle (prototype reproduction) Skeleton+ Space Battle Space Treat Deluxe Stelladaptor 2600 to USB Interface (hardware) Ultra SCSIcide Warring Worms: The Worm (Re)turns 3/5 Alfred Challenge Alligator People (prototype reproduction) Asteroids DC+ (hack) A-VCS-tec Challenge Defender Arcade (hack) - 7/8/18 Ebivision Five-Pack Elevators Amiss FlapPing Galaxian Arcade (hack) Haunted Adventure Trilogy (hack) - 7/8/18 Inv+ Jammed Marble Craze Melbourne Tatty Pesco Pleiades (prototype reproduction) Poker Squares Raster Fahndung Space Instigators Space Invaders Arcade (hack) Star Castle 2600 - 7/13/18 Test Cart This Planet Sucks Vault Assault Wolfenstein VCS: The Next Mission (hack) 2/5 3D Rubik's Cube (prototype reproduction) Actionauts (prototype reproduction) Boing 2600! Brik - 7/22/18 Cat Trax (prototype reproduction) Cat Trax, Funky Fish, Pleiades Bundle (prototype reproductions) Crazy Valet Ebivision Four-Pack Encaved Funky Fish (prototype reproduction) Solar Plexus Swordfight (prototype reproduction) 1/5 Labyrinth (prototype reproduction) Mental Kombat Merlin's Walls N.E.R.D.S The Last Ninja StickyNotes 7800 Homebrews 5/5 Armor Attack II - 8/5/18 Asteroids Deluxe (hack) Astro Blaster - 7/27/18 b*nQ Beef Drop Frenzy - 8/5/18 Jr. Pac-Man Pac-Man Collection (hack) Scramble - 8/5/18 4/5 Crazy Brix - 7/22/18 FailSafe Moon Cresta - 7/27/18 Rip Off - 8/5/18 Space Duel (hack) Space Invaders 3/5 Astro Fighter - 7/27/18 Super Pac-Man 2/5 Crazy Otto (hack) - 7/8/18 Wasp!

These showed up yesterday: Yeah... I know. Now I'm even further behind with my reviews. But it is nice to finally get my hands on some of the games I worked on. (I didn't have anything to do with Epic Adventure. But it's on my list of games to review.)

Out of curiosity more than anything, although maybe with a slight tinge of hope, I recently picked up an ATGames "Atari" Flashback Portable. I was given a Flashback 2 about ten years ago as a gift from a couple of friends who knew I was into Atari. I plugged it in once, played through some of the exclusive games on it (most of which were terrible), and stuck it on a shelf in the closet, where it's been ever since (although I have used the joystick that came with it, since it's pretty good). The only thing I could think of to actually use the Flashback for would be to hack a cartridge port into it, and use it as a slightly smaller, less-compatible 2600 with composite video out. But I never bothered. Since then, umpteen revisions of the Flashback have come out, and I haven't been inclined to pick any of them up. But I'm not really part of their target demographic. I have a working real 2600 (several, actually), a 7800, all of my original carts, and a Harmony cart. And despite all of that, I do most of my 2600 gaming in Stella anyway. And as of the Flashback 3, even if you wanted to, you could no longer hack a cartridge slot into them, so you were just stuck with whatever games were included. Flashbacks aren't really for those of us who are already into the 2600, and own cartridges and consoles. That is, unless you're a completist and have to buy one of everything that has "Atari" stamped on it, or are curious to see how close (or far off) the emulation is, or can find some other use for the case. The Flashback is designed for people who fondly remember the 2600 from when they had one as a kid, had gotten rid of it long ago, and sees this in the store and thinks "Hey - that'd be fun for my kids." So for the cost of a couple of pizzas, they throw it in their shopping cart, take it home, plug it in, are amused with it for a little while, then after it's gathered enough dust, it goes into the closet. So keep that in mind when thinking of the Flashback Portable. Because it was designed for the same market. But, with two key differences. First, of course, it's portable. It has a built-in LCD screen, so no TV is required. This means parents don't have to bother with hooking it up to their TVs. They can just give it to their kids as soon as they get it home, and the kids can play with it anywhere. It's simple. There are no controllers to connect, no AC adapter to plug in. No extra parts to lose or break, except a USB cable for charging, which you can get anywhere. Sure - the kids would rather have an iPad, or an iPhone, or a Nintendo DS, but this is much cheaper. Besides the price, there are no extra games to buy and no worries about data charges or in-app-purchases. With a 20% off coupon, I was out the door of Bed Bath and Beyond with one for just under $35 including tax. And when I say this is portable, it's really portable. Much more so than I was expecting. It's noticeably smaller (and lighter) than my PSP, and much smaller than my Lynx. In fact, it weighs exactly as much as my iPhone 5 (with case), and isn't a whole lot bigger (although the Flashback's screen is certainly smaller). The second key difference, is that in addition to the 60 built-in games, the Flashback Portable also has an SD card slot. This means you can load up more Atari 2600 games on it. A lot more. The menu is limited to 103 pages of games, with 10 games per page. So unless you have a pretty extreme ROM collection, you probably aren't going to run out of room. To sort mine better, I batch renamed my ROMs with a manufacturer prefix. ACT = Activision, for example. There are a few quirks with using an SD card to be aware of which you can read about here. And if you're on a Mac, there are a couple of other things you should know about to get the SD card to work well. It's going to be non-obvious for the typical buyer to get this to work, so this was definitely something added for Atari enthusiasts. Or more likely, Sega enthusiasts. Which we'll get to shortly. Capacity aside, it's probably a good idea to pare down your ROM collection for the Flashback Portable anyway, since you can't set up subdirectories to organize your ROMs, and after a few dozen pages worth of games it becomes tedious to page through them. That, and a bunch of your games probably aren't going to work anyway. Of the games tested (as of this writing), 512 work fine, 72 have issues, and 124 are completely unplayable. Not all games have been tested yet, but it's hit-or-miss as to what works. Almost nothing from Tigervision works, yet Parker Bros. is a mixed bag. Activision fares better, but quite a few of their games have annoying (but not fatal) graphical problems. A lot homebrews do work, but there are still quite a few that have issues or just don't work at all (typically odd bankswitching schemes or DPC+ games). And you can forget about getting any SuperCharger games to work. If playing your favorite games is critical to you, it's best to check the compatibility list before buying. Even for some games that otherwise work - you may not be able to actually play them. With only a d-pad, the Flashback Portable is effectively useless for games that need paddles (or a keypad). That brings up the odd button layout of the Flashback Portable. While they managed to squeeze in all of the original console switches (and even added pause), the layout isn't exactly intuitive, and unfortunately isn't ambidextrous. This latter point is really a shame, since you only need one fire button for 2600 games and they could have easily made the existing layout ambidextrous by just swapping the S and A buttons and flipping the d-pad and display around in software (presumably). Also, as mentioned, there's no paddle control - even though there appears to be plenty of room in the unit to add a small potentiometer (to save space, it could have been recessed into the side of the unit). But the lack of the paddle control as well as the overall layout was dictated by AtGames wanting to build this as cheaply as possible, so they used the same molds for this and their Sega Genesis Portable (which requires the six-button layout and has no use for paddles). Given that the Sega unit was likely to be a bigger seller, it made sense for ATGames to put their resources behind that, rather than making something more specific to the Atari. Consequently, the Atari controls are a bit compromised. That said, I've found the d-pad to be pretty good, and the fire button is nicely responsive. Playing Joust, for example, is no problem. Note however, some people have reported issues with the d-pad registering directions, or the fire button feeling stiff, both of which are likely attributable to the inconsistent (read: cheap) build quality. In other words, save your receipt. The screen looks very nice - surprisingly so. Crisp and bright, although the viewing angle isn't great, as certain colors will appear different to each eye, making the display appear to flicker, even when it isn't. But it's still much better than what originally came on the Lynx or Nintendo GBA-SP, showing how far LCD technology has come - especially for the price. But here again, build quality seems to be a letdown, with at least one report of a dead pixel (and at this resolution, these are pretty big pixels), and some reports of the screen being installed crooked or off-center. Again - save your receipt. Don't be afraid to take it back for an exchange if the unit has noticeable issues. These were built to be disposable, so consider yourself lucky if you get a keeper the first time out. Speaking of disposable, the battery isn't replaceable. At some point, someone will figure out how to hack a new battery into it, but it's certainly not designed to be user-replaceable. While I haven't played mine to the point of failure yet, the manual claims that after a full charge you can expect 4-6 hours of battery life. That's not bad, but the charging time is really long. The manual states that the first charge will take about 11 hours (I left mine in overnight, and it was still going the next morning), and subsequent full charges will take about 7 hours. There is no charger included - just a USB cable that you can plug into a computer or standard USB charger to recharge the battery (the charger for my iPhone worked fine). I don't know if the unit will run directly off of a charger once the battery is shot, but having to plug it in while playing would sort of defeat the purpose of a portable anyway. Audio emulation is acceptable - it still sounds like a 2600, but it can be noticeably off on some games. Also, the speaker emits an annoying buzz, but it isn't bad if you don't have the volume up too loud. The unit has a headphone jack, and an A/V output jack if you want to hook it up to a TV (cable not included, of course). I haven't tried the TV output, so I can't speak to its quality. But I didn't buy this to hook up to a TV. If I were to use it like that, I'd want to be able to plug proper controllers into it as well, and that's not an option. One of my biggest disappointments with the Flashback Portable though, are the built-in games. For a lot of it, ATGames is scraping the bottom of a pretty empty barrel: Adventure Adventure II Air Raiders Aquaventure Asteroids Astroblast Atari Climber (aka Climber 5) Black Jack Bowling Breakout Centipede Circus Atari Crystal Castles Dark Cavern Demons to Diamonds Desert Falcon DodgeEm Double Dunk Fatal Run Frog Pond Frogger Frogs and Flies Fun with Numbers Golf Gravitar Hangman Haunted House Human Cannonball Millipede Miniature Golf Miss It! Missile Command Night Driver Pong (Video Olympics) Radar Lock Realsports® Basketball Return to Haunted House Saboteur Save Mary Secret Quest Shield Shifter Slot Machine Solaris Space Attack Star Strike Starship Stellar Track Strip Off Submarine Commander Super Breakout Swordquest: Earthworld Swordquest: Fireworld Swordquest: Waterworld Tempest Video Checkers Video Chess Video Pinball Wizard Yars Return Yars Revenge Frankly, this list really doesn't represent the 2600 well. Certainly not the best of what it can do. While there are a number of genuinely fun titles on there, there's too much filler. Any of the games requiring paddles are effectively unplayable. Radar Lock should have a second joystick for weapon selection. A lot of the titles are horribly dated even by the 2600's standards, and the unfinished Tempest prototype is outright garbage. Some of the games can't really be played without a proper manual (although it could be argued the Swordquest games couldn't even be played with one), and homebrews aren't very well represented as Miss It!, Shield Shifter and Strip Off are all mediocre at best. I cringe when I think of someone taking this home, hoping to re-experience some of the great gameplay the 2600 had to offer, only to be confronted with the likes of Blackjack or Fun With Numbers. Arguably, one of the best games on here (and one featured prominently on the box) is Frogger - but it's not even the 2600 version. It's a custom port - closer to the arcade game - designed to run natively on the Flashback Portable's hardware. Presumably, Konami didn't want the original Parker Bros. version to represent their brand anymore. (And yes, I know about the music issue. But it would have been relatively simple to just hack that out of the 2600 version). And while it's a nice version of Frogger (and the one game the sales clerk mentioned when I bought it) I would have rather seen them put their efforts into using the SuperCharger version. The version on the Flashback Portable has absolutely nothing to do with the Atari 2600 in any way, shape or form, so at best it seems disingenuous to me. But hey... they've gotta put something on the box to sell these. It's sure not going to be Wizard and unfortunately, it's not going to be Space Invaders either. While originally slated for the Portable (again, as another remake) it was pulled before the final units went into production. You won't find most of Atari's best arcade ports on here either: Battlezone, Berzerk, Dig Dug, Galaxian, Joust, Jungle Hunt, Moon Patrol, Ms. Pac-Man, Phoenix, Stargate, Vanguard... or any arcade ports produced by any other companies. Or any classic Activision games. Or Imagic games. Or... well, you get the point. There's so much missing here, it's hard not to be disappointed that at least some of it wasn't included. Yes - it costs money. But it could have made this unit so much better out of the box. That's why the SD card slot is this unit's saving grace. While not all of those games work, at least you can load up some of them. That makes this worth having. Without the SD slot, I never would have bought it based on the included games. So while that's fine for myself or other Atari enthusiasts, I just wish the built-in game selection was better for those casual buyers who will never, ever, load up extra games on it. However, for the rest of us, because of its price, its size, and the fact you can load games onto it, the Flashback Portable is worth a look, despite its other shortcomings. If they could have just made the emulation a little bit better, it would be an unqualified "must-buy". As it is, it's a pretty fun, cheap, portable way to play some 2600 games. And until this came along, that was not an easy thing to come by. In the end, I think Dave Dries summed it up best, "for the price, it's a really cool toy". If you think of it that way, and what you're getting for the money, it's a pretty amazing little piece of gear. If you want it to be a fully compatible, portable replacement for a real 2600, you're going to be disappointed. Check the compatibility list first - and use that as your guide for whether or not you'll get your money's worth. For me, the lack of paddle support is fairly minor, and I wouldn't expect game compatibility to extend to homebrews using DPC+ or esoteric bankswitching schemes, but I would have hoped for better vintage game compatibility. I think the Flashback Portable is about 70% of the way there. So I'll give it a 7/10.

See what I did there with the II? As in Lynx II? No? Well... fine. I never claimed to be a good literaryist. I'm pretty sure that's a word. If I tell my spell-checker to ignore it, it works, and that's good enough for me. Anyway, a few years ago, I had written that I had dusted off my Lynx II and picked up a few new games for it. And while there were a few keepers in the bunch, after a little while the Lynx sat idle again. In the last couple of years though, it's had new life breathed into it not once, but twice, thanks to a couple of very talented Lynx hobbyists. AtariAge member McWill created an LCD screen replacement kit that has to be seen to be believed. The original Lynx screen was dull, washed out, and had a very narrow viewing angle. Mine was starting to exhibit dead pixels, too. McWill's kit puts a modern, bright, crystal clear screen in its place (and you can optionally add a VGA output, too). I posted about my experience with installing McWill's screen kit in the Lynx forum. The upshot is, it completely transformed the system. The games actually became more playable, as details lost to the old murky LCD screen suddenly became razor-sharp. It was like my Lynx got cataract surgery! That was a weird analogy. Maybe this is better: It was like the difference between looking at leftover pizza through wax paper or Saran Wrap. Uh... no. Look... here are a few photos, okay? Rampart, before: And after: And Awesome Golf before: And after: It looks a lot better. That's the point to take away here. If you want to see more, I posted extensive before and after galleries. If you want to order one of these amazing new screens, just contact McWill, and he'll get the details to you. For those who don't know how to solder, he offers installation as well. He also has kits for the Lynx I. So... after installing the new screen, the games I had looked better, but I still had a relatively meager selection of them. But this year AtariAge member SainT developed an SD-based multicart for the Lynx. As with similar multicarts for other systems, the RetroHQ multicart allows you to load any or all Lynx ROMs onto a single Micro SD card, which can then be plugged into your Lynx. From there, you just choose the game you want to play from an onscreen menu. The online reviews and videos of it were all very promising, so I asked to be added to the pre-order list. And last week - mine finally arrived! SainT's Multicart is on the left (the Micro SD card can be seen in the notched corner at the top), and a standard Lynx cart is on the right: Once booted, the menu system is very responsive and clear to read. A downside is that it only shows 8 character filenames: One thing that helps is that you can organize your ROMs by folder. Mine are alphabetical for now, but I may further refine this by games I play more often, or by genre, etc. A really nice option is that you can add preview images to your SD card to view pictures of the games you select before loading them. This is very handy, especially if you can't remember what game KISTENSC is supposed to be. Or in this case, APB, which is, well... APB. In order for the previews to work - your ROM names and preview names must match. The preview images have already been created, named and zipped for download, so you'll likely have to go through and rename something for them to work. In my case, I renamed my ROMs to match the previews. It's just as well, since the menu can't display long filenames. Also, you currently can't create your own preview files, unless you can figure out how to save images in the correct image format. It'd be great to be able to create your own, or even have multiple ones available for each game to show different screens or other information. Once a game is selected, it takes several seconds to load, but from that point on, everything works as if it were an original cart. The multicart is very solidly made - with a 3D printed case permanently attached to it (for the Lynx I, you have to get one without a case, or it won't fit). There's quite a long waiting list to get one - I was added to the list mid-May, and it finally arrived mid-October. But it was well worth the wait, because apart from a few unavailable homebrews, I have instant access to the entire Lynx library. If you want to read more about it, check out the this thread. To get on the order list, just post a response in that thread, specifying what you want. I'd highly recommend both of these items to any Lynx owner. They really do transform the system, and have really increased my enjoyment of it. If I had to pick one, I'd have to go with McWill's screen. I never thought a Lynx could look that good. But once you get the screen looking good - you're going to want to get the multicart, too.

This. This is what happens, when you don't review any games for over six years. This is going to take some time. Your patience will be appreciated.

This has been added to my "to-review" list. Thanks Richard! What? Don't have one yet? Well, what are you waiting for? (Of course, to actually play with it, I'm going to need some kind of software... Darrell? )

I recently added a Lynx to Artie the Atari. The reasons were twofold: I've had a Post-It note on my computer for well over a year that says, "Atari Lynx whose battery always dies by fourth panel". . I've had a list of Lynx games I've been meaning to buy from B&C Computervisions for even longer than that. Much, much longer. . I'm not a completist, by any stretch of the imagination, but there are some games I've always wanted to pick up for the system (I own a Lynx II). Nearly 22 years ago (hard to believe it's been that long), I bought my Lynx from a local video game store. They carried all of the latest systems (of the day) and also rented games. Since I was a broke college student, I tended to rent. I rarely bought games, except for a select handful: Block Out, Checkered Flag, Klax, Qix, RoadBlasters and Toki. Of the games I played back in the day, these were the ones I wanted to play the most, and all I could afford. They weren't cheap, either - I still have price stickers on several of them for $39.95. Ouch. But I did rent others, and borrowed some from a friend of mine who owned a first-gen Lynx. So I had a good idea of what was available, and what I liked. Some I probably rented enough times to afford to buy. But having $40 all at one time, and having $40 incrementally are two entirely different things when you're broke. Within a couple of years, the Lynx was relegated to the dustbin of videogame history. I was still broke though, and although I meant to pick up some more games, I never did. A few years later, the store went out of business. I didn't even notice, since I'd stopped going there. I knew there were no new games coming out for the Lynx, and I had no other current systems to buy games for. It was like the Atari 7800 all over again. Promising start, quick death, small game library. Had I known they were going under, maybe I would've tried to pick up some games before they closed. The sad truth is, I don't even recall the name of the store anymore. Some years later, I found B&C's Lynx game list, and from that, made a list of "must-buy-these-someday" games. But I never bought them. Some were still too expensive, and after playing some of them in Handy, I came to realize I needed to trim down my list some more. A couple years ago (okay, I just looked, and it was actually 2008!), the AtariAge store had a good-sized stock of dirt-cheap Lynx games, and Albert hooked me up with Chip's Challenge, Crystal Mines II, Kung Food, Steel Talons, Tournament Cyberball and Xybots, effectively doubling my Lynx's library. However, none of those games were what I'd classify as a "must buy" (which is probably why they were dirt cheap in the first place). Xybots, Crystal Mines II and Chip's Challenge were good games, but the rest... shelf filler. My comment to him regarding Kung Food at the time was, "This belongs in the landfill under E.T." But this past week, as I was finally adding a Lynx to Artie the Atari, I decided, "Hey... I'm not broke at the moment. I've got some empty shelf space in my Lynx section. Why not dig out that list again, and go for it?" So I did. I whittled my list down to seven keepers, five of which only cost $10 each. All new-in-box, still factory shrink-wrapped. And Thursday afternoon - they showed up, along with a couple of vintage Lynx catalogs as a nice bonus (or as packing material... but either way, it was a nice surprise): Six of the games came in an original Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure shipping box. It was good way to protect them, and also a neat artifact from the era: So with that, I dug out my AC adapter (despite what I might have written elsewhere), opened the shrink-wrap (ruining their value for all eternity) and fired them up. Here's a rundown of the games: Awesome Golf - I rented this quite a lot back-in-the-day, but it was always one of the more expensive games (and still was, from this batch) so I hadn't bought it. But it's a really good golf game - three 18 hole courses, good controls, nice scaling effects, and a decent number of options. That said, the sound effects leave something to be desired. An annoying gopher with an irritating voice will comment on your shots, and the distinctive sound a ball should make when hitting the bottom of the cup is poorly done and rather unsatisfying. But those are minor complaints. Awesome? Perhaps not. But "Very Good Golf" probably didn't have the marketing potential they were looking for. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - An RPG based on characters from the best time-travel movie of all time (and yes, I can back that statement up). Typically, you walk around looking for objects and solving puzzles, but where this adds a unique twist is that you have to travel through time as well. So you may have to pick up an object in the future, travel back in time to leave it somewhere, then travel back to another point in the future so the object is waiting there when you need it. Clever stuff. Hydra - A port of an obscure arcade game, it's basically RoadBlasters on water. And like RoadBlasters on the Lynx, the lack of analog controls causes the game to suffer. You can't precisely steer or aim. The graphics are good, and there is an added element in that you can periodically fly to avoid obstacles and capture objects. But besides the lack of analog control, I'm also not fond of the inverted joypad layout (press down to accelerate, up to decelerate) because it really gets uncomfortable after awhile on the Lynx's joypad. An option to flip it would have been most welcomed. Paperboy - This surprised me a lot. I liked the original arcade Paperboy game, but it never worked well in emulation because of the arcade game's unique handlebar controller. Somehow though, they made it work on the Lynx. Part of this has to do with the fact that you're always (and only) aiming straight to your left. All you really have to do is steer and control your speed, and, unlike Hydra, they figured out how to dial in the controls just right. An excellent port. Rampart - I never played the original arcade game. In fact, I never knew the game existed prior to the Lynx, but this became one of my favorite Lynx titles. It's incredibly well-suited to being a portable game, and would make a great iPhone game (along with Quantum). You build up walls around your castle using Tetris-like pieces, place your cannons, then defend your territory in a brief battle sequence. Between battles you repair your castle, but it's not as easy as it sounds. You can't build over debris, and you aren't always given pieces that fit where you need them. It's a combat, strategy and puzzle game all in one, and a bargain at $10 for one of the Lynx's best games. S.T.U.N. Runner - Another surprising arcade port. Atari attempted to port Hard Drivin' to the Lynx with catastrophically bad results. It looked terrible, the controls were bad, and the frame rate was unbearably slow. So I expected S.T.U.N. Runner to be just as bad, if not worse. But they cranked out a great version of a very advanced arcade game for its day. The controls, graphics, gameplay - everything works, and really shows off the Lynx's power. There's a nice depth to the gameplay, and the difficultly ramps up very well, adding new elements as you progress through the levels. Well worth having. Zarlor Mercenary - It's a vertical shoot-'em up. A bit overpriced relative to the other games, but still good fun. There's a good variety of enemies and power-ups, although my gripe with games of this genre is that they throw more enemies at you than you could ever possibly shoot. They expect you to die repeatedly, or pick up ridiculous power-ups to wipe out the enemies en masse. While it looks impressive with all of those explosions going off everywhere, it makes me wish Xevious (which required more skill than firepower) had been ported to the Lynx instead. So there you are - my Lynx has some new life breathed into it again. And even after all that... I still have enough room on my shelf for two more games.

Believe it or not... this entry includes my 60th Homebreview! To mark the occasion, I'm reviewing a couple of games that were released at the Classic Gaming Expo this summer. The ROMs aren't available, so I've posted movies of them, to show you what they're really like (sorry about the quality - they were shot off of a TV screen). Actually, I would have rather reviewed a really good game instead, but these are the last two unreviewed games that I've got. So there you go. Although these reviews are already editorials of a sort, I'm going to editorialize a little bit more, before delving into the reviews proper. N.E.R.D.S and The Last Ninja are the worst homebrews I've reviewed to date. They aren't merely near-misses that just barely fell short of their potential, either. Both have a very unfinished feel to them. Neither offers much of a challenge, any depth, innovation or replay value. They're poorly designed and executed, as if hastily slapped together just for the sake of "making a game". Is that too harsh? I know it takes a lot of work to program a game. It takes a lot of effort to manufacture them. And I know that the people who program games have a desire to see their games published on a cartridge. In some cases, they've dreamed about it since being a kid. I've got game ideas I'd love to see on a cart, too. Who doesn't? But that doesn't mean every idea is a good one, nor does it mean that even potentially good ideas get executed to their fullest potential. In the case of both of these games, I can only speculate why they were made. It seems odd that not one, but two games at this level of quality should be given such a high-profile release: fully boxed, limited editions, and a starring role at a game expo. Did it just happen that these games were finished at the right time, and they were convenient titles to turn into boxed editions, regardless of how good or bad they actually were? Or were they created for the sole purpose of selling boxed games, and whatever the end result was didn't really matter? Given that the games are only available this way, and not just as cartridges and manuals (and the manuals, incidentally, are just single pieces of card stock, folded over) calls into question exactly who they intended to sell these to. It seems to be a rather counter-productive way to reach as broad of an audience as possible, if you're selling a game you're truly proud of and want people to play. To me, this whole thing smacks of playing to the collector crowd, assuming that no matter what gets put in a box - as long as it is in a box - collectors will line up and pay outrageous prices just to have them. I consider that to be manipulative and insulting to anyone who enjoys buying games for classic systems, whether they're collectors or not. For both of these games, having boxes - and the resultant astronomical prices - actually hurt their reviews. I might have treated them a little bit kinder if the packaging and pricing weren't so completely out-of-line with the quality of the games. Now, despite having a limited production run, these two games are showing up at AtariAge, presumably because Atari2600.com simply couldn't unload all of them on their own. Maybe the lesson to be learned here is that just because you can program a game, doesn't mean it should automatically be put on a cart. Maybe it would be better to hold off until the next game, and chalk up the first as a learning experience. What happened during these games' development? There are plenty of homebrews to compare works-in-progress to, and there are far more commercially released games to use as points-of-comparison. Is that fair? Absolutely. Many homebrews exceed the quality of a lot (if not most) of the commercially released games, even those from major companies. There are standards to strive for. Sure, not everyone can program something like Thrust+ or Lady Bug, but there's no reason not to at least aim at lesser, but still good games. For example, Apollo's Spacechase is very similar in appearance to N.E.R.D.S, but Spacechase is vastly superior in every way - and Spacechase is far from being the best vertical shooter on the 2600. Beyond that is the sheer amount of information and help available to programmers: websites, the [stella] mailing list, even these very forums. I'm not a programmer, but even I know where to look for that stuff. No excuse can be made about there being a lack of help available. I have to seriously question how much play-testing went on with these games. The Last Ninja is solvable in about 5 minutes, and once you solve it, there's nothing left to do. It's a one-shot deal, with no replay value at all. Even a game like Dark Mage, which also has a single solution, has vastly more going for it, because it does take some time to get through it, it's engaging while you're playing it, and it's something completely unique on the 2600. (Besides that, you could buy three copies of Dark Mage and still have three dollars left over, for the cost of The Last Ninja.) In N.E.R.D.S, after about the fourth round, the boss virus no longer comes out, and it just repeats the same enemy formation at the same difficulty level, presumably forever. N.E.R.D.S also has major collision detection issues, and a jumpy screen (presumably a scanline count problem). Was this ever tested on real hardware? Was this ever tested? These seem to have been developed in a vacuum, much like the Ebivision games. Nobody seemed to have heard of them, much less played them, prior to their release. Many homebrews have benefited, to at least some degree, from feedback given by people play-testing their games. I can't help but think that both of these games would have also benefited from a lot more play-testing from a lot more people. That's not to say programmers should (or even could) implement all of the suggestions that come in. But even rejected suggestions can lead to other ideas that can ultimately improve a game. As long as the suggestions are given with respect, with an eye towards improving the game, I would think most programmers would welcome the feedback. Wouldn't it be more desirable to release a good game that people were already interested in, rather than surprise them with a bad one? As I stated before, these are the two worst homebrews I've reviewed, and I hope it remains that way. I'd hate to think this was the start of a trend. I've bashed Merlin's Walls pretty good, but at least that was innovative, and they were trying something really different. Bonus points and my admiration for that, if not for the actual end result. My hope for N.E.R.D.S and The Last Ninja is that nobody runs across them and assumes that they represent the rest of the homebrew scene. What a terrible thing, if the many great homebrews that are out there, are left undiscovered by someone just because they ran across these two games first. So with that, on to the reviews: N.E.R.D.S 1/5 It should be noted that N.E.R.D.S was produced by Atari2600.com - not by AtariAge. On the surface, this may resemble Apollo's Spacechase, but it's not. Spacechase is a far better game. In fact, I can't readily think of any 2600 vertical shooter that's not better than N.E.R.D.S. In N.E.R.D.S, you fly a miniaturized ship through a person's blood vessels, shooting viruses. First, they appear in groups of eight, then as a single large "boss" virus. The problem is, the game isn't challenging, isn't really any fun, and doesn't feel like it's even finished. The eight small viruses simply move back and forth - not firing at you - then fly down towards you, moving slightly as they "attack". Their initial left-right formation speed increases as the game goes on, but they're still easy to hit. Their spacing also makes it easy just to hold down the fire button, and pick them off without having to move. It doesn't really matter if you hit them in formation or not though, since their vertical attack speed doesn't really seem to get any faster, and the collision detection in the game is so bad, they'll often fly right through you. The game is just too easy. It's predictable and boring. If there were just something more to it - maybe being penalized for running into the blood vessel walls, or if the formations would just shoot at you once in awhile, or change their attack pattern - maybe this game could have been worth playing. Even the boss virus doesn't offer any real challenge. It does fire at you, but it's a very poor shot, and it never charges at you - it just moves back and forth. Shoot it enough times, and it's back to the formations. After a while, the bosses don't even come out anymore, and your just stuck with the same formation - over and over again. N.E.R.D.S has no options. No difficulty switch settings. You get only one life (although with the aforementioned collision detection, it's more like 20). The graphics are okay but there's only one enemy design, the sound effects are minimal, and the picture jumps whenever the enemies reach the bottom of the screen. It makes me wonder if anyone bothered play-testing this, or checked it on real hardware. There's just not much of anything here. It seems more like a 1k mini-game, and a poorly done one at that. In fact, there are quite a few 1k games that are far better than N.E.R.D.S, including Zirconium on the 2005 MiniGame MulitCart, and Lead 1K - which is included as an extra with the full version of Lead. The reason N.E.R.D.S seems to exist, is its box. It's a very nice box. It's a very expensive box. It even has a seal across the flap with the N.E.R.D.S logo printed on it, so when you break the seal, you'll feel the value of your investment slipping away. It has nice looking artwork, and it's very slickly produced. It will look great on your shelf. If that's what's important to you, maybe forking over $42 for a box is reasonable. Even then, there are misspellings on the box (although technically, you could be attacked by a "rouge" viral agent, I suppose), and the cardboard insert that's supposed to hold the cart in place had folded in on itself, so the cart was flopping around loose in the box. Finally, despite all the money put into the packaging, they couldn't even get all of the old adhesive residue off of the recycled cart shell, which shows up around the edges of the new label. Save your money. Buy something else. You can get a couple of other, better homebrews for the cost of N.E.R.D.S. If you want a game with a similar theme, buy a copy of 20th Century Fox's excellent Fantastic Voyage. That had a really nice box, too. But it came with a real game inside. Things to watch for: Hardly having to move the player's ship, the horrible collision detection, periodic screen jumps (whenever the enemies go off the bottom of the screen), and at 8000 points, I get killed, and the game immediately restarts, wiping out my score. After that, I intentionally crashed to see how the game is "supposed" to end. The Last Ninja 1/5 It should be noted that The Last Ninja was produced by Atari2600.com - not by AtariAge. As The Last Ninja, you are alone against the Emperor and his minions. You must battle samurai, thugs, and vicious guard dogs as you track down the Emperor in his garden maze, to seek your revenge and put an end to his reign once and for all. In The Last Ninja, you move from room to room, searching for the Emperor and battling bad guys by hurling throwing stars at them. There's also a power-up where you can get super-sized throwing stars, which take down opponents with fewer hits. The sprites are decent, although the samurai looks like a girl with a pony tail, and all of the animation is minimal. Sound is almost nonexistent, except for a handful of uninspired blips and beeps. The samurai has a "special strike", which consists of the sprite flickering back and forth once it gets near you, making it a little harder to hit. There is no score, although a character's health is indicated by a change in their color. A nice touch is that if you linger too long in a room after killing an opponent, their ghost will come after you. The problem is, each room only has one opponent in it, which is hardly a challenge to begin with. The enemies are all easy to avoid or kill, including the Emperor. Just hold down the fire button, and you'll auto-fire throwing stars, and take down anything in your path. Simply moving behind a wall effectively renders most opponents harmless, although there's a bug in the game where if you're up against certain walls, you can't throw your stars. But The Last Ninja's biggest problem, besides being too easy, is that it never changes. The rooms are always in the same place, with the same opponents in the same locations, at the same difficulty level, every time you play. With no score or timer, there's nothing to improve upon when you solve the game. And the game isn't large enough for it to take very long to get through every room. Most players would likely find the Emperor in about five minutes, tops. And after memorizing where he is, you can get to him in about a minute (or less if you don't stop to kill enemies along the way). As it is, this feels more like the first level of a game, than an entire game. There are no additional levels. No other layouts. No difficulty switch settings. No other game options. It plays more like a work-in-progress, than a fully fleshed-out, complete game. As with N.E.R.D.S, The Last Ninja's main selling point would seem to be it's box. While it's a well-constructed box, the artwork looks like it was cobbled together in a couple of minutes with clip art using PowerPoint, or some other equally ill-suited software. If they were going to put that kind of money into making a box for it, couldn't they have held a label contest for it? Certainly, someone could have come up with something better, especially if you're going to charge a whopping $42 for the finished product. The manual also seems hastily put together, with the interior being inexplicably printed at a low resolution, as if it were made from a screenshot. Beyond that, the insert that's supposed to hold the cart in place had folded in on itself, so the cart was flopping around loose in the box. Finally, they couldn't get all of the adhesive residue off of the recycled cart shell, and it shows up around the edges of the new label, as it did on N.E.R.D.S. The Last Ninja might have made an okay mini-game, perhaps as an Easter Egg on some other cartridge. As it is, it's a waste of money. Five minutes, and you're through with it, and those five minutes don't offer any real challenge, or innovative gameplay, or anything worth looking at or listening to. There is absolutely no replay value, and even the box, which might have otherwise appealed to collectors looking to fill up an empty spot on a shelf, has poorly done, amateurish-looking artwork. There are plenty of other, much better homebrew games to get, and they all cost less than The Last Ninja. Even the ones with boxes. This is a complete game walkthrough which shows where to find the emperor. If I hadn't stopped to kill anything, it probably would have been about 20 seconds long. The rest of the game isn't much bigger than what's shown here. < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

In my Cave In review, I'd mentioned that I'd made maps of the game to work my way through it. I completely neglected to post them, and I was recently asked to, so here they are. There's a non-spoiler version which is just a map of the main caves. It can help you get around from place to place easier, but won't show the hidden areas: cave-in-map-no-spoilers.pdf And there's also a spoiler version, which shows the entire cave, plus has labels showing where everything is located: cave-in-map-spoilers.pdf As near as I can tell, the spoiler version is complete, although I'm not sure about one room. But given the vastness of Cave In, it's entirely possible I missed something, or many things. I strongly recommend though, that you take the time to map the game out yourself (and just use these to compare your results after you finish it). When I played it, that's where a lot of the fun came from. If you're stuck, I'd suggest checking out some of the documentation posted in the Cave In development forum thread. The earlier version of the manual posted there does a nice, concise job of spelling out what you need to do to win the game, without telling you how to do it.

Back to the venerable 2600, and two games that have some of the best label art ever! K.O. Cruiser 5/5 K.O. Cruiser is a boxing game that harkens back to the arcade classic Punch-Out!! You control the transparent outline of a boxer, throwing punches and dodging blows from your opponents. You win by either knocking them out or going the distance and getting the judges' decision. If you get knocked down, you have only seconds to get back up before you're counted out. K.O. Cruiser is a game that I never expected to see attempted on the 2600. The transparent boxer works extremely well, especially considering the 2600's graphics limitations. All of the opponents look terrific, with excellent detail and funny expressions when they get hit, and they all exhibit distinct personalities and fighting styles. The controls work well, although all you can do is essentially punch, block and dodge (you can't choose between a body blow or uppercut, for example), but for this game nothing else seems really necessary. The sound is good throughout the game, with each opponent having their own musical theme when introduced. I wish that AtariVox support could have been added for the ring announcer, and to have opponents taunt you or respond when hit. There are only six opponents in the game, and while you'll probably get through the first few on the easy setting pretty quickly, in the higher difficulties you're going to find yourself on the canvas quite a lot. K.O. Cruiser is an excellent game, well-worth buying whether you're into boxing or not. The game is a blast to play, the characters are a lot of fun, and there are difficulty levels suitable for any player. There are already sequels in the works, so we will get the chance to see more characters. With any luck, maybe we'll get AtariVox support at some point, too. Or at least some ring girls. Duck Attack! 5/5 In the original Adventure for the 2600, the dragons that were attacking you looked more like giant ducks. Well there's no ambiguity in Duck Attack!, because now you actually are being attacked by giant ducks. And not just any ducks - but fire-breathing, radioactive, mutated, evil ducks that lay plutonium eggs. Fortunately, you have a trusty robot minion at your disposal to enter the mad scientist's labyrinthine lair to retrieve all of their eggs, and put a stop to his evil plans. Duck Attack! plays much like Adventure, in that you explore a maze, pick up objects to use (or to gain bonus points), unlock new areas to explore, and battle giant ducks. The world of Duck Attack! is huge, and mapping it out is essential if you're going to find your way around. There are many obstacles to overcome, items to collect, ducks (and other enemies) to battle, areas to unlock, and a lot of guest appearances by familiar video game icons. Your goal is to collect radioactive eggs left throughout the maze, and use them to unlock doors to other areas. Collect all 25 eggs, and you will have successfully completed your mission. If all of your robots get eaten by ducks (or are otherwise killed) then it's game over. Along the way, you can also pick up speed-boosts, extra lives, shields, flashlights (to illuminate otherwise dark rooms), a rechargeable zapper to fend off enemies, and more. The graphics in Duck Attack! are outstanding. All of the sprites are large and multi-colored, and the ducks are especially impressive. To be sure, there's a lot of Adventure-like flicker, but it isn't too bad, and doesn't detract any from the enjoyment of the game. The sound is very good, with some helpful audio cues warning you of nearby enemies. If you have a SaveKey or AtariVox hooked up, it will save your top five high scores, but more impressively - you can save your progress mid-game. This means you can save your game, switch off your Atari, and resume right where you left off. How many times have you wished for that in other 2600 games? Duck Attack! isn't just an homage to Adventure, it's a complete re-imagining of it. With impressive graphics, a huge world to explore, and a terrifically fun concept, you can't go wrong with it. Even if you're not a fan of the original Adventure, Duck Attack! stands on its own as one of the best, and certainly most unique, homebrew titles. < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >

Time again to dust off the ol' 7800. Failsafe 4/5 Failsafe is an unofficial sequel to the Atari 5200 game Countermeasure. Having never played Countermeasure, I can't judge Failsafe's success as a sequel, only on its own merits as a standalone title. The goal of the game is to drive a tank across hostile enemy territory, while destroying enemy gun emplacements, jeeps, terrorists and cruise missiles, while collecting pieces to a code that will allow you to to disarm a nuclear missile before they can launch it. To help you in this task, you can collect power-ups to increase your speed, make you temporarily invulnerable, freeze your enemies, extend your firing range, and so on. If all of your tanks are destroyed or you fail to enter the code in time, the bad guys win. The controls are simple - just move and shoot. However, your tank moves frustratingly slow (especially when you encounter certain types of terrain), which makes it all the more imperative to pick up power-ups whenever you can. You can move and fire in eight directions, but the 45° angles aren't actually 45°, which takes some getting used to, since you have to line up shots at odd angles. The plus side is that the enemies actually do shoot at 45° angles, so you can sneak up on them. The sound effects are minimal, but adequate. The graphics are detailed, but the limited color palette makes the game rather plain looking, and it's difficult to read the tiny letters that distinguish the power-ups. Generally, I just pick up anything I run across, and hope it's something useful. Unique icons or different colors would have helped make them more distinct. There's good variety to the terrain, although sometimes you're forced to slog your way through nearly impassible sections that can make the game more frustrating than fun. The 7800's second fire button isn't used for anything special, which is too bad. It would have been nice to be able to pick up and save a power-up for later use. Failsafe plays very much like Strategy X does on the 2600 - you drive a tank, you shoot some stuff. But from a 7800 title, I'd hope for something more - like less linear progression, or requiring the player to get out of the tank and fight hand-to-hand or switch vehicles (like Taito's Front Line). Still, Failsafe is a pretty good game as it is, and there are multiple difficulty settings which let you find a good match for your skill level. < PreviousHomebreviews IndexNext >