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Is this a good starter set?


Koopa64

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I could live without Raiders, although I remember playing the hell out of it back in the day.

 

Absolutely love Seaquest. May not be a banner headline 2600 game, but it's solid and fun. (I just need to figure out why my cart has the game start immediately upon turning the console on; every other game has to have the reset toggle pulled or the fire button hit; this is the only one I have that exhibits this behavior.)

 

Space Invaders is the killer app.

 

Combat, as said, is best for two players.

 

Berzerk was a personal fav - can't say the same for Centipede and Defender, I always sucked at them and never liked them much as a result.

 

Donkey Kong... hmm... the humble 2600 version of the arcade smash... it is what it is...

Edited by Brian R.
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I know I'm opening myself up to a Royal $#17-storm for this, but Pac-Man has to be considered. Steaming pile that it was, many of us played the crap out of it because at its release, it was the only way one could play Pac-Man at home. Resembled arcade Pac-Man? Barely. But it was playable, as long as you weren't seizure-prone; the badly flickering ghosts were a sure trigger.

 

Fling away, droogies, fling away.

 

*dons haz-mat suit*

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I know I'm opening myself up to a Royal $#17-storm for this, but Pac-Man has to be considered. Steaming pile that it was, many of us played the crap out of it because at its release, it was the only way one could play Pac-Man at home. Resembled arcade Pac-Man? Barely. But it was playable, as long as you weren't seizure-prone; the badly flickering ghosts were a sure trigger.

 

Fling away, droogies, fling away.

 

*dons haz-mat suit*

 

I don't think you'll get the rain of $#17 you think. Although 2600 Pac Man doesn't resemble the arcade version, it was, and still is, very playable. If you let go of the idea that it's supposed to be Arcade Pac Man, it a fun game to play. Based on that, I agree that Pac Man should be in everyone's collections. Heck, it's not like it's an R10 to begin with. You can't go to a flea market without tripping over a few of them. ;)

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For the really common games like Space Invaders and Combat, it's not really a rule of "you have to have it" more than "you will end up getting it without even trying".

 

The same can be said for Pac-Man.

 

For a better Pac, Ms. Pac-Man is the game to get. And that's also a game that is easily obtained, again whether you want it or not.

 

My "starter set" when I started my adult Atari collection consisted of 27 carts. Don't ask me what titles they were, they got lost in the hundreds that came later.

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Would you call at least some of these games staples of the 2600?

 

Seaquest

Donkey Kong

Berzerk

Defender

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Haunted House

Centipede

Space Invaders (text label)

Combat

 

Sure. Also Adventure, Pitfall, and a host of others. But yes, those you listed could be considered staples of the 2600.

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For the really common games like Space Invaders and Combat, it's not really a rule of "you have to have it" more than "you will end up getting it without even trying".

Yeah....thats kinda what I meant....somehow I have 4 Combat carts :D

 

That's what happens when you buy carts in bulk or as part of system packages. You end up with WAY too many commons. I try to restrain myself as much as possible from doing deals like that unless I can actually use more than a few of the carts to fill holes. Collecting label variations helps, because then you can at least justify the purchase of your fifth Combat cart by saying "well, the label is different from the four I already have" but even that doesn't go down too well with "she who must be obeyed". :D

Edited by OldAtarian
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I know I'm opening myself up to a Royal $#17-storm for this, but Pac-Man has to be considered. Steaming pile that it was, many of us played the crap out of it because at its release, it was the only way one could play Pac-Man at home. Resembled arcade Pac-Man? Barely. But it was playable, as long as you weren't seizure-prone; the badly flickering ghosts were a sure trigger.

 

Fling away, droogies, fling away.

 

*dons haz-mat suit*

 

I'll admit right up front that I'm only a few months into my rediscovery of Atari (after 20+ years of "downtime"), so my perspective is limited, but since you brought it up...

 

For what it's worth, I thought Pac-Man was great when I originally had it, as did my brother, all my cousins, and all my friends. I don't ever recall anybody saying "Ahh, Pac-Man, what a disappointing arcade port!"

 

Then, the internet comes along, and all of a sudden it appears to have become almost an "in-joke" to pile on Pac-Man as a monumental disappointment, an unplayable mess, a hack job, choose your pejorative.

 

I can't help but get the impression that there's a bit of "group think" going on. Am I far off here?

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I know I'm opening myself up to a Royal $#17-storm for this, but Pac-Man has to be considered. Steaming pile that it was, many of us played the crap out of it because at its release, it was the only way one could play Pac-Man at home. Resembled arcade Pac-Man? Barely. But it was playable, as long as you weren't seizure-prone; the badly flickering ghosts were a sure trigger.

 

Fling away, droogies, fling away.

 

*dons haz-mat suit*

 

I'll admit right up front that I'm only a few months into my rediscovery of Atari (after 20+ years of "downtime"), so my perspective is limited, but since you brought it up...

 

For what it's worth, I thought Pac-Man was great when I originally had it, as did my brother, all my cousins, and all my friends. I don't ever recall anybody saying "Ahh, Pac-Man, what a disappointing arcade port!"

 

Then, the internet comes along, and all of a sudden it appears to have become almost an "in-joke" to pile on Pac-Man as a monumental disappointment, an unplayable mess, a hack job, choose your pejorative.

 

I can't help but get the impression that there's a bit of "group think" going on. Am I far off here?

 

 

I loved playing 2600 Pac-man too and didn't hear anything bad about it until the internet. I didn't even notice the

ghost flicker when I was a kid. I do now though.

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I know I'm opening myself up to a Royal $#17-storm for this, but Pac-Man has to be considered. Steaming pile that it was, many of us played the crap out of it because at its release, it was the only way one could play Pac-Man at home. Resembled arcade Pac-Man? Barely. But it was playable, as long as you weren't seizure-prone; the badly flickering ghosts were a sure trigger.

 

Fling away, droogies, fling away.

 

*dons haz-mat suit*

 

I'll admit right up front that I'm only a few months into my rediscovery of Atari (after 20+ years of "downtime"), so my perspective is limited, but since you brought it up...

 

For what it's worth, I thought Pac-Man was great when I originally had it, as did my brother, all my cousins, and all my friends. I don't ever recall anybody saying "Ahh, Pac-Man, what a disappointing arcade port!"

 

Then, the internet comes along, and all of a sudden it appears to have become almost an "in-joke" to pile on Pac-Man as a monumental disappointment, an unplayable mess, a hack job, choose your pejorative.

 

I can't help but get the impression that there's a bit of "group think" going on. Am I far off here?

 

 

I loved playing 2600 Pac-man too and didn't hear anything bad about it until the internet. I didn't even notice the

ghost flicker when I was a kid. I do now though.

 

I would say the same applies to ET, to an extent. Don't get me wrong, I fully agree ET is a bad game... a flawed game. But I did spend a moderate amount of time playing it back in the day, so that's something.

 

I thought I was pretty cool for having about 100 unique carts back then, and I definitely had some stinkers (Sorcerer anyone?) but my collection was quite meager in comparison to the available library at large. With the advent of emulation, decades later I was able to go through and play hundreds of games I had never even heard of in the heyday of the 2600... and wow, are some of those games ever horrendous. For those of us who were too young and naive in the early-mid 80's to understand the vagaries of markets and big business, these games, now immortalized in .BIN files on HDD's and flash media the world over, really help drive home what the video game market must have been like leading up to the "video game market crash" that has become such an oft-referenced event in gamer lore. And wow, what a mess it must have been.

 

I'm definitely rambling a bit here, but I'm just making the point that I think Pac-Man and ET get a disproportionate amount of disdain, and there are hundreds of games that suck so much harder.

 

Then again, I suppose it would be reductive to leave out the fact that Pac-Man and ET hold positions on the top-ten 2600 sellers of all time, with the former holding the title, so their status as being much higher-profile than, say, Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em, makes them easier targets. :)

Edited by Cynicaster
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Plenty of good stuff there to play, for sure. I agree with many others that Pac-man is certainly playable; I played it enough to justify the $30 i paid for it and that is, like, $150 in kid dollars. I played one-player Combat all the time, just see how many times you can hit the defenseless tank in two minutes and sixteeen seconds. I get crap every time I say it, but I enjoyed Defender more on the 2600 than in the arcade. I always wanted to play the arcade version, but would wind up blowing too many quarters, because I couldn't get the hang of all the buttons. The 2600 version managed to be very fun - with one button, and I think that was quite an acccomplishment. Morgan

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For the really common games like Space Invaders and Combat, it's not really a rule of "you have to have it" more than "you will end up getting it without even trying".

Yeah....thats kinda what I meant....somehow I have 4 Combat carts :D

 

That's what happens when you buy carts in bulk or as part of system packages. You end up with WAY too many commons. I try to restrain myself as much as possible from doing deals like that unless I can actually use more than a few of the carts to fill holes. Collecting label variations helps, because then you can at least justify the purchase of your fifth Combat cart by saying "well, the label is different from the four I already have" but even that doesn't go down too well with "she who must be obeyed". :D

Actually I have never purchased a Combat....they just spontaniously appear every 10 years or so.....kind of like the census....or John Travolta

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I know I'm opening myself up to a Royal $#17-storm for this, but Pac-Man has to be considered. Steaming pile that it was, many of us played the crap out of it because at its release, it was the only way one could play Pac-Man at home. Resembled arcade Pac-Man? Barely. But it was playable, as long as you weren't seizure-prone; the badly flickering ghosts were a sure trigger.

 

Fling away, droogies, fling away.

 

*dons haz-mat suit*

 

I'll admit right up front that I'm only a few months into my rediscovery of Atari (after 20+ years of "downtime"), so my perspective is limited, but since you brought it up...

 

For what it's worth, I thought Pac-Man was great when I originally had it, as did my brother, all my cousins, and all my friends. I don't ever recall anybody saying "Ahh, Pac-Man, what a disappointing arcade port!"

 

Then, the internet comes along, and all of a sudden it appears to have become almost an "in-joke" to pile on Pac-Man as a monumental disappointment, an unplayable mess, a hack job, choose your pejorative.

 

I can't help but get the impression that there's a bit of "group think" going on. Am I far off here?

Probably not, but I definitely remember being disappointed by Pac-Man for the 2600. Somewhat for the graphics, but especially the sound. But we did play it.

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For what it's worth, I thought Pac-Man was great when I originally had it, as did my brother, all my cousins, and all my friends. I don't ever recall anybody saying "Ahh, Pac-Man, what a disappointing arcade port!"

 

Then, the internet comes along, and all of a sudden it appears to have become almost an "in-joke" to pile on Pac-Man as a monumental disappointment, an unplayable mess, a hack job, choose your pejorative.

 

I can't help but get the impression that there's a bit of "group think" going on. Am I far off here?

I recall being extremely disappointed with Pac-Man when it came out for the 2600, and of the gamers I knew, that was the general consensus. I thought it was horrible, and returned it to the store (something I had never done up until that point). The flickering wasn't so much the problem, as that everything was so far off. The maze, the colors, Pac-Man's appearance and animation, lack of fruit, no music, awful sound effects, sluggish controls. It felt like the programmer went out of his way to not even look at a Pac-Man arcade game to see what made it what it was. I was a big fan of the arcade version, and while I wasn't expecting a perfect copy (I had enough 2600 games by then to know better), I was certainly hoping for reasonably decent. Not all that much later, Atari proved they could do it with Ms. Pac-Man.

 

Nukey's hack of Pac-Man is a really amazing example of what changes could have been made to vastly improve the game.

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For what it's worth, I thought Pac-Man was great when I originally had it, as did my brother, all my cousins, and all my friends. I don't ever recall anybody saying "Ahh, Pac-Man, what a disappointing arcade port!"

 

Then, the internet comes along, and all of a sudden it appears to have become almost an "in-joke" to pile on Pac-Man as a monumental disappointment, an unplayable mess, a hack job, choose your pejorative.

 

I can't help but get the impression that there's a bit of "group think" going on. Am I far off here?

I recall being extremely disappointed with Pac-Man when it came out for the 2600, and of the gamers I knew, that was the general consensus. I thought it was horrible, and returned it to the store (something I had never done up until that point). The flickering wasn't so much the problem, as that everything was so far off. The maze, the colors, Pac-Man's appearance and animation, lack of fruit, no music, awful sound effects, sluggish controls. It felt like the programmer went out of his way to not even look at a Pac-Man arcade game to see what made it what it was. I was a big fan of the arcade version, and while I wasn't expecting a perfect copy (I had enough 2600 games by then to know better), I was certainly hoping for reasonably decent. Not all that much later, Atari proved they could do it with Ms. Pac-Man.

 

Nukey's hack of Pac-Man is a really amazing example of what changes could have been made to vastly improve the game.

 

The same here. I always thought it was horrible. It looked nothing like the arcade game and barely even played like it. I actually enjoyed playing K.C. Munchkin on my Odyssey2 more.

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Absolutely love Seaquest. May not be a banner headline 2600 game, but it's solid and fun. (I just need to figure out why my cart has the game start immediately upon turning the console on; every other game has to have the reset toggle pulled or the fire button hit; this is the only one I have that exhibits this behavior.)

 

Every Seaquest cart I've played does that. I'm pretty positive that it's programmed that way.

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For what it's worth, I thought Pac-Man was great when I originally had it, as did my brother, all my cousins, and all my friends. I don't ever recall anybody saying "Ahh, Pac-Man, what a disappointing arcade port!"

 

Then, the internet comes along, and all of a sudden it appears to have become almost an "in-joke" to pile on Pac-Man as a monumental disappointment, an unplayable mess, a hack job, choose your pejorative.

 

I can't help but get the impression that there's a bit of "group think" going on. Am I far off here?

I recall being extremely disappointed with Pac-Man when it came out for the 2600, and of the gamers I knew, that was the general consensus. I thought it was horrible, and returned it to the store (something I had never done up until that point). The flickering wasn't so much the problem, as that everything was so far off. The maze, the colors, Pac-Man's appearance and animation, lack of fruit, no music, awful sound effects, sluggish controls. It felt like the programmer went out of his way to not even look at a Pac-Man arcade game to see what made it what it was. I was a big fan of the arcade version, and while I wasn't expecting a perfect copy (I had enough 2600 games by then to know better), I was certainly hoping for reasonably decent. Not all that much later, Atari proved they could do it with Ms. Pac-Man.

 

Nukey's hack of Pac-Man is a really amazing example of what changes could have been made to vastly improve the game.

 

I think the main difference between your perspective and mine is that I was too young to have really experienced Pac-Man at the arcade. I mean, I had seen it a few times, but I was 5 years old and the nearest arcade was all the way downtown (an hour bike ride). So, in essence, the Atari Pac-Man was more the "standard" to me, while the arcade was just an improvement over that, rather than the other way around.

 

The main nit I have with the game isn't the flicker, it isn't the non-rotating head, it isn't the absence of fruit... it's the way you die by the slightest brush with a ghost. The arcade and other Pac-Man games let you rub shoulders a bit with the ghosts before you die.

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My Opinions

 

Seaquest - Not familiar with

Donkey Kong - Must have

Berzerk - Must have (I actually have more of these complete, than Combat!)

Defender - Pretty good, if you like the game.

Raiders of the Lost Ark - Must have, even if you don't like it...

Haunted House - Cool game, fairly common, but not something most people seem to have actually tried to beat.

Centipede - real fun game, cool with a trak ball

Space Invaders (text label) - just looking at the game matrix is work it on this one!

Combat - play the flying games head to head, most people skip those

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For what it's worth, I thought Pac-Man was great when I originally had it, as did my brother, all my cousins, and all my friends. I don't ever recall anybody saying "Ahh, Pac-Man, what a disappointing arcade port!"

 

Then, the internet comes along, and all of a sudden it appears to have become almost an "in-joke" to pile on Pac-Man as a monumental disappointment, an unplayable mess, a hack job, choose your pejorative.

 

I can't help but get the impression that there's a bit of "group think" going on. Am I far off here?

I recall being extremely disappointed with Pac-Man when it came out for the 2600, and of the gamers I knew, that was the general consensus. I thought it was horrible, and returned it to the store (something I had never done up until that point). The flickering wasn't so much the problem, as that everything was so far off. The maze, the colors, Pac-Man's appearance and animation, lack of fruit, no music, awful sound effects, sluggish controls. It felt like the programmer went out of his way to not even look at a Pac-Man arcade game to see what made it what it was. I was a big fan of the arcade version, and while I wasn't expecting a perfect copy (I had enough 2600 games by then to know better), I was certainly hoping for reasonably decent. Not all that much later, Atari proved they could do it with Ms. Pac-Man.

 

Nukey's hack of Pac-Man is a really amazing example of what changes could have been made to vastly improve the game.

 

I think the main difference between your perspective and mine is that I was too young to have really experienced Pac-Man at the arcade. I mean, I had seen it a few times, but I was 5 years old and the nearest arcade was all the way downtown (an hour bike ride). So, in essence, the Atari Pac-Man was more the "standard" to me, while the arcade was just an improvement over that, rather than the other way around.

 

The main nit I have with the game isn't the flicker, it isn't the non-rotating head, it isn't the absence of fruit... it's the way you die by the slightest brush with a ghost. The arcade and other Pac-Man games let you rub shoulders a bit with the ghosts before you die.

 

I saw a website that talks about the logic used in arcade Pac Man and everything pretty much revolves around the center point of the sprites. If the center points of Pac Man and a ghost meet in the arcade then Pac Man dies or the ghost gets eaten if it's blue. In Atari Pac Man it looks more like it is programmed if the edges of the sprites meet, then the action takes place.

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