Ex-Activision Designers Launch Retro Game Publisher Audacity Games™

[bradhig1]

Will the labels end up with actiplaque?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

9 minutes ago, bradhig1 said:

Will the labels end up with actiplaque?

Of course! Authenticity is king.

[Lord Innit]

9 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Of course! Authenticity is king.

Indeed.

I think they should have International Edition printed on the PAL boxes to add to that authenticity. Maybe even have the PAL boxes smaller like the earlier releases were.  I really like those little boxes.

[widowsson]

Excited! Collectors Edition #310 arrived today!!!!

I did get a patch as you can see, though I ordered on 4/4 and got a lower number than some others?

Still not sure what happened there!!!

[MrTrust]

Well, I have mine in my fat little hands now, but no time to play for at least a few hours.  I will say they did a nice job with the packaging, and the box looks nice.  Solid printing, not too warped where the empty air around the cartridge is.  Shrinkwrap does appear to be done by hand, but overall, yeah, very comparable to the AA store, which I would say is about as good as anyone could expect.

 

I can't say I ever bought a new 2600 Activision game myself in the 80s, but I imagine the feeling is about the same.  Too bad nobody sells extra time to play these things.

[+sramirez2008]

1 hour ago, widowsson said:

I ordered on 4/4 and got a lower number than some others?

Still not sure what happened there!!!

Several people ended up not completing their purchases and those previously selected serial numbers were added back to the pool. 

[Rogerpoco]

1 hour ago, sramirez2008 said:

Several people ended up not completing their purchases and those previously selected serial numbers were added back to the pool. 

Still, very, VERY uncool how that whole process went, "random", and " slick internet people" seems to be the caveat, just doesn't seem right, as much as I am enjoying the game.

 

[MrTrust]

Okay, got to open it up and play.  Manual is what you'd expect from an old Activison game.  Stock actually feels a little more robust.  Game label's a little on the shiny side.  Just like an old Activision game, it does not fit into a 7800 properly.  Wow.  Yes.  So authentic.  Thanks for that.

 

But the game is what matters.  And the game is... Pitfall! plus inventory puzzles.  If you've seen any of the previews of the game, it is definitely what it looks like.  So, ultimately it's going to be a timed game once you have everything memorized, but you can still screw up on the jumping and the sideshow minigames, so score is not totally irrelevant.  QR codes work just fine on my flatscreen with an RF out, and I have to admit, that is a pretty neat feature.  Graphically and sonically, it is bog standard Activision stuff, which is to say, very high quality for the 2600.  Controls are nice and smooth on my Trooper joystick.

 

So, yeah, it's good.  Other than the size and scale of it, it does not have that I-can't-believe-this-is-the-2600 feel that many of the more recent homebrews, but of course, that's not what they're going for here.  As a sort of kinda' quasi-unofficial Pifall 3, I don't think you could ask for much more than that.  The main question I have is whether this is a game that would have been really cool to have back in the 80s, or if it's really cool to have come out now.  Though the tech driving it is very neat to see in a 2600, the game itself is not really anything we haven't seen on the system, just not quite this way and with this level of presentation.

 

If you haven't already gotten anything for the system produced after it was discontinued back in the day, this is not where I would start.  There are better value propositions out there in newer 2600 stuff, but this is a worthy game.  I turn it on, start playing, and I'm having a good time; the whole vibe is very charming, and it is a solid design.  So, good on them; I will definitely take a second look at the next game.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

3 hours ago, MrTrust said:

Other than the size and scale of it, it does not have that I-can't-believe-this-is-the-2600 feel that many of the more recent homebrews, but of course, that's not what they're going for here. 

To be fair, the "I-can't-believe" games usually use WAY more advanced additional hardware than what was available and affordable back then. I have respect for their decision to stay within the limits of the CPU and RAM. Anything else wouldn't have been even remotely authentic.

[MrTrust]

6 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

To be fair, the "I-can't-believe" games usually use WAY more advanced additional hardware than what was available and affordable back then. I have respect for their decision to stay within the limits of the CPU and RAM. Anything else wouldn't have been even remotely authentic.

 

Sure, that's why I said "that's not what they're going for here".  Of course, strictly speaking, a 128k rom with the serial number blown into it, that you can point a device at to beam your scores up to the mothership; none of that was practical in the 80s either.  So, I guess we could do a lot of naval gazing over what "authentic" even means in this context.

 

But I wasn't necessarily referring to the ARM, or even carts with onboard RAM.  Take something like Stay Frosty, where you have such good animation, and even having that built into the gameplay; if it weren't for the telltale flicker, I might mistake it for an A8 game.  Or outside of graphics, something like Gingerbread Man; with all that level variation, it could easily pass as a modern Steam game with stylized 2600 graphics.  There's not really anything like that in this game, although maybe the big snake fits that bill, graphically.  Like Pitfall!, mostly what you're going to be looking at are little variations on the same few screens with a couple of big attractions, and the whole inventory puzzle mechanic is not too far outside what we saw in the 80s with some of the 2600 adventure games.

 

That's not a knock on the game.  That's what they were out to achieve and they achieved it.  It's a fine game.  It's just, let's say, more subtle in its impressiveness.

[+KaeruYojimbo]

My copy came on a Friday. I played it a bunch that first weekend and have played it maybe 3 times in a little over a week since. It's not that I don't like the game, it's more that I feel like I've pretty much seen what it has to offer (and I got a little tired of replaying the first part of the game every time to get to new stuff).

[Dan Iacovelli]

got my collectors edition on monday played it today, was able to scan qr code to login(using a qr reader app) but when I went register score couldn't do so via website. camera wasn't working with chrome on phone. my phone is an S4 so doesn't have an Qr reader included

 

[Mockduck]

Got my Standard edition today! Not sure what the numbers really tell me in terms of where I fall in purchase and cart order. Invoice says order #2016 but serial number is 002362. Shipped securely and nicely.  

[+Pat Brady]

12 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

To be fair, the "I-can't-believe" games usually use WAY more advanced additional hardware than what was available and affordable back then. I have respect for their decision to stay within the limits of the CPU and RAM. Anything else wouldn't have been even remotely authentic.

 

I won't name names here because I don't want to pit any innocent programmers against David Crane, but I've seen some astonishing stuff in games that don't use extra RAM or a coprocessor. Though from what I've seen of Circus Convoy, I'd include the giraffe in that, so maybe I just have a lower bar for 2600 astonishment than you and MrTrust.

 

Is a 128k ROM remotely authentic?

[Albert]

7 minutes ago, Pat Brady said:

Is a 128k ROM remotely authentic?

This Superbanking scheme has been around for a while, but nobody's really had a strong desire to create a 128K game on the 2600.  It's just another bankswitching scheme, but a 128K ROM would have been prohibitively expensive "back in the day", so it seems extremely unlikely that anyone would ever have produced such a game back then. 

 

 ..Al

[Thomas Jentzsch]

5 minutes ago, Albert said:

a 128K ROM would have been prohibitively expensive

We discussed this in a different thread. It didn't seem to be too expensive later in in 80s.

[+Pat Brady]

13 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

We discussed this in a different thread. It didn't seem to be too expensive later in in 80s.

 

Okay, but if "probably feasible in the late 1980s" is the standard for authenticity, then cart RAM and some level of coprocessing are absolutely authentic.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

8 minutes ago, Pat Brady said:

Okay, but if "probably feasible in the late 1980s" is the standard for authenticity, then cart RAM and some level of coprocessing are absolutely authentic.

Yup.

 

Maybe not everything to the max at once, though. But I suppose we will never know the exact costs from back then.

[Albert]

36 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

We discussed this in a different thread. It didn't seem to be too expensive later in in 80s.

Certainly better than in the late 70s and early 80s, but sales of the 2600 had slowed greatly by the late 80s.  Not many new games were being made at that point (mainly just Atari with their red-label Atari Corp. games).  I don't give this period nearly as much weight as when the system was in its heyday in the early 80s, and Atari didn't produce any games approaching 128K.  I think the largest was the PAL 32-in-1 cart, which was 64K (I guess all 2K games from early in the 2600's history). 

 

 ..Al

[fakecortex]

On 4/9/2021 at 3:55 PM, fakecortex said:

Just got my shipping confirmation! Standard edition #2473

Arrived today! Woohoo! Tested it out for a few min, but gonna go sink some time into it now

[MrTrust]

7 hours ago, KaeruYojimbo said:

My copy came on a Friday. I played it a bunch that first weekend and have played it maybe 3 times in a little over a week since. It's not that I don't like the game, it's more that I feel like I've pretty much seen what it has to offer (and I got a little tired of replaying the first part of the game every time to get to new stuff).

 

I haven't reached that point yet obviously, but I know I will soon.  My one real gripe I have is that if you got yours late, you didn't get to be part of the big scramble on the leaderboards.  The top score had been reached tens of tines over, so now it's going to be a fight over seconds.  Nothing that can be done about it, of course, and that's just kind of the nature of these fixed beat-the-best time games, but the leaderboard is the big attraction for the game, and getting into that upper echelon is going to be tough.

 

Not that I probably could anyway, given how middling I am in the HSC here, bit it would be nice to have that hope to shoot for.

[fakecortex]

My login QR scans just fine, but the score is not ☹️ Tried it on three different TVs. Will have to try during the day, perhaps it’s the lighting in my room. 

 

Having fun with the game, just disappointed with the scan not working. 

[fakecortex]

It worked! 359th and climbing!! ?

 

 

I really like the puzzle aspect to the items. Reminds me of A Boy and His Blob (duh), which I love. There’s such satisfaction in figuring out where to use an item. 

[+KaeruYojimbo]

On 4/13/2021 at 6:12 PM, MrTrust said:

 

I haven't reached that point yet obviously, but I know I will soon.  My one real gripe I have is that if you got yours late, you didn't get to be part of the big scramble on the leaderboards.  The top score had been reached tens of tines over, so now it's going to be a fight over seconds.  Nothing that can be done about it, of course, and that's just kind of the nature of these fixed beat-the-best time games, but the leaderboard is the big attraction for the game, and getting into that upper echelon is going to be tough.

 

Not that I probably could anyway, given how middling I am in the HSC here, bit it would be nice to have that hope to shoot for.

 

Yeah, I'm looking forward to a more score-oriented game with the online leaderboard (even though that will eventually just become a race to roll the score the fastest). With Circus Convoy it feels more like a fancy way to prove you earned a patch than an actual high score competition.

[MrTrust]

Haha, well I earned mine this morning, but $2 to redeem it?  Come on, guys; I thought we were being authentic here.  Self-addressed, stamped envelope option and I'll bite.