Disk 5
Since there’s only one game on side 1, I am combining both sides into one post.
Picnic Paranoia
It’s Picnic Paranoia! And the bugs are after your food! You play as “George,” a diminutive picnic guard with a flyswatter that’s about half as big as the bugs you are swatting. Your job is to keep the ants away from your food, but oddly enough, you can’t walk on your own picnic blanket/tables (the yellow area in the screenshot), so once an ant gets on the yellow it’s out of reach for poor George. Once enough ants get behind a piece of food they start dragging it away. Fortunately, once they get off the table/blanket you can swat ’em again and push the food back onto the table. Good luck with that, though, for as the levels go on, the ants get faster and more numerous. In addition, jumping spiders create webs you’ve gotta swat through, and every so often, a wasp appears that is bigger than you that can sting you and leave you out of the action for a few crucial seconds.
Picnic Paranoia is a fun little game. The graphics are decent, although it’s just one screen, and the sounds are suitably annoying for bugs (especially the wasp). There’s also a “night” mode, where you can’t see the ground or the yellow tables/cloths, but for some reason can still see the bugs (must be those bio-luminescent ants). Add to all of this the title screen sequence, featuring the song “Flight of the Bumblebee,” and you’ve got the frenetic recipe for Picnic PARANOIA!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
Rating: B+
Obligatory accordion performance, uh, remix
Claim Jumper
Well, howdy, pardners! Y’all’ve moved West lookin’ fer gold in them thar hills, but yer neighbor’s shootin’ from the hip! OK, I’ll stop. Claim Jumper involves two cowboys, fashionably dressed in green and, um, pink, wrasslin’ for money in the Ol’ West. The entire game takes place on one screen, where the two cowpokes race for a piece of gold and take it to the assay office. The assayers then give out a stack of money, which a cowboy can then take back to his bank. The trouble is, obstacles such as cacti, snakes, and blobby-things (tumbleweed?) are blocking the way, and every time a player touches an obstacle that is not his color (or anyone touches a cactus) he gets stunned for a few seconds, at which time the other player can grab the gold or money and skedaddle. The blobs and snakes move around the field pursuing the opposite-color player, but don’t worry: a player can poop out eggs or, um, brown things, to get a snake to change into a blob or vice versa and chase after the opponent.
The best part of this game, though, comes from shooting each other. Each player’s got a gun, which can be used to either shoot a snake or blob (either killing it or turning it into the opposite type), or each other. When a cowpoke gets shot his hat flies off and an ignominious “wah-waaah” plays, after which the player us moved to one of the two “hospitals” in the corners. You can even bank shots off the corners of the hospitals in case your opponent is way ahead of you and heading for his bank. Yee-ha!
Once a player fills up his bank, he gets a new house, not to mention 20,000 points. Since the object of the game is to get to 25,000 points, and you get points for every blob or snake you convert, usually filling up the bank with ten stacks of cash signals the end of the game. Different game options include a “head start” mode, where one or both of the players start with five bills already in the bank, or a “buy bullets” mode, where you get a limited number of bullets and must buy more if you run out. This mode was never popular in our house, as the main point of the game for us was to shoot each other as often as possible.
Claim Jumper is an infectiously fun game, and definitely among my very favorites for the system. It’s a rare Atari game where both the players play at the same time (most early games featured the old “alternating” faux-2-player system). Was this game the precursor to more modern FPS multiplayer modes? Could be, but instead of having to deal with n00bs and l33t-sp33k, you can just grab a real-life friend and duke it out among blobs and pooped-out eggs. And by gum, it’s fun.
Once again, highly recommended, pardners!
Rating: A-
Zaxxon
Zaxxon employs the completely unique gameplay of “you’re in a space jet, blowing stuff up that scrolls past.” The difference in this game is that the stuff comes at you in an isometric perspective (apparently the first use of the isometric perspective in video game history). Your mission is to destroy the Zaxxon defense force. This mission consists of three stages. First, you must fly through a fortress-type area, where tanks are shooting at you and there is the ever-present danger of flying into a force-field or wall. Your job is to blow up fuel tanks to somehow refill your fuel before it runs out, and destroy grounded enemy aircraft. The aircraft you don’t destroy comes back in the second stage, apparently with reinforcements, and you must destroy them all to proceed to Zaxxon itself. I don’t know what that part entails, though, since I’ve never gotten past the second stage! That’s right, folks, Zaxxon is a game I never really got good enough at to be able to see the whole thing. You only get three lives, and the collision detection is spotty at best, especially during the second stage, where you can’t really tell where the enemy aircraft are in relation to the ground and they are constantly shooting, with little room and time to maneuver around their shots.
Zaxxon can be fun, and the graphics were certainly groundbreaking, but if you want to be in a plane shooting stuff the concept is better implemented in other games. Or, you could also pick up a copy of Zaxxon for a different system, hoping the graphics aren’t as confusing as they are in the Atari 8-bit version. Either way, good luck!
Rating: D-
Defender
Another in the line of “spaceship/jet shooting stuff that scrolls by” games, Defender has you flying over looping mountainous terrain, defending your homeland (which consists of little flag-things) from abducting aliens. You’ve got a high-tech laser that you use to destroy the invaders, of which there are six types: Landers (small green aliens like in the screenshot that kidnap your flag-people), Mutants (when a Lander reaches the top of the screen with a human and, like in checkers, gets more powerful moves), Bombers (box-things that lay mines everywhere), Pods (slow-moving star-shaped aliens that when blown up transform into Swarmers), Swarmers (pie-shaped aliens that move fast, shoot fast, and come out of Pods), and Baiters (annoying, Evil Otto-type flying saucers that hunt you down if you take too long). When all enemies are destroyed on a level (except Baiters), the wave is complete and you advance to the next, where there are more and faster enemies.
The controls take a bit of getting used to, since whenever you turn around the screen shifts rapidly and you actually end up sliding a fair distance backward, but the gameplay is smooth, the difficulty level is high without being frustrating, and the explosions are fun to see fill up the screen. Plus, if things get too hectic, the player is armed with three “smart bombs” that immediately destroy everything on the screen. Defender is quite a fun shoot-’em-up space game, and I recommend it for anyone just looking to ‘splo some stuff up.
Rating: B-
Missile Command
Ah, another classic. In Missile Command you play as the defender (hmm. . .a trend is developing. . .)of six cities under constant missile threats. The missiles streak down the screen as flashing dots, occasionally splitting, MIRV style, into several missiles, as they streak inevitably toward the populace. The only deterrent is your anti-missile battery, which can fire missiles to stop their missiles from missiling the cities. Some missiles are dropped by flying aircraft or UFOs (worth bonus points if destroyed), and some are “smart bomb” missiles that can change direction to avoid your missiles.
If you’re looking for a game with a higher concentration of the word “missile” in its description, you’d be hard pressed to find one (eleven in the previous paragraph). The gameplay was more than just point ‘n click, since due to the delay of your missiles firing your timing had to be just in front of any missile paths to successfully destroy one. Also, you had limited ammo, and once you ran out (or the missile battery itself got blown up), you could only watch helplessly as the enemy missiles obliterated your thriving metropolises. Did I mention that, after every level, it sped up until it was running at an inhuman speed?
Missile Command was simple, yet fun, and an enduring game. In fact, it has been ported to an enormous variety of consoles and computers, and, in fact, they’re still doing it (a version is out for the Xbox 360 right now). Give it a “shot,” and save our cities from missile annihilation!
Rating: B
Well, that finally does it for Disk 5. Coming up next: Disk 6, featuring Buck Rogers, Joust, Kaboom, Popeye, and BC’s Quest for Tires. Until then, folks!
Disk 4, Side 2
Track and Field: Los Angeles 1984 Summer Games
Track and Field, although apparently based on the 1984 Summer Olympics in L.A., was more of a generic track and field competition game than anything Olympics-related. You competed in six different events: the 100m dash, the long jump, the javelin throw, the 100m hurdles, the hammer throw, and the high jump. Running was accomplished by wiggling the joystick back and forth as fast as you could until it broke and you had to scour the electronics department at the thrift store in the slim hope you could get a new one. In the jumping games the angle of your jump was affected by how long you held down the button. The coolest thing about it was when you broke the world record (arbitrarily set, as far as I could tell: a quick Google search for the ’84 games revealed that the actual records of the time were from people with different initials and times/distances than the ones present in the game) and got your initials at the top. Unfortunately, as is with most of these games, the list reset itself every time you turned off the computer, so you’d have to beat ol’ ARM and CDM once again. Plus, it seems the competitors all wear toupees, as their hair looks like it’s detached from their scalp every time they jump. The two-player mode was turn-based, with the exception of the 100m dash and the hurdles.
Track and Field was a decent track game for its time. It’s pretty fun to play and master, although you may want to figure out how to get that running action down without breaking your joystick. In addition, if you’re Russian you may just want to boycott this game altogether, for reasons of principle.
Rating: B+
Obligatory remix (kind of)
Cosmic Tunnels
This game’s full name is “Cosmic Tunnels” Episode 4 in the Captain Sticky Saga. I have no idea who Captain Sticky is or what the other games are in his saga, since searching online for other episodes turn up nothing. I presume it’s some sort of odd Star Wars reference, starting with episode 4 and all. Maybe in a few years the creator of this game will release the first three “prequels,” featuring much better graphics and more wooden acting. In any case, in Cosmic Tunnels your home planet seems to be under attack by burning tomatoes—oh, excuse me, meteorites—and the only way to save it is by traveling through cosmic tunnels and stealing glowing bricks from space chickens. There are four tunnels floating above the world, and you blast off the launching pad into one. Your ship then rotates from straight up-and-down to face away from the screen, and the tunnel is portrayed by concentric squares flying past while little alien ship-like shapes fly past. When you exit a tunnel you’re over some strange alien world, where some defense turrets start firing at you. Your mission is two-fold: destroy all the turrets, and land on the landing pad.
At this point the screen switches to a close-up of the surface, and your astronaut exits the ship. He must make his way to the bottom of the screen, grab four glowing bricks (one at a time), and head back to the ship to drop off each one. Barring your way (depending on the planet) are giant space chickens, vicious robots, velociraptors with no face, or giant Pacman-esque creatures with stumpy legs. In addition, two of the planets have holes scattered about, which swallow both you and the creatures (who immediately respawn in a random location, sometimes right on top of you. Fair? Whoever said the game was fair?) The best part of the planet segments are four launching pads, one in each corner of the screen. Two of the planets give you a helicoptor helmet for a brief moment when you step on them, while the other two simply launch you across the screen to the other pad, accompanied by the most awesome BOING!!! noise you’ll ever hear in an 8-bit game. You may just want to spend the game bouncing around on these pads and giggling like a maniac. Or maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, assuming you got all the bricks before you were eaten by space chickens or whatnot, you reboard the ship and re-enter the cosmic tunnel, finally exiting over your world again, where you land on your planet’s surface and rejoice for the ten seconds the game takes to tally up your score. Pretty easy, eh? Well, the entire time you’re in your ship it is slowly running out of energy, which depletes faster if you are hit or fly into the ground or let those little aliens in the tunnels past you without shooting them. Once you run out of energy (or astronauts on the planets), your game is over, with a loud explodey noise and a bright orange screen. Everything onscreen freezes like those old nuclear war movies where you see the couple in the park or the kids playing in the street freeze right before the bomb goes off downtown.
Cosmic Tunnels is a pretty fun game, with its three different play-styles (tunnel, landing & take-off, and planet) and challenging time-limit. The controls are easy, the sound is good, and the graphics were excellent for the era, especially the tunnels and the planet scenes. Besides, I think any game in which you can trampoline over velociraptors is worth a shot. Just stay tuned for Captain Sticky 5: The Giant Chicken Strikes Back!
Rating: A-
One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird
One of the first, if not the first, sports game to feature actual sports stars, One on One pitted Larry Bird against Julius Erving, also known as “Dr. J” in a one-on-one match for the ages. I presume these two were chosen because 1)they were both superstars of their day, and 2)one is black and one is white, so they’re easier to distinguish between on an Atari. In any case, you can choose who to play as (or grab a friend and play as both) and whether to play a timed game or up to a certain score. The basketball play seemed handled pretty well (not being a big basketball guy, I’m not going to elaborate much on that), the characters are animated well, and occasionally one of the players shatters the backboard, causing a grumbling janitor to appear and clean up, chewing you out at the same time. This was one of EA Games’s first sports games, heralding their takeover of all sports-franchise games that holds true today, forcing other sports-game creators to pit made-up team against made-up team (The New York Frogs against the Atlanta Beetdiggers???) I don’t have much more to say about this game, except that when I was younger I didn’t know who Julius Erving was and assumed the “J” stood for “Jordan,” as in Michael (blasphemy, I know), and that the referee looks like Mr. Belvedere.
Rating: B
Thus ends Disk 4. Stay tuned for Disk 5, which will cover Picnic Paranoia, Claim Jumper, Zaxxon, Defender, and Missile Command!
Disk 4, Side 1
Disk 4: the Mario disk. Three out of the four games here involved the world’s most famous video game character (besides Pacman, possibly).
Donkey Kong
The debut of both Donkey Kong himself and Jumpman, later renamed Mario, Donkey Kong was, and is, an arcade classic. You play as Mario, working as a construction worker in the days before you went into the plumber business with your brother Luigi and got sucked down a toilet to the Mushroom Kingdom. Here you’re just in boring old Brooklyn, where escaped ape Donkey Kong has kidnapped your girlfriend, Laura Ingalls Wilder (named Pauline in the game, but come on; look at that dress!) Your mission is to dodge barrels, peeved-looking fires, jumpy pogo-weights, and other random obstacles to win back your pioneer girl and give that ape what-for! Hammers help you crush the barrels and obstacles flying around, but unfortunately you can’t climb ladders with a hammer, so the game mainly consists of running and jumping. In the final level you undo rivets under Donkey Kong’s platform, which flips him upside-down and sends him flying to an ignominious end 100m below. The “bump” sound made as he hits the ground is less of a bone-breaking splat and more of a “I just hit my head on the doorframe!” whump!, which, actually, sounds more painful.
The Atari 8-bit version is known not only for giving Mario blue hair and a pointy nose, making him look vaguely like a moustachioed witch, but being the only home version of the game that included all four levels found in the arcade version! That’s right, in addition to the barrel-throwing, pogo-weight-jumping, and rivet-removing levels, you can also play the “pie factory” level, omitted from other home gaming systems that licensed the game. I read somewhere that they’re actually supposed to be cement containers, but man, do they look like pies. Deadly, deadly pies.
Donkey Kong was, of course, a ground-breaker in many ways: one of the first platformer games as well as the introduction game of two beloved characters (Pauline was presumably omitted from later games due to her inability to float, pull up turnips, and command entire legions of loyal fungi). But how does it stack up today? It acquits itself admirably, in fact. The easiest difficulty is easy enough for casual gamers to try it, but the later levels (as speed increases) are enough to challenge a hard-core player. In fact, thanks to Haley’s helpful comment on the previous post, I have been made aware of a movie based around getting a high score on Donkey Kong, called The King of Kong.
If you’ve never tried Donkey Kong, give it a shot, if for no other reason than to smash giant barrels with a hammer. I think we’ve all had days where we’ve wanted to do that.
Rating: A-
Donkey Kong Junior
Mario’s back, and this time, he’s violating the laws of PETA. After Donkey Kong failed to keep his damsel in the last game, Mario (strangely dressed in Wario’s color scheme here) locked the poor guy up, chaining his arms and legs so he was no longer able to hide his man-boobs. You play as Donkey Kong Jr., the giant primate’s cute lil’ son, trying to free your father from his imprisonment. Unfortunately, somehow Mario acquired the ability to command alligators and giant blue birds, and as we all know, a monkey-child’s arch-nemesis is the dreaded giant blue bird. Eventually you must unlock all the keys to Donkey Kong’s cage, which allows Donkey Kong to escape and kick Mario’s behind, sending him flying off-screen to presumably conk his head on a doorframe.
Donkey Kong Jr. employs the same kind of technique as the previous game: get to the top of the screen just so your nemesis can whisk his captive off to the next level. In this game, however, there’s more focus on climbing up and sliding down poles and avoiding animals. While Junior can’t really jump worth beans (as you may find out on the second level, where he’s required to jump across some sort of stump-looking things literally inches apart and still regularly miss), his climbing skills are unparalleled, especially with two hands on two poles, which looks uncomfortable but seems to work for him. The game’s jump, climb ‘n dodge approach is just as fun as the original, so I would recommend this game for anybody who liked the first one. Of course, the game might’ve ended differently had Pauline been in it, pleading with Mario to let Donkey Kong go, and then staring into his eyes for hours on end while Mario got eaten by dinosaurs and giant grubs, eventually escaping to form an elementary-school rock band and become a sub-par Mexican wrestler to impress a nun.
Rating: A-
Congo Bongo
While this is the only game on the disk not to feature Mario, it obviously has similarities to Donkey Kong. You play as some red guy with a hat, hunting down the ape Bongo. Why? He doesn’t have your girlfriend or anything. According what I can figure out it’s because he enjoys throwing coconuts at you, which look more like watermelons. This version of the game only has two levels. First, you climb up the stairs, avoiding the watermelons, but not the monkeys for some reason (they don’t really do much of anything besides look cute). When you reach the ape, he flees across a river that you have to jump across, using sandbars and fish as stepping stools. If you reach him again he flees back to the mountain and you’ve got to climb up to him again and again, until you finally reach the Ninth Circle of Hell, where Satan himself sits, frozen, ready to hurl a watermelon at you.
Despite having only two screens, Congo Bongo was a pretty fun game. The watermelons were hard to avoid, since they didn’t actually moved, but flashed from one spot to another like they were animated on one of those old LCD hand-held games (like the famous Game & Watch or Tiger Toys games), so you had to learn how they moved. Also, the isometric view was unique for its time and added a bit of a challenge. Plus, Bongo doesn’t have the man-boobs that Donkey Kong seemed to possess, so it’s a little less disturbing that way. Give it a try, but after you’ve beat the second level there’s not much to go back to.
Rating: B
Mario Bros.
Mario got sick of construction and ape-hunting, so he teamed up with his brother Luigi (played by John Leguizamo) to rid the sewers of turtles, crabs, and flies. This is done by jumping underneath one and flipping it over, then disposing of the flipped-over creature. (The crabs must be hit twice while the flies jump and are harder to hit). Occasionally a fireball flies in from the side of the screen and burns you up, or as it looks like, covers you in mustard. As the levels go on the creatures get more numerous and varied, and later on googly-eyed blocks of ice start freezing the platforms, making it harder to stop moving. Every so often a bonus coin level comes up where you’re supposed to grab all the coins before the time runs out.
Mario Bros. is a pretty fun one-player game, but it’s the two-player mode that really shines. You can either work together to rid the screen of pests, or, more commonly, try to screw each other over and knock each other around and even into enemies. This type of play ended up being so popular that it was incorporated into many later Mario games, most notably Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario All-Stars, and all of the Super Mario Advance titles. Mario Bros. also introduced many of the elements that would later be used in Mario’s next NES adventure: Luigi, turtles, pipes, and not looking like a witch anymore. Although, with the command that Mario had over alligators in Donkey Kong, Jr., you’d think he’d have full control over any sewers in Brooklyn.
Rating: B+
That’s it for side 1 of disk 4. Join us next time for the second side, which features Track ‘n Field (or Los Angeles 1984 Games), Cosmic Tunnels, and One on One with Dr. J and Larry Bird. See you then!
Disk 3
The second side of disk 3 had orange juice spilled on it early on. Fortunately, my dad was able to transfer most of the games on that side to disk 16, so I’ll get to those games at that point. In any case, here are the games from the first side.
Pacman
Ah, Pacman. Possibly the world’s most famous video character ever (although that may now be Mario). Born from a Japanese programmer who was eating pizza and got struck with inspiration. In case you don’t know for some reason, the point of Pacman was to eat all the dots in the maze, avoiding the ghosts along the way. There were some larger “power pellet” dots that temporarily turned the ghosts blue, allowing you to chase them for a short time. There also occasionally appeared some sort of fruit, which was worth extra points. That’s it. The maze never changed, the object never changed; the fruit would change and the ghosts’d get faster. That’s about it. Yet it became one of the most popular games of its generation. Mainly because it was the first real non-space-based arcade game. Maybe because, in its simplicity, the game is still fun to play and requires quick reflexes to master. In any case, it’s Pacman.
Here’s a trivia note: did you know the ghosts all had names? And that one of those names was “Clyde?” You may never look at this game the same way again, knowing that Clyde could get you. Ah, Clyde.
Rating: C+ (there are better versions of this game out there)
King Tut’s Tomb
King Tut’s Tomb got corrupted on our disk, so I hadn’t played it until I got it on an emulator recently. The goal was to sneak through King Tut’s tomb, stealing his treasure while avoiding the dangerous creatures along the way. Shooting undead cobras kills them, apparently. Along the way you needed to pick up keys to open the keyholes blocking your way, eventually culminating in the GIANT DOOR at the end, which contained a big lamp. Unique to this game was the ability to customize your controls a bit, and the shield factor: instead of instantly dying when you were touched, the denizens of the tomb drained your shield until you reached 0, at which point you’d become a cute lil’ skull and crossbones.
King Tut’s Tomb was mostly a shoot-em-up in a maze. It was pretty fun, but nothing outstanding. Give it a try, if you’re bored.
Rating: C
Centipede
So disk 3 apparently had a lot of the more famous early video games on it, and Centipede definitely falls into that category. You were a little gun-type apparatus trying to rid your mushroom field from bugs, including a spider that’d jump around and some sort of slug, maybe(?) (it looked like a fairy) that’d turn your mushrooms different colors. The main pest, however, was the eponymous centipede, who would slowly wriggle its way toward your end of the field. Shooting a section of the centipede would split it into two different ‘pedes, who would then both invade your space by different paths. Completely destroying a centipede would get you to the next level, where everything changed colors and went faster.
This game was another one of those early reflex-dependent games with little else going for it. There was no music, and the sounds were just of your gun firing and the centipede moving around. Still, its simplicity can make it a good coffee-break game, and there are dozens of versions available for all platforms, so grab one and rid your mushroom farm of pests in style!
Rating: B-
Ms. Pacman
Trying to entice members of the female gender into playing video games, the Pacman guys came up with this little gem. The object is the same: eat dots and fruit, ghosts chase you, etc. etc. The differences, however, made up for the shortcomings of the first game: there were several different mazes, the ghosts behaved slightly more intelligently, the fruit (or other object—you can make out a pretzel in the screenshot) moved about the screen, and, of course, Ms. Pacman herself had an eye and a cute lil’ bow. In addition, every few levels you’d have a little intermission portraying the budding romance between Pacman and Ms. Pacman. My favorite was always the chase scene, although the stork scene is an interesting one as well. Since it improves on its predecessor, I’d say play this one over the original, although I’m not personally a giant fan of either. Sadly, Clyde has been replaced with “Sue,” which isn’t nearly as cool.
Rating: B+
Berzerk
Yet another classic, this game takes place in an electrified maze. Your object was to kill all the robots in a room, and then hightail it out of there before a smiley face known as “Evil Otto” strolled along and zapped you. Rinse and repeat. Otto would also yell at you whenever he’d come after you or you left a room (calling you a coward if you left before killing all the robots) using digitized speech, ooooooooh!. Although basically another shoot-‘n-run game, Berzerk became notorious for actually killing people playing it. So to those who would like to be chased down by a sadistic smiley face in a world where even touching the walls kills you, I say, enjoy Berzerk. . .but take your heart medication first, and make sure you are not pregnant, elderly, or injured in any way. Good luck!
Rating: B-
Crossfire
Hey, it’s a not-classic game! In Crossfire you were shooting at little aliens who resembled Chinese lanterns on a grid. The trick was, the aliens were coming from all sides, hence you were caught in the “crossfire.” Occasionally a spiky thing would pop out of the middle boxes and you could grab one for extra points. When you killed a Chinese lantern it’d come back as a different-shaped alien, and when you finally rid the grid of all offending attackers, you’d move to the next level, where—you guessed it—the aliens would move and shoot faster. What is it about these old games anyway? I mean, come on, you can do more with 64k of memory than that! Crossfire can be fun for a bit, but in the end it’s just another shooter, and there are plenty of other superior shooters out there. I’d say pass this one up.
Rating: D
Fast Eddie
Fast Eddie was an interesting, colorful game. You were the title character, a fat, hatted man with apparently only one leg, and you were stuck in a platform/ladder-style board. Strange blue creatures of different styles ran around underfoot, and glowing objects (such as the fish(?) in this screenshot) floated above your head. On the top level one of these creatures, colored brown, had exceptionally long legs and could not be jumped over. The object was to collect ten of the glowing objects, each of which would shorten the legs of the guy at the top. When it was as short as the other creatures, a key would appear above its head, which you then needed to grab to make it to the next level, where the objects would change and you’d do it over again. Each time you cycled through the different object types the layout of the ladders and blue creatures would change: on a certain floor there might now be two creatures or three running around, or one big fat one, or some combination. It was these combinations that gave this game replay value aside from “get the high score” and, as a run’n’jump game goes, this one was fairly fun. I’d say give it a shot, even if it was just to see what silly objects you had to collect.
Fish? Really?
Rating: B-
Obligatory remix(well, not really, but still!)
I’ve done three of these reviews within 24 hours, and I think I’m going to take a break before launching into disk 4, which is the first disk so far where both sides worked. So stay tuned for Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong, Jr., Congo Bongo, and Mario Brothers!
Disk 2
Side 1 of Disk 2 contained a program that I have yet to find, as the disk got corrupted when I was very little. All I remember is that it was some sort of drawing program that I really really loved. Oh, well. Side 2 contained two of my top Atari games of all time, so it was one of the most-used disks we owned.
Necromancer
Necromancer was one of my favorites on the Atari. You were a little druid/wizard who was battling an evil necromancer and his army of creepy spiders. During the first stage you were protected by a force field that looked vaguely like the Star of David and you used a little magic wisp to grow seedlings. These seedlings were threatened by walking dwarf-type people that looked like they either had wings or those lampshade things they put on dogs who had surgery so they won’t chew on their casts. Eventually the seedlings would grow into full trees, which were then immune from the dwarves but could be torn down by a giant spider that occasionally flew around and, um, made the trees scream.
In any case, the first stage ended when your strength ran out and you went to the second stage with however many trees you grew. This stage was even odder: you were in some sort of stone structure with giant hands coming out of the ceiling and rows of chambers containing spider eggs. Your goal was to get through the chamber unscathed by growing ladders using magic ? marks the hands left behind, while at the same time using your army of grown trees to crush the spider eggs. The catch was sometimes an egg would hatch and a spider would fly out, trying to steal your trees and weaken you. This happened for five screens (in each one the hands and spiders would get faster), which led to the final stage: the showdown against the necromancer himself.
The evil wizard would pop up behind gravestones, leaving trails of spiders in his wake (the more eggs you crushed in the previous stage, the less spiders there’d be) who would drain your energy if they touched you. You could clear away the spiders with your wisp, but sometimes his pet giant spider would come along. If it touched any normal spider, the normal spider would start to glow and become impossible to kill: you just had to avoid those ones. Your object was to pick up all the gravestones on the screen so the necromancer couldn’t use them to reincarnate himself. This, supposedly, went on for five screens, after which you win the game. I say supposedly because I have never beaten this game! Yes, despite having this game since before I could remember, I have never beaten the final stage. Even today, when I’ve gotten much better at games in general and have save-states and emulators to help me out, I’ve still never seen the end of this game. There are just too many spiders in those last stages, even if you get rid of every single spider egg in the previous ones! A lot of the earlier stages depend on luck anyway: in the first stage the trees can either shoot up like weeds or take literally five whole minutes to bloom, or anything in between. The same is true for the trees breaking through the spider egg compartments. And if a spider hatches in a compartment with a tree above it, say goodbye to that tree and hello to another spider in the final round. Bagh!
This intense difficulty notwithstanding, the game rarely gets frustrating. Part of that is the first round: you can either grow 30 trees or none at all, but you still can “beat” the first round. In fact, it’s technically possible to win the game without any trees, if you can contend with the literal army of spiders during the final round that will make it virtually impossible to move. The graphics are also colorful and fun, but what really made the game for me was the music. During the game there was this demented, jazzy bassline playing, which would add sevenths and thirteenths whenever the giant spider appeared. But the best music was over the title screen: a haunting melody that would slowly get louder and add a 4-part countermelody. All in all, Necromancer was a top-notch game, however illogical and demented it was, and I highly recommend it.
Rating: A
The Last Starfighter
The Last Starfighter was actually apparently a beta version of Star Raiders II. This version was based on the movie of the same name, which I’ve actually never seen but have been told the plot by my brother-in-law: how a kid plays this video game and gets the high score, and is then whisked into space by some actual aliens (headed by Professor Harold Hill, apparently) to save their planet based on his l33t skillz.
In the game itself you must defend a solar system from the evil invaders, who are sending out red-colored short-range fighters (seen in the screenshot here) from their mother ships, which are supposed to be flying saucers but look more like cymbals with eyes. If you stave off enough attacks from the cymbals you can warp to their system, where you are supposed to destroy all their cities on their planets to, um, get revenge, I guess, although it seems that saving your planet from being wiped out by wiping out hundreds of civilian cities of the enemy would be a bit harsh. In any case, the graphics are pretty good for the time (the pseudo-3D when you are fighting the short-range fighters and flying over planets is especially worth a mention), and the gameplay is pretty fun, although a bit repetitive when you have to deal with the same horde of fighters and cymbals time and time again. Also, since you can fly to a star at any point to recharge your energy, it doesn’t matter how much damage you take in a fight: the fight resumes where you left off when you return. (Although, spending too much time at a star can be kind of fun and frightening at the same time: the heat literally melts your ship off the screen, and the effect is a bit jarring.)
Anyway, this game is a bit of fun, and you can either play it here in its beta stage or grab it, fully completed and with all the movie references removed, as Star Raiders II.
Rating: A-
Pitfall II
Pitfall II, bar none, was my favorite game for the Atari 8-bit computer, and in fact is still in my top ten favorite games of all-time. You are Pitfall Harry, an adventurer who has lost his niece Rhonda, the beautiful Raj diamond, and some sort of cat-creature that looks nothing like a cat named Quickclaw. You must traverse the dangerous Lost Caverns to find them, grabbing gold bars and dodging bats, vultures, scorpions, and electric eels along the way. Pitfall II was unique at the time in that it had an open world to explore, and that the game would actually end instead of just starting over and getting harder (in fact, there was a blog by Strong Bad about this very subject not too long ago).
The best part, though, was that the version available for the Atari 8-bit computers and the Atari 5200 had an easter egg: after finding the girl, ring, and cat-thing, you were transported to an entirely new level, which was both much more interesting and difficult than the original. Now you had to deal with giant ants, crazy bats, pirahnas, and more intelligent frogs, along with devious jumping puzzles. Your quest now was to find a snake-charmer person, a bowl, a horn, and the Golden Rope (which was Pitfall Harry’s only hope) in order to escape the Lost Caverns and see daylight once more. The level was fairly difficult by itself: fortunately, you couldn’t die. Each time you touched a vulture or ant or whatever you lost some points and were sent back to the last red cross you touched, which were scattered about the levels. Unfortunately, there were some very difficult areas (like the path to the Golden Rope itself) without a red cross in the middle, adding to the challenge. Also, getting a perfect score took a lot of effort, as not only could you not touch any creatures, but even the act of falling to the next floor below often cost you 100 points, leading to a lot of convoluted routes to pick up all of the gold. This, of course, added to the replay value, which was needed in a game with a finite ending.
Pitfall II was not just a pioneer in the gaming field, it was also very fun. The game was kept interesting also by the music: a sprightly heroic theme would play every time Harry picked up some gold or other treasure, and a sad version of the theme would play every time he touched a creature. The rest of the time, a “moderate” version of the theme would loop, which may get tiring after a while, but for me only added to the impetus to find the next piece of gold and hear that heroic tune again! You can find all three themes here.
In any case, if you love exploration games, swashbuckling jungle tales, and games that are fairly easy to beat but difficult to master, grab Pitfall II for the Atari 800 or 5200!
Just for fun, here is a video I uploaded of the end of the game when I got a perfect score (a feat in and of itself):
Rating: A+
Frogger 2
Finally we come to Frogger 2, the sequel to the very famous and popular Frogger. You once again took on the role of the famous frog, trying to get across obstacles to plant your froggy face in the top of the level. This time around, instead of crossing roads and streams, you began underwater and had to avoid fish and sharks. There were three logs that could hold your face at the top; however, if you jumped on the top of the logs, you would find yourself on top on a different part of the level, where you jumped across lilypads, ducks, hippos, and alligators to plant your face in a life preserver at the top. If that weren’t enough, you could also take a ride on a mother duck and find yourself in the sky, where you had to bounce on clouds and birds and avoid a giant dragon to immortalize your face in the heavens, so that every time a schoolchild lay on his/her back and pointed out shapes in the clouds, he or she would say, every time, “Hey, that one looks like a frog! In fact, it looks just like that frog caught in the life preserver over there!”
Frogger 2 was a pretty fun game, especially if you were a fan of the original but wanted more variety. The sound was nothing to write home about, but the graphics were pretty good for the eight-bit era, and the gameplay was varied enough to keep you coming back for a little while, at least. All in all, a good game, though not one of my favorites.
Rating: B+
Well, that’s it for this edition. Stay tuned for disk 3, which contains the fun games Ms. Pacman, King Tut, Centipede, Pacman, Berzerk, Crossfire, and Fast Eddie. Until then, keep on retro-gaming!
Disk 1
Professor IQ
Ah, Professor IQ. The game that professed to be educational when really. . .OK, it was obviously educational and not much else. Two players would take turns spinning the “Wizard Wheel” and then play a mini-game. In Puzzle Time there was a sliding-tile puzzle of the alphabet that had to be put in the correct order. Word Scrambles showed a mixed-up word that you had to put in the correct order. Math Fun simply gave you a math problem you had to solve. Finally, Reverse it showed a line of numbers, starting with just 0-2 and eventually going from 0-9. When you pressed the joystick trigger the line reversed itself from the cursor to the left side. The object was to order the numbers correctly from 0 to 9. While all of these games sound about as exciting as scraping your gums, the point was to earn credits, which were then spent on a somewhat amusing final mini-game where you and your opponent (or the computer) had their icons placed on an 8×8 grid. You could spend each credit filling in a square of the grid with your color (overwriting the other player’s color if it was already there). The game was won when one person had filled in the entire grid with their color. You could also “eat” your opponent and send his icon outside the grid if you had more credits than he.
Professor IQ was about as fun as it sounds. However, the bright graphics and cheery music kept it from being a total snore-fest, and if you like those sliding-tile puzzles you might enjoy the alphabet game. Also, in the math and word scramble games a snake-like character with a graduation cap marched across the top of the screen, and if you took too much time solving the problem, an unseen assailant would throw a book at it and a giant “WRONG!!!” would appear at the top. This was obviously in the days before political correctness would take effect; nowadays an authority figure would put an arm around the snake and a giant “YOU ALMOST GOT IT!! KEEP TRYING!!” would appear.
Rating: C-
Well, that’s the only game on Disk 1. Next time: Disk 2, consisting of Necromancer, The Last Starfighter, Pitfall II, and Frogger 2.
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