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Disk 14, Side 2
Bruce Lee
To start off, I’m woefully unequipped to compare this game to actual Bruce Lee movies, genre conventions, or tropes. I know very little other than that he was one of the greatest martial artist actors of all time and that since his passing tons of people have tried to build off his popularity to make a quick buck. Among those people trying to cash in were the creators of this platformer, in which you play as Bruce himself, kicking and punching his way into some sort of fortress, stealing lamps or jewels or something off the walls. Pursuing you through most of the rooms are two sinister enemies: a ninja wielding a katana or staff or something who is so stealthy that he doesn’t even have a face, and some sort of mooing green sumo dude (apparently named The Green Yamo) who, despite weighing probably over 300 pounds, is as accomplished a martial artist as Bruce himself. For a really fun twist, a multiplayer mode allows one player to control The Green Yamo, who can either fight against Bruce or work with him (by keeping the ninja off his back), making the game either much easier for beginners, or quite a challenge for veterans.
The fortress consists of twenty, vaguely Chinese-related screens, each with a completely different layout, and although you mainly must proceed through them in a linear fashion, they are laid out in such a way (and you have to backtrack enough) that it gives the game somewhat of a Metroidvania vibe to it (even if it’s not explicitly that sort of game). In many of these rooms there are moving obstacles that can be anything from a single white dot, to a giant collection of spears flying across the screen, to, uh, some sort of bush that erupts out of the ground, that immediately electrocute Bruce, causing him to freeze up with a noise that sends chills down the spine. These traps will also kill the ninja and the sumo dude, though in their case they will just respawn about three seconds later, and in screens where precise timing and/or jumping is required to navigate these obstacles the game is merciful enough to just remove the two enemies completely.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the art style in this game, which is probably the most unique part. Despite the limited hardware, every screen is vibrant with a definite Asian style. Everything, from the floors to the walls to the ladders to the deadly electrocuting bits, has some sort of intricate pattern to it, and there’s just enough representational artwork to keep you guessing about the more abstract bits. For example, the first few screens obviously take place in the courtyard of some Chinese mansion, with the mountains in the background and some statues of, cows, maybe(?), up on pedestals. As you descend deeper into the fortress it becomes less and less clear exactly where you are or what things are, for that matter. In the screenshot above, for instance, the column in the middle acts as a moving ladder, but I have no idea what it’s really supposed to represent. It gives the whole game a sort of mystical feel; like watching a Miyazaki film: all the weird stuff probably has some sort of significance, but heck if I know what it all means, it’s certainly pretty to look at and ponder about. At one point in the game you may be descending into hell (though it may just be a basement), and at another point a giant demon throws magic at you until you hit a dynamite plunger and blow him up, and at the end you finally find either treasure or a room that’s burning down.
I really like this game. Even though there’s not much to keep you playing after you’ve beaten it once, it’s still pretty fun and surreal. Plus, grabbing a friend to play as The Green Yamo can really transform the game into something unique and especially fun to play. It’s even got a PC remake, so you’ve got no excuse! Play it today!
Rating: A
Encounter
First, a tiny bit of history: The Atari 800 was built to be a gaming machine, and had custom hardware designed specifically for that end. Sadly, it kept the price tag high, which is one reason it eventually lost most of its market share to its competitors such as the Apple ][ and especially the Commodore 64 (it was kind of like the PS3 of its day). Most of these computers had nearly identical libraries of games as the Atari (especially the Commodore), so most consumers opted to buy the cheaper machine, since many games played fairly similarly on both platforms. There were a few games, however, that really showed off what the Atari was capable of, especially compared to counterparts on other machines, and Encounter was certainly one of those games.
Encounter is basically an early first-person shooter, somewhat reminiscent of Battlezone, where you are shooting various aliens (I think, though they mainly take the form of colorful floating diamonds) that come out of warp holes dotted about a landscape. Most of the aliens just move around and occasionally take potshots at you, though on occasion a red one appears that tries to kamikaze right into you at high speed, dodging erratically while a tense, frustrating sound plays (see here at 0:50). Most of the time, this will cause you to go into panic mode, frantically backing away from the suicidal maniac trying to shoot it, and heaven help you if your back suddenly gets stuck on one of the many pillar-like obstacles dotting the playing field; you’re basically toast at that point.
After offing a certain amount of enemies, a black door of doom opens up and you must proceed into it, where you are suddenly flung at high speeds into a field of giant balls or bullets or something which you must dodge for about half a minute. Failure means you have to repeat the level you just finished, but if you make it past that stressful obstacle course, another door opens to a different-colored landscape, where you must now kill some more aliens. These aliens don’t just change color and move faster, however; in later levels they start shooting multiple rounds at a time, and some are even bombs that, if not killed quickly enough, explode into about a dozen or so projectiles that basically cover the landscape. Those red kamikaze guys, though; they’re always around, no matter how high up you climb in the levels. Seriously, screw those things.
Encounter is a game with great atmosphere. The aliens make some weird, sing-songy noises that get louder the closer you are to them, but other than that (and the sound of you moving), it’s absolutely still, making for a tense situation. The graphics actually aren’t all that hot (nearly comparable to the graphics on the 2600 really), but what separates the Atari port from the other computers of the time is the smooth scrolling and sounds which create the atmosphere. Compare that video I linked to earlier with this one from the Commodore and you’ll see what I mean: the Commodore version looks and sounds surprisingly generic, where the Atari one just oozes with tension and danger.
In any case, Encounter is a wonderful, if highly difficult, game. Even the novice setting can be quite a challenge, if only because of those red kamikaze guys and the between-level super-fast warping sections. Definitely recommended, but not for those with faint hearts.
Rating: A-
Pacific Coast Highway
And now we come to yet another Frogger clone! This one’s called Pacific Coast Highway, and this time you play as a bunny instead of a frog. The basic gameplay is the same as Frogger: cross the busy highway, then hop across boats/rafts/etc. to cross the water. The main difference are that the two sections of the game are actually split up into two screens, and if you get hit or drown, a little ambulance (or an, uh, ambulance boat, I guess?) rushes to the scene to pick up your bunny corpse. I assume this was added after the programmer’s 5-year-old daughter asked, “Daddy, what happened to the cute hopping bunny? Why isn’t it moving anymore?” and the dad, not wanting to explain death to his little princess, programmed in the ambulance so he could say, “Don’t worry, sweetie, the bunny just got a boo-boo. See, the little ambulance is just taking it to the bunny hospital, where the bunny doctor will make it aaallll better!” thus preserving the innocence of little girls everywhere. See, media watchdogs? Some programmers really do care!
You can also play in a multiplayer mode, where the other player controls a turtle (really just a palette swap of the bunny). Interestingly enough, you actually play at the same time, though it’s somewhat confusing as to why, as it’s not a race (or at least you don’t get extra points for beating the other person and the game waits for both of you to finish before moving on anyway) and you can’t affect the other player at all. But it’s still pretty fun, and certainly one of the better Frogger clones out there.
Rating: B
That takes care of Disk 14! Coming up next: side 1 of disk 15, featuring Super Breakout, Star Raiders, and Asteroids!
Disk 14, Side 1
Caverns of Mars II
The original Caverns of Mars game starred a plucky space adventurer heading deep into the underground of Mars. On he plummeted downward, shooting tanks of fuel to get fuel (yet again) and generally trying to avoid the wall in an autoscroller. The sequel here is pretty much the same game. Except they switched it sideways. And you aren’t in a cavern anymore. Also, Mars suddenly got a lot browner. That’s, uh, pretty much the game. Autoscroll sideways, don’t run into anything, blow up rockets for points, and shoot “fuel” for fuel. Type “help” for help. Oh, and get a high score that gets reset when you turn off the machine. That’s always fun.
Also (and I am totally serious about this), after all my years playing this game as a kid, and even playing it again for this review, I did not realize that the markings on the front of the fuel containers actually said the word “Fuel” until as I’m literally writing this paragraph and looking at the screenshot. Really. Since it’s all smooshed together my brain always interpreted it as some sort of alien markings, or simply a kind of cool design or windows or something. Amazing the things you learn twenty-five or so years later.
Rating: C
Night Mission Pinball
I’ve always had a problem with pinball video games. Part of the fun of pinball is that it’s real; those flippers are actually there, the ball is an actual ball, and those buzzers and bells are there to be heard (unless you’re Tommy). More importantly, there are certain things you can do in real life that just don’t work in the virtual world, like bang on the cabinet to get the stupid ball to go the right way, taking extra care not to cause the dreaded “TILT” message to shut you down. Oh, sure, some pinball video games have a button you can press to simulate bumping the cabinet, but it’s completely uncontrolled and only works a few times. There’s just something satisfying about playing real pinball that’s never transferred over to the computer or console versions, even if they do have extra gimmicks.
This phenomenon gets worse the farther back in time you go and the worse the graphics get. Take a look at Night Mission Pinball here. There are no helpful messages that pop up and tell you what you’re hitting with the ball or what effect it has on the game. I can’t even tell what most of that stuff on the screen is. The flippers and bumpers are fairly easy to make out, but what’s that thing in the top left corner? An altimeter? Why is there an altimeter? ‘Cause this game has a plane theme? What do I do with it? Are those white lines with the brown under them supposed to be bumpers or flippers? How am I getting points? How did I activate that multiplier? Those chutes at the top sometimes have numbers? I think? Are we dropping bombs on Germany or something? How come the bombs aren’t moving? How do I get them to fall? What is this game?
You could take the time to observe every single hit the ball makes and figure out what it does on the screen to change things. Or you go play something like Sonic Spinball instead. Sure, that game sucks too, but at least you can tell what’s going on.
Rating: F
Atari Invaders
Anyone who doesn’t know what Space Invaders is probably a space invader in disguise. Aliens are descending in several rows and dropping things on you (bombs, I hope). You are in a ship/tank/something that fires upwards, destroying them. As each one dies the rest speed up until the last one is going about Mach 3 or so and you end up losing. Ha ha, sucks to be you, and not have superhuman reflexes!
In the rare event that you do destroy them all, then they come back moving even faster! Beat your high score! You know, the one that gets erased when you turn off the machine!
This particular version of Space Invaders, termed Atari Invaders, was created by some guy named Joe Hellesen. Joe apparently had a mild seizure when writing the word “joystick” on the main screen here, but fortunately the space invaders moonlight as spelling Nazis and they destroy the extra letter pretty quick. Presumably the reason they’re invading Earth in the first place is because they’ve been reading peoples’ texts, Facebook statuses, Twitter accounts, etc. and they just can’t stand it anymore! Its all you’re fault that their coming!
Rating: D+
Slime
Yet another game from Synapse Software, Slime puts you into a boat that you don’t actually control, fighting off the evil forces of, um, acid rain, I guess? Your boat is floating in what I guess is slime, and you control a glowing blue cursor that moves all over the screen. Instead of firing projectiles, however, each time you hit the trigger a small, triangular wedge appears. Deadly rain falls out of the sky at an increasingly faster-paced rate, and the wedges serve to divert it to the left or right, depending on what side it hits. Your goal is mostly just to survive, but also to make as many drops as possible fall into the drains on either side of the screen. If too much rain falls into the, uh, slime ocean? I guess? Whatever it is, if too much rain falls into it instead of the drains, the water level rises, destroying any wedges that now fall under the water line and moving you boat closer to the death rain. If the boat gets hit, it sinks and you lose a life.
Slime is certainly a unique game, especially for the time. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean it’s a good game. While it starts out fairly enjoyable, as time goes on it simply gets more and more frustrating. You’re never given any warning as to when the slime level rises; it just suddenly jumps up, completely messing up your structure, and forcing you to rebuild both sides as quickly as possible to divert the rain again. Often this turns out to be nearly impossible, as the previous structure was built at a certain angle that now causes a one-square gap at the end that is impossible to fill (like on the left side of the screenshot) without destroying the whole thing one piece at a time and rebuilding. Also, sometimes the game pulls awfully jerky moves like having lightning randomly strike and destroy your wedges (or your boat if the water’s high enough), or having a UFO suddenly fly onto the screen in an erratic pattern, destroying whatever wedges it hits. Even worse, on occasion, the UFO drops a drain plug into one of the drains that is impossible to remove, rendering it useless until a helicopter shows up (completely randomly) and removes it.
All in all, this is one of Synapse’s weaker entries into Atari 8-bit games. It’s creative, but ultimately the deck is so stacked against you that it’s impossible to get very far, especially later when ten bad things happen one right after another and there’s absolutely no time to react. It’s basically the Atari version of getting hit by a blue shell right before the finish line in Mario Kart. No matter how well you do, the game randomly screws you over anyway.
Rating: C+
That’s it for side 1 of disk 14. Coming up next: side 2, featuring Bruce Lee, Encounter, and Pacific Highway. Hopefully I’ll get the next review out in less than a year this time!
Disk 13
Lode Runner
Somewhere along the lines of early platform gaming, somebody stood up and said, “Why is everyone jumping? In the real world, do people jump over holes or up halfway-constructed buildings? No, they go around them, or up elevators, or whatever! Leave the jumping to the kangaroos; let’s get some realism in our new game!” And while Lode Runner doesn’t really qualify for the title of “realistic”, at least the guy isn’t bounding around like he’s got springs in his pants.
You play as (insert protagonist name here), whose job it is to run, climb up ladders, and clamber across bars to collect all the…gold, I guess, even though they look like square barrels… on a given level. Pursuing you relentlessly are a group of guards who will stop at nothing to zap you dead. No word as to the identity of these blue-chested guards or the location in which you are lode running. Perhaps they are robots. Perhaps they are mad monks, as the 1995 remake suggests. Perhaps they are hardcore UCLA fans and you are simply stealing from the school’s treasury to take it to USC, possibly to fund their basketball program. Whatever the case, they are after you, Mr. NoJumpMan. Your only defense is a zapper gun that can zap the brick floor to either side of you, making those hapless Bruins fall in and get stuck for a few seconds, at which point you can run across their heads to freedom. This zapper is also essential for getting all the gold on a given level, for in some levels the gold is buried or otherwise inaccessible without digging.
Which brings me to the next point: the levels. Specifically, the fact that there are 150 of them! That’s right, unlike about 90% of its contemporary games, Lode Runner does not force you to replay the same level or small collection of levels over and over while the colors changed and the enemies moved faster. Instead, there were 150 different levels, each with its own unique layout, which meant that unless a player cheated or was obsessive (since there was no way to save your progress back in the day), most players never actually got to see all the levels in this game. Add to this the fact that the game even included a level editor (possibly the first game to do so), and suddenly this game got what few other games of its time had: a replayability factor! And not just to improve your time or boost your score, but to experience new gameplay! Thus began the practice of customizing and/or modding games, which has extended the life of games waaay past the time when they may have died otherwise (I’m looking at you, everything based on Quake III or Half-Life) to this very day.
Lode Runner was a very popular and well-received game, and has spawned a lot of sequels and remakes, from the faithfully updated (e.g. Lode Runner: The Legend Returns and its “sequel” Lode Runner Online: Mad Monks’ Revenge) to the not-so-good 3D remakes (Lode Runner 2 and Lode Runner 3D) to the inexplicable (apparently Bomberman was based on the NES version of Lode Runner. Who knew?) Perhaps the best gauge of how well a person may play Lode Runner is his or her performance in Championship Lode Runner, a direct sequel with 50 more levels, each more impossible than the last. If somebody makes it past level–oh, let’s say, one–said person has already spent too much time playing Lode Runner and needs to go outside. Maybe catch a UCLA game.
In any case, if you haven’t already guessed, I heartily endorse Lode Runner. It’s fun, challenging, ever-changing and downright awesome.
Rating: A
Coming up next: side 1 of Disk 14, featuring Caverns of Mars II, Night Mission, Atari Invaders and Slime. See you then!
Disk 12, Side 2
Jumpman Junior
After Jumpman, there was Jumpman! And after Jumpman, there was Jumpman Junior! In the original Jumpman (to which Jumpman Junior is basically an extra level pack), you were the title character (not related to Mario) whose duty it was to collect bombs that some nefarious force had placed all over Jupiter. Nevermind that a person would be crushed to death by the atmospheric pressure and wouldn’t be able to breathe, let alone construct some sort of puzzle-filled base for terrorists to put bombs in; we’re on Jupiter, and that’s that. In any case, most levels consist of running, jumping, climbing ladders, etc. while bullets patrol the screen slowly, suddenly firing quickly at you if you’re lined up horizontally or vertically with them. In addition to this, most levels have some sort of puzzle-y gimmick to them, such as ledges that disappear, hailstones that drop from the top of the level, giant walls that push you off the edge of platforms, and even a hurricane that constantly pushes you to the right, along with a flock of birds. On Jupiter. You know, Jovian birds. Work with me here.
Like previously mentioned, Jumpman, Jr. is more of the same gameplay as Jumpman, just with different levels, but the game is a lot of fun. It’s fairly difficult, too, as you only start with three lives and can gain extra ones only by getting a certain score. The levels are varied and range the entire gamut from ridiculously easy (like the “Electrocution” one up above) to quite difficult (such as a level that reveals itself as you walk around it, meaning that you don’t know where the end of a ledge is until you walk off of it and die).
Rating: A-
H.E.R.O.
Recent history has shown us that the dangers of mining are very real and hazardous. From cave-ins to hazardous atmospheric conditions, to radioactive burning walls and pools of pink acid filled with deadly octopi, modern miners face all sorts of difficult conditions while trying to mine the precious minera…
Wait a second, radioactive burning walls and pools of pink acid? Deadly octopi?
That’s what the game H.E.R.O. would have you believe, anyway. Nobody’s quite sure what H.E.R.O. stands for (Wikipedia offers up at least three guesses), only that it has something to do with helicopters, so I would like to say it stands for “Helicopters Eating Real Oranges.” Yeah, I know, it sucks, but I can’t think of anything better right now. In any case, you play our plucky H.E.R.O., flying into dangerous mine shafts to rescue trapped workers. Also, nobody’s quite sure why the powers that be gave him an implausible helicopter pack instead of, say, a jetpack, or an environmentally sound rope and tackle set or something. Maybe the game was designed by Leonardo da Vinci.
Anyway, in addition to the red walls (which the manual calls “magma” but come on, magma’s a liquid! Do the research, people!) and octopi tentacles, there are other types of fauna that are deadly to the touch, including snakes, spiders, and some sort of frightening butterfly hybrid as shown in the screenshot. Even a recolor of the bat from Pitfall II makes an appearance. Most of the (later) levels consist of two parts: first he drops through a set of improbable caverns until he reaches the bottom which is flooded with either water, green acid, pink acid (I guess), or mud. Really liquidy mud. Then, he side-scrolls through a couple screens and rides platforms across the liquid until he reaches the trapped miner, after which the level instantly ends. No mention is made of how the H.E.R.O. actually evacuates the miner, so I assume that he is actually just a Catholic priest, flying into mines to perform last rites before perishing along with the miner in the gloom.
The H.E.R.O. is not defenseless. First of all, he has a few sticks of dynamite which he can use to blow open certain doors. I don’t know how safe it would be to blow open a wall with a stick of dynamite when one is already deep inside a claustrophobic mine shaft, but hey, I’m not an engineer. Secondly, he can also shoot laser beams from his eyes.
Which is cool.
H.E.R.O. is a pretty fun game that’s difficult to master. A lot of the gameplay is simply trial and error (going down the left mineshaft lets you progress, while going down the right leads to instant death, etc.). The controls are a little wonky (it takes a second after you press up on the joystick for the man to actually move), but that adds to the challenge. Also, in many rooms there is a lantern hanging on the wall and if you accidentally touch it then the room goes dark except for enemies (which turn gray), raising the difficulty level even more. Overall, sometimes frustrating, yet not enough to turn off most gamers. I recommend it.
Rating: A-
Java Jim
This is a weird game. You star as Java Jim, a digger with glasses who is digging up a, what, tropical island, I guess? Maybe it’s in Indonesia, given the title of the game? Anyway, you are seeking random treasures, like rings, keys, crowbars, dynamite plungers…ok, these are less treasures than they are random stuff you can dig up on the beach using a metal detector. However, the whole time a volcano is tossing lava shots at you. If a bit of lava hits a hole, it fills it back up again. If it hits solid ground, then a tree or a bush suddenly grows there. And occasionally, the lava will spawn either a spider that stuns you or a strange creature that looks like a cross between a frog and a hippo that will either kill you or get killed by you depending on its color. This is very fertile lava.
After you dig up your quota of random crap, then the volcano turns into stairs (?) and you climb up to the next level. You only have a certain number of times you can dig, after which you need to crawl into a hole and steal shovels from snakes.
Like I said, this game makes no sense. It doesn’t have to do with coffee, even. Still pretty fun, though.
Rating: B-
Froggie
This is the third take-off on Frogger that I’ve reviewed on these disks, and out of the three (this one, Frogger 2, and Preppie), Froggie seems to be the most faithful to the original. Unfortunately in this case, that simply means that it’s basically the same as Frogger with worse graphics. The story is a tale as old as time: frog wants to cross street, frog avoids cars. Frog wants to cross stream, frog leaps across logs and turtles (that submerge sometimes). Frog leaves identical frogs across top of screen, and repeats the process five times. Frog goes to next level, where everything moves faster. Yeah, it’s a fun concept, but this is just a Frogger clone without anything distinctive to separate it from the original. If you’re going to play Frogger, go play Frogger; don’t bother with Froggie.
Rating: D
Oddly enough, I’ve reviewed at least three take-offs of Frogger, yet the actual Frogger is nowhere to be found on these disks. Strange.
Shooting Arcade
Yay! A shooting gallery! You’re a gun, and you shoot things going across the screen for various amounts of points! Most of the objects just disappear when shot, but some reverse the direction of everything, some give you more bullets, and some make other targets reappear! When you’ve shot them all, they all reappear moving faster! Also, circus music is playing! If you run out of bullets, then you just sit there, totally screwed! Whee!
Rating: C
Star Wars
What if the entire Death Star attack sequence from Star Wars: A New Hope was seen exclusively from the viewpoint of Luke’s targeting computer? My bet is that it would look very similar to this game. It consists of three stages: first, destroy some TIE fighters; second, blow the tops off some towers (which look like actual, literal towers instead of the turrent guns from the film), and finally, fly through the trench and fire into the exhaust port, blowing up the Death Star. Sadly, instead of a big ceremonial march, you instead then advance to the next stage, where the Empire has quickly built a whole fleet of new Death Stars right behind the first one, so you have to do it again and again and again! The only way to escape it is to use the Force Reset button, Luke!
Rating: B-
That finally does it for disk 12! Coming up next: disk 13, featuring apparently just Lode Runner. That review will probably be posted in a much more timely manner than this one. It’s one game. See you then!
Disk 12, Side 1
Ballblaster (Ballblazer)
One of the most well-loved game companies of the ’90’s was LucasArts. From Star Wars flight sims to hilarious pirate adventure games, the company was a wonderful purveyor of top-quality games. However, not many people know that before they were LucasArts, they were Lucasfilm games, and they even created two of the most impressive games to be found on the Atari 8-bit system, both of which are found on this disk.
Let’s start with Ballblazer. On the surface it seems simple enough: two triangles with bases are playing some sort of one-on-one soccer match where the goalposts move and get smaller every time a goal is scored through them, and the farther away you are from the goal when you shoot the ball, the more points you score. This premise could easily and quickly be accomplished using some sort of top-down static view. But these guys take it to the next level. Not only is it the only first-person-perspective scrolling game for the Atari (as far as I know, anyway), but it scrolls incredibly smoothly for the hardware, with no skips, jumps, lag time, etc. The graphics themselves are fairly basic by today’s standards (checkerboard, ball, posts), and even the two players are little more than a triangle on top of another triangle with a triangle in the middle, but just the fact that they scale according to perspective in 1983 ought to count for something. That’s almost ten years before Wolfenstein 3D came out! There’s no real rotation, however, and the perspective changes at 90-degree jumps, which can be disorienting for new players.
The sound also deserves mentioning. During the match itself there’s this sort of hi-hat sounding “rat-a-tat” pumping up the tension that gets a little more subdued whenever someone is in possession of the ball. Also, when the two players get too close to each other there’s a weird buzzing sound, like when a bee flies into your ear (except quite a bit lower, like when a mutant bee flies into your ear). But the most amazing part is the theme tune, which is possibly one of the most creative theme tunes I’ve seen anywhere, not just on the Atari. There’s a repeating bass and harmony pattern, and layered on top of it is an undulating, jazzy improvisatory solo. But wait! How in the world can a computer improv a solo? Well, it’s actually not a programmed-in sequence of notes; instead, it uses a fractal-based algorithm to simulate a solo that, according to one reporter quoted on Wikipedia, sounded like John Coltrane was playing it. (Incidentally, the same article includes a snippet of the C64 version of the theme. No disrespect to the C64, but its version of the theme sucked compared to the Atari 8-bit’s so I’m including how it should sound here.)
The game itself is also infectiously fun. While you can play against the computer at varying skill levels, the best is to go against a friend. Being a Lucasfilm games, it also received an unusual amount of backstory thanks to corporate synergy. Apparently in some future year in some future space, players mount their “rotofoils” (the triangles) to shoot the “plasmorb” (the ball) into the “goals” (the goals). They even made a sportscast video to advertise, featuring the most annoying sportscasters this side of Greg Proops in The Phantom Menace. If LucasArts ever makes a sports game, I sure hope they hire outside people to do the commenting (although, as a rule, sports game commentators are always annoying. How many times must Lee Corso tell me to keep the CLOCK running?!?!? Sorry, had to get something off my chest; I’ll be OK.)
Some may notice that I actually titled this “Ballblaster” not “Ballblazer” and I said it came out in 1983, where other sources state 1984. This is because the version I had was actually a pirated beta version that was missing several frills (although the gameplay is unchanged) such as flashing skies when a goal was scored, the loser spinning out at the end of a game, the entire AI system (you were forced to play against a friend), and, sadly, that awesome Coltrane-like line on top of the theme song. Even with those omissions, it was still an incredible game, and I give it extremely high marks! Get it now! Also, don’t get the Nintendo version! That one sucked!
Rating: A+
Obligatory remix (language warning!)
Rescue Mission (Rescue on Fractalus, or Behind Jaggi Lines)
In some future time, in some future space, some humans were waging a war against evil aliens called “Jaggis.” Some of the most brave, heroic pilots faced off against these evil foes on their inhospitable planet, Fractalus. You, however, apparently weren’t as awesome (or foolhardy, depending on your point of view) as any of these pilots, so you get to fly the rescue ship to pick up these poor saps. The atmosphere is toxic, and day lasts something like nine minutes or so, plus the Jaggis keep shooting at anything that emits energy, so you’ve got your work cut out for you. Once you’ve picked up enough pilots you signal the mothership to come pick you up and fly into its docking bay, which looks oddly like a football field, where you advance to the next level. Lucasfilm, however, doesn’t just speed up the enemies and change their color. Instead, every few levels they add a more intimidating obstacle, such as suicide saucers, that day/night change where you have to fly blind (use the altimeter!), and perhaps the reason I’m still scared to live sometimes (but I’ll get to that in a second).
Once again, Lucasfilm blew away the competition with this game. The graphics are quite innovative, with the landscape being generated fractally and therefore consisting of random jagged mountains. (I wonder if it’s the same fractal algorithm used in Ballblazer to make the theme tune. If you fed these mountains through a sound processor, would you get a solo worthy of Coltrane? Should the game be subtitled “Behind Jazzy Lines?”) When you spy a downed ship, you must land and turn off your engines so the pilot can approach and knock on the door. You must then open the airlock (if you don’t the knocking gets slower and eventually stops, showing that the pilot’s suit melted in the atmosphere and he is now dissolving into a gooey pile of flesh. Nice job, Hero.) and let the pilot in. Those Jaggis are a sly bunch, however, and sometimes they pull the most evil stunt in video game history (yes, even scarier than Doom 3):
You’re dead. The end. This actually happens a lot in later levels. The one memory I have of when this first happened to me led me to never play past about level three. Dude, you want to give a kid nightmares, this is the way to do it.
That aside, it really can be a fun game, although it’s actually kind of slower-paced, due to the flying being rather skippy thanks to hardware limitations. I recommend it for anyone without heart problems.
Again, you may notice that the title I gave this game was “Rescue Mission” and not “Rescue on Fractalus.” This is because, once again, we owned the pirated version, which didn’t have all the graphical frills done. That stupid alien was still in it, though.
Rating: A
That’s it for Disk 12, side 1! Coming up next: a whole slew of games, including Jumpman Junior, H.E.R.O., Java Jim, Froggie, Shooting Arcade,and Star Wars. See you then!
Disk 11, Side 2
Salmon Run
There are games based in space. There are games based around adventurous heroes. There are games based on sports. There are games based on abstract concepts like yellow blobs eating dots and chasing ghosts. But nowhere was there a game based on fish in heat until the release of Salmon Run. (Wait, “fish in heat?” Is that the term? My sense of propriety forces me to keep from searching the Internet for an answer, lest I come across fetish sites too disturbing to contemplate.)
You are a rather intrepid fish who has just spent one to five years (depending on your species) hangin’ out in the ocean with your salmon buddies, eating a lot of plankton or whatever and generally having a good time. Suddenly, your instincts kick in, and you remember that hot salmon chick (salmon chick?) from the sac of eggs next door where you grew up somewhere in Alaska. It’s time to settle down, take out a salmon mortgage, and maybe search for some good salmon grad schools. But first you’ve got to get back to your old spawning grounds, so off you go. You race along the jaggedy stream, occasionally jumping over waterfalls and/or rapids. These waterfalls, if hit, will bounce you back and freeze you for a second, which doesn’t seem so bad, right? I mean, this thing isn’t timed, right? Well, be careful, because the streams are being patrolled by bears! These godless killing machines will stop at nothing to devour their next helpless salmon delight, which, sadly, happens to be you. They are also really fast! One of these bears will zoom across the screen, pursuing your fast-swimming tailfin at nearly the same speed (and even faster on later levels). Also, during later levels they turn pink. Sunburned? Embarrased? Some new form of salmon-fed Alaskan pink grizzly?
Once you jump enough waterfalls and avoid a sufficient amount of bears, you finally meet your sweetie and give her a nice fish kiss (complete with a nice, Atari-like kissing sound that is actually either really sweet or disturbing, considering the noise is coming out of a fish), where hearts float around you both and thankfully we are spared the ensuing biology lesson about salmon spawning. Then the level begins again, where everything goes faster!
Salmon Run is a reflex game, with the added challenge of those blasted bears, who charge at you from out of nowhere, move faster than you do, take up a big chunk of the screen, and are nearly impossible to avoid, thanks to the narrowing stream. It’s not my favorite, but it can be fun if you want to test your reflex skills. As for me, now I’m hungry for trout. Oddly enough, not for salmon.
Rating: C+
Pharaoh’s Curse
Move over, Indiana Jones! Or in this case, turn blue, Indiana Jones! You play as a little cyan guy with a fedora, collecting the treasures of the ancient Pharaoh Whoever: treasures as beautiful and strange as a golden cat, a golden trophy, a golden cane, a golden, uh, fir tree, and other golden objects too crudely drawn to accurately make out. Also, there are gold keys, but they just open doors (not golden) and don’t count toward your treasure total. There are sixteen rooms in all, each containing one treasure, and when you have collected all sixteen you must make your way triumphantly back to…the title screen! Which is where you started, but for some reason is located in both the bottom and the top of the tomb! (The tomb, of course, wraps around, so you can fall out of the bottom of the tomb and arrive in a screen at the top.)
But this tomb raiding isn’t all gold-grabbing and door-opening. It is also filled with ancient and mystical traps! Sometimes a bird-like thing will appear and grab you, whisking you away a few screens. I have no idea what it’s supposed to be. Sometimes a treasure seems to materialize out of thin air, and if you grab it you get an extra life (but it doesn’t count toward your total treasure count), but sometimes it turns into a deadly golden arrow! Death! Also, there are golden traps that look alternately like claws, forks, jumping grasshoppers, and blunted spikes that pop up out of little bumps. A large amount of the time, these bumps are found at the bottom of ancient and mystical elevators, so you must stand on them waiting for an elevator and get killed if you wait too long! Wait, elevators? This ancient pharaoh outfitted his tomb with elevators? Who is this, Pharaoh Otis? I gotta hand it to those ancient Egyptians: their tombs may have been filled with deathtraps, but at least they were handicapped-accessible.
Anyway, occasionally you will run into either Pharaoh Otis himself or his mummy, who appear on a given screen announced by an eeeeevil fanfare. These denizens of the underworld don’t have any otherworldy powers, however; but they do have guns. Which they shoot at you. Fortunately, you also have a gun. Unfortunately, if you shoot one, it just dematerializes for a short time and will later reappear. Fortunately, the pharaoh can’t seem to figure out how to use his own elevators. Unfortunately, the mummy can. Fortunately, you can kill the mummy by running over a booby-trap bump right before the mummy does and kill it that way. Unfortunately, if you grab a key and then get killed you lose the key, often having to backtrack several screens. Fortunately, the Frogurt comes with your choice of topping! Unfortunately, the toppings contain potassium benzoate. That’s bad.
Pharaoh’s Curse is a lot of fun, but has some really strange physics quirks. Oftentimes you can walk right through walls and shimmy up them. Sometimes the bird will suddenly grab you, even though you were nowhere near it, and deposit you somewhere deadly. If you climb up a rope too fast a little remnant of your feet get left on the bottom of the screen, and if those pseudopods run into a wall then you can’t move in that direction, even if your way is clear. There are at least two or three doors that you are supposed to open with a key but can actually pass right through going one way (one of these actually gets you stuck until the bird-thing picks you up). If you jump while shooting you can make your jumps longer, sometimes, by…jumping off the bullets or something? You can even use this right when you press START to begin the game by shooting and jumping off to the left, eventually ending up in a part of the tomb you weren’t supposed to access yet. This makes it possible to collect the title screen treasure last instead of first, which is rather silly.
And hey, this is original: once you finished a level you started the game over, but everything went faster! It even gave you a password in case you wanted to start at higher levels. Interestingly enough, the password, which I won’t reveal here, is simply propaganda by Synapse software to train you into typing that their games are the best. It’s like the secret code from Miner 2049er actually being the phone number of the company that made the game: if you typed it enough into your Atari, maybe you’d accidentally punch it into your phone without thinking, and when you’re on the line with the company, heck, you might as well order a game or something, right? That’s marketing for you!
I really liked this game growing up. It was a fun, unpredictable platformer that was at a good difficulty level (not maddeningly hard, but not a cakewalk at higher levels either), and none of the weird quirks are gameplay killers. Give it a try, and see if you can avoid the evil pharaoh and his ominous elevator systems!
Rating: A-
Submarine Commander
A regular visitor to this site may wonder why there was a several-month delay between my last reviews and this disk’s review. Well, wonder no more, because it mostly has to do with this game! In it you play a submarine commander on maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea during WWII, sinking enemy ships. No word on which side you belonged to, Allied or Axis, so I would assume you were actually a semi-neutral Spanish submarine, sinking ships from both sides just for kicks. In any case, you had to creep along silently and avoid depth charges to get within 35 feet of the surface and close enough to a ship to torpedo it, which usually missed. Once you got too damaged you had to go hide along the bottom of the sea and nurse your wounds, sitting there waiting for the sound of more depth charges being unloaded above your head. Once you blew up all the ships then…no, wait, that never happens; the ships keep coming.
This game, much like Eastern Front 1941 and Jumbo Jet Pilot, suffers a lot from a lack of manual, but even with the manual the controls were hard to figure out. Nevertheless I really tried to get into this game, as several reviewers online found it fun and adrenaline-filled when you finally sank something, but this game requires patience that I just don’t have. Curse my upbringing and exposure to fast-paced cartoons and ADD-inducing trance-like commercials for sugary beverages! So if you can figure it out then have fun sinking those Nazis. Or Frenchies. Whoever.
Side note: why do these hard-to-figure-out games always have to do with Germans? First Eastern Front 1941, and now this game. Maybe Jumbo Jet Pilot was commissioned by Lufthansa.
Rating: C
Pool
All right, nothing too fancy here; it’s pool. Or more specifically, 8-ball. You point the cursor at where you want the cue ball to hit, watch the fluctuating power meter on the left, and hit the trigger when the meter is at the level you want to strike with. Instead of stripes and solids, the balls are red and blue (except the 8-ball and cue ball, of course). It’s two-player, with no computer opponent, and numbers on the top of the screen represent nothing important. I don’t have much else to say here: if you like pool, give it a shot, if not, don’t. Whatever.
Rating: C-
Nautilus
For those for whom Submarine Commander was apparently too obtuse of a submarine game, we present Nautilus! You control a submarine, whose mission is to torpedo underwater skyscrapers and steal the inhabitants.
Wait, what?
It gets better. The computer opponent (or a second player if you wish) controls a destroyer of some sort, who speeds across the screen dropping depth charges on you in its mission to drop a white thing on the far left of the playing field, which goes down a tube and rebuilds all the skyscrapers. Magic! If the sub runs into anything it breaks in half and sinks to the bottom, where it lies for a few seconds before being miraculously resurrected to continue its underwater havoc-wreaking, where if the destroyer gets hit by anything (either from a torpedo by the surfacing sub or a malicious yet tiny helicoptor dropping bombs) part of it explodes and it races back to the far right of the screen, unable to drop that skyscraper-building whatever thing. I know that’s a vague term, but if there is a word in the English language for “device that travels through an underwater tube erecting skyscrapers in its wake” I’ve yet to find it.
Anyway, once the sub gets all the inhabitants from the skyscrapers, then they all immediately reappear and you can get them all again! Yay? This continues for the entire three-minute round, at which point the game abruptly ends and you can press START to begin it again.
I don’t know about Nautilus. While it certainly is a well-made game, there’s just something missing to make it truly enjoyable. Maybe it’s because I don’t understand anything that’s going on. Maybe it’s because there’s no real objective (collecting things from skyscrapers ad nauseum aside). Maybe it’s the fact that you can’t kill either the sub or the boat for more than a few seconds. Maybe it’s the fact that the board never changes and is pretty easy the first time anyway. Whatever the reason is, Nautilus is one of Synapse’s weaker entries, and, while not a bad game, fails to live up to the shine of its brothers.
Rating: C+
That finally does it for Disk 11! Stay tuned for Disk 12, which contains beta versions of Ball Blazer and Rescue on Fractalus, called Ball Blaster and Rescue Mission.
Disk 11, Side 1
Kangaroo
Donkey Kong was a big success in Japan. It was also a big success in the U.S. and probably Europe; I’m too lazy to look that up. But when it came to Australia I guess they ran it by the quality assurance guy and he said, “That monkey’s too bloomin’ big! Turn him into a lot of smaller monkeys! Also, make the main character a kangaroo instead of a plumber. There are a lot of kangaroos down under, but I don’t know anybody who’s ever seen a plumber there. It’s not relatable! That won’t play in Perth! Crikey!”
Whether or not the above story is true (it isn’t), the game Kangaroo bears a striking resemblance to the previously mentioned Donkey Kong. You are a mommy kangaroo hopping your way up a series of platforms in some sort of bizarre tree to reach your baby, which was stolen from you, presumably by small monkeys. Said monkeys climb up and down this tree, hurling their poop at you. OK, they look like small round objects that could be anything, and Wikipedia claims that they’re apple cores, but we all know what monkeys throw at people. As you ascend the tree you can collect fruit for points, in a vain attempt to get kids in the early ’80’s to think that eating fruit is cool because the kangaroo mom does it. Each level also has some sort of bell that, when rung, replaces all the already collected fruit with different kinds of fruit, waiting to be collected again: strawberries, apples, grapes, and uh, some sort of honeycomb? That’s what it looks like, anyway.
Momma Kangaroo, unlike Mario, is not an entirely defenseless jumping character. If a monkey gets too close she can go all “maternal instinct” on it and punch its lights out. In fact, in one level there is a big stack of monkeys holding up the baby kangaroo like a totem pole and Mommy’s gotta sock each one out of the line-up to reach her little angel, lest the monkey stack get too large and start raining a hailstorm of crap on top of her. When she finally reaches her joey the game inexplicably plays “Oh, Susannah!” which is a real piece of Australia right there, and the game moves on to the next level. There are four in all, and when all four are beaten they start over, albeit with more monkeys and fruit.
Even though this game bears some obvious Donkey Kong similarities, the gameplay is different enough to make it a new experience in its own right. The action never gets too complicated to be overwhelming, yet it’s difficult enough on the higher levels to be a real challenge. Although jumping over holes can be a bit tricky since Momma Kanga can’t move horizontally very well, it never gets frustrating. Give it a shot. As for me, I’m suddenly craving some Honeycomb! Honeycomb! Me want Honeycomb!
Rating: B
Flying Ace
The first thing you may notice on beginning to play Flying Ace is that you’ve immediately died. The second thing you may notice, after you get used to the controls being reversed and finally taking off, is how orange the ground is. This is supposedly some sort of WWI action game, where you are flying your biplane through enemy European territory, yet the landscape looks like at least Egypt, if not southern Nevada. The third thing you may notice is that you can only fly at one speed, your plane isn’t very responsive to your joystick (you have to hold a direction for at least a third of a second for the plane to respond, which doesn’t sound like much but can be death), and that hitting the ground isn’t actually hitting the horizon line or the line where the road is, but some arbitrary zone inbetween there. The fourth thing you may notice, after dying again, is that the gameplay is merely aiming and shooting slow-moving trucks on a highway without crashing into the arbitrary ground, and avoiding some black plane that you can sometimes shoot down or maneuver into the ground, but which comes back one second later. The fifth, and last, thing you may notice is that Blue Max is a much better game with the same premise on the Atari, and so you go play it instead.
That’s Flying Ace! Hope you like Blue Max!
Rating: D-
Mouse (Mouskattack)
Cloning was alive and well in the early ’80’s, as every single game on this disk is a near-clone of another more well-known game (except for Flying Ace, but that doesn’t make that game any good), and this Pacman clone is no exception. To be fair, I don’t even know if “Mouse” is even the name of this game, since there is no title screen, a search for “Mouse” in Atari search engines doesn’t bring this game up, and the creatures in this game really don’t look like mice. Oh, well.
You play an unhappy ghost (for sake of awesome names from Pacman I’ll call your ghost Clyde) wearing cool shades and a dapper hat, filling in a maze with lines. Chasing you around this maze are three things that are mice, I guess, although they more resemble teddy bears than anything else. Like in Pacman the level is complete once you have visited every corner of it, and one touch from the enemy teddy mice is instant death. Death for a ghost, yeah, I know. You get no power-pellet-esque devices, however; instead, there are two types of objects you can pick up and drop off to throw off the mice. The first is some sort of cat head, which you can pass through and pick up but acts as a barrier to the mice. The second is a sort of trap that resembles a dotted box. If you get a mouse trapped in one of these you can grab it for extra points, after which it immediately respawns somewhere else in the maze. But beware: occasionally the new mouse will reappear with ominous-sounding music, sporting an ‘S’ on its chest. This is, of course, the fabulous “Super Mouse” which is identical to the other mice except that it eats the cat heads instead of being repelled by them. Catch a supermouse in a trap and you may get it to respawn as a normal mouse, but you only get a certain number of traps per level, so use them judiciously!
I actually enjoy this game more than I do Pacman. It’s not just a matter of avoiding the mice whilst filling in the maze, it’s using the cat heads effectively and the traps in just the right spots so as not to catch two mice at once (for once you grab the first, the second will immediately wipe you off the face of mousedom, leaving only your hat to flutter softly away). This requires more strategy and planning than Pacman does, and I for one like it. Additionally, the two-player mode is a bonafide co-op game, where both players fill in the same maze at the same time. Props for that.
So whether or not this game is actually called Mouse or not, it comes recommended. Download it if you can find it, and then tell me what the real name is. It’d be nice to know!
EDIT: I found the name! It’s Mouskattack!
Rating: B-
Tumble Bugs
Pacman goes Mexican in this delightful, yet frightening game! You’re a little chomper dude, chomping away at white dots in a maze. The twist is you’re actually a microscopic chomper, chomping away at microscopic white dots, leaving behind you a trail of, let’s say, crumbs, just to avoid two poop jokes in one review. Also prowling this maze is a number of tumble bugs: little blue nasty creatures. They mostly wander aimlessly through the maze, but if they stumble onto a crumb trail they will probably follow it until they catch up with you. (This means you can throw them off by taking one side of a fork, backtracking, and then taking the road less travelled by. It may make all the difference!) Since you’re so small the game employs a clever technique: it magnifies the area currently around you, and as you move around the maze the magnified area does too, even magnifying the score and time counters if you get near the top or bottom of the maze. In another bit of clever programming, if a bug catches you it uses actual voice simulation to spout something completely unintelligble (wiki gotcha?) at you. Then, the Vanna White bugs on the side of the maze do a little jig to the “Mexican Hat Dance” song. ¡Olé!
Tumble Bugs is certainly a piece of programming work, with the magnifying square and the speech (the latter heretofore unheard of in an Atari game and quite possibly on a home computer, period). The gameplay itself is pretty fun too, although it can get quite frustrating. The maze is randomly generated each time and there are quite a few bugs and no way to destroy or block them, which means if you go down a long dead-end passageway and a bug enters at the other end that you can’t see because it’s blocked by the giant magnifying window, then there’s nothing you can do but wait for the bug to scream “Whee! Bocce!” at you and start the maze over.
Its frustrating flaws aside, Tumble Bugs is pretty fun, and as an added bonus, it has one of the most frightening title screens known to man. It would make an awesome guitar case sticker or possibly tattoo.
Rating: B-
Galaxian
In Space Invaders aliens try to land on Earth, only to be thwarted by the world’s state-of-the-art defense system and a bunch of late ’70’s college students with a lot of quarters. Apparently, their tried-and-tested method of slowly descending to a planet in rows hadn’t worked this time. So one day one of the generals (for sake of awesome Pacman names let’s call him Clyde) came up with a brilliant plan: descend on a planet in rows, but occasionally break off and fire at the defending ship! But then get back into the row! The row is tradition! You can’t mess with the row! History shows that wars are won by the side that refuses to alter its tactics!
In any case, you, plucky defender, have once again been sent against this alien onslaught. Gameplay in Galaxian is similar to Space Invaders except you don’t get any shields, and the aliens dive at you one-by-one instead of line-by-line as a giant group when they reach the edge of the screen. Other than that, it’s your basic shoot-the-aliens to get a lot of points game. Galaxian, although not a complicated game by any stretch of the imagination, is still pretty fun and has achieved classic arcade status, and is now remembered as one of the most popular games of its time.
That’s all I got to say about that.
Rating: B-
Coming up next: side 2 of disk 11, featuring Salmon Run, Pharoah’s Curse, Submarine Commander, Pool, and Nautilus. See you then!
Disk 10
Preppie
One day, in the distant past, a frog needed to cross a busy highway and a log-filled river in order to, I dunno, mate or something. This tale of bravery in the face of certain danger seized the imaginations of people everywhere. His story can be told in the game Frogger. However, all was not well in the universe. While this plucky amphibian might entertain the simple plebians with its down-to-earth humble story, what about the upper-middle class? How would it be even conceivable that a golf-playing junior executive with a Lacoste alligator polo, argyle sweater, cuffed chinos, and cordovan loafers would be remotely interested in something so below his station as a simple frog hopping across logs? The simple matter of the fact was: junior executives had no time for helping frogs! They didn’t preserve wetlands; they destroyed them to make room for their gated communities and exclusive country clubs! No game company had the guts to crack into this key demographic.
Until Preppie.
In Preppie you play Mr. Bigshot’s prep-schooled junior executive (read:golf caddy), who has to go get his stray balls and avoid paying that extra fee at the pro shop every time that the CEO, well, hit the ball. The problem is, in order to keep the fairways and greens looking their finest, there is a constant stream of lawnmowers, both manual and motorized, which are immediately fatal to anyone with a polo shirt. Sometimes the ball will be across the water hazard, but fortunately it is filled with canoes, logs, and alligators to cross. Our poor caddy only has enough room in his pocket for one ball at a time, though, so he has to pick up one at a time and bring it all the way back to the start before attempting to pick up another one. As levels go on the objects move faster and there are more balls to collect. To make matters worse, apparently the golf course was built over where the original Frogger takes place, because the frog himself jumps across the middle in later levels, trying to exact revenge on whoever stole his hopping grounds and mutated him until he was twice the size of any normal human being. Unfortunately, the developers aren’t around, so the frog will settle on maiming any caddies that cross its path. I tell ya, the life of a caddy is a hard one.
Fortunately, the whole thing is set to some upbeat tunes from the early 1900’s, including “I Was Strolling Through the Park One Day” and “Down Among the Sheltering Palms,” giving the whole thing a sort of box social feel. In short, while Preppie is basically just a Frogger clone, it is a well-realized catchy one, and I recommend it for anyone too bourgeois to take on the role of a lowly frog.
Rating: B+
Qix
The first thing you may notice about Qix is its complete disregard for the precedents set by the English language. A Q without a U? How is that pronounced? Kix? Quix? Should I be controlling a kid-tested, mother-approved corn crunch ball? Am I to expect to be fighting windmills to win the heart of my beloved Dulcinea?
The true purpose of this game is both simpler and far stranger than either of those two scenarios. As a purple diamond thing, you must form boxes on the playing field. Each time you complete a box, it fills in with blue and becomes permanent. However, to menace you are little sparks (creatively named Sparx) that travel along the edge. Leaving the edge renders you safe from the Sparx but vulnerable to the Qix, a strange construct that looks like that old “dancing lines” screensaver that makes a noise that is a cross between a lawnmower, hairdryer, and annoying fly. If the Qix touches you or a line of an unfinished box trailing behind you, you’re toast. The object is to fill at least 75% of each playing field, at which point you move to the next level where everything goes faster. Also, after a few levels the Sparx can travel up your unfinished line and there are two Qix.
Qix is a simple game requiring fast reflexes and a whole lot of luck. Since the movement of the Qix is so unpredictable, especially on later levels, it’s anybody’s guess as to whether you can survive long enough to fill in the required amount or not, and it can get quite frustrating. Still, it’s a great little game, and I recommend it as well.
Rating: B
Hard Hat Mack
While Preppie appealed to the fortunate prep-schooled business executive, Hard Hat Mack targets the other end of the spectrum: the hard-working blue collar construction worker who’s just trying to get in a good day of work before he goes home to his split-level to watch some NASCAR. The game consists of three levels, in which our protagonist is trying to complete various construction-related tasks while avoiding vandals and OSHA representatives. In the first he is laying some flooring and hammering it in with a jack hammer, in the second he is grabbing everyone’s lunchboxes from a death-trap of a construction site, and in the third he is processing some scattered boxes into nails Any contact with the vandal or OSHA guy, as well as falling too far or contact with other dangerous objects such as spitting nailguns, giant chompers, and plain open flames spell doom for our hero, who will contract into his helmet like a turtle (or Bounty Bob). Hmm. With all these deathtraps around, maybe letting the OSHA guy inspect the place wouldn’t be a bad idea! It would beat having poor Mack live off workman’s comp for the rest of his life with a wrench imbedded in his spine, simply because the foreman didn’t have the foresight to leave his lunch in a place other than on the conveyor belt leading to the furnace!
Mixed messages about occupational safety and hazards aside, Hard Hat Mack is full of fun, Donkey Kong-esque gameplay. The controls are a little fussy, and many jumps have to be ridiculously well-timed in order to succeed, but that’s part of the challenge. The sound is well-done: a catchy little rhythmic ditty plays over and over again, but only when Mack is actually moving, compelling a musical person like myself to keep the guy active so as to not break the rhythm. After you’ve beat it once there’s not a whole lot to go back to except perhaps improving one’s time, but it’s still a pretty fun game.
Rating: B+
That’s disk 10! Coming up next: side 1 of disk 11, with Kangaroo, Flying Ace, Mouse (aka Mouskattack), Tumble Bugs, and Galaxian. Catch you then!
Disk 9, Side 2
Onslaught
Only you can save the universe from random brightly-colored shapes that don’t really move! Onslaught puts you in the place of the defender of all mankind. Flying inside your spaceship shaped like a barn, you must destroy as many random shapes as possible. If you miss any. . .well, you don’t get the points for shooting them. I guess that portends. . .doom for humanity?
OK, so this game really has no storyline. The point is, shapes scroll toward you on a rapidly moving starfield. You shoot them and avoid getting hit. Occasionally they shoot back with a slow-moving bullet that actually usually ends up destroying another one of them instead of you. As time goes on they get more closely-packed, until it’s nearly impossible to maneuver. That’s why, sometimes, a flying rainbow-colored diamond flies by, and if you hit it then everything on the screen gets destroyed and you get a bunch of points. There are several game modes: different combinations of flying a thin or a fat ship, shooting thin or fat bullets, the choice to have three or five “shields” (really just extra lives), and one or two alternating players.
Onslaught is an OK game which can be good for some mindless hand-eye reflex fun. Also, a unique feature of this game was the ability to keep the high score. Most of these games reset the high score as soon as you turned off the computer, but this one saved it to disk, therefore keeping it for all posterity. See that high score in the screenshot? That was actually set by my own late father in the early ’80’s. That alone raises my estimation of my copy of this game, if only for sentimental reasons. Nerdy sentimental reasons.
Rating: C-
Apple Panic
APPLES!!!! AAAAAAHHHH!! This game is a good game struggling to break free of a really crappy one. You’re on a network of platforms and ladders, which are also inhabited by antennaed creatures (apples, I guess?) You dig a hole for one, and if it falls in then you hammer its head until it dies. Once they all die you move onto the next level, where there are more of them.
Sounds like some simple fun, no? Well, it would be, if the controls were any good! The problem is that you can’t just dig anywhere; there are certain sections of the brick that can have holes in them, due to graphics limitations, kind of like in Dig Dug you can only turn at certain spots. These have to be pixel-perfect; otherwise, your guy just stands there and waits for an apple to kill him. Then, when you finally find a spot and hold down the trigger to dig a hole, you have to let go of the trigger in a precise instant for the hole to be complete. If you don’t hold it long enough the hole is only half-dug and an apple will just pop right out of it if it falls in, and if you hold it down too long then your hapless digger man starts filling in the hole, giving you the exact same problem. This might not be a problem if each hole didn’t take about five seconds each to make, so if you miss the timing you’ve got to wait ten seconds for the man to fill in the hole all the way and then dig again. In addition to that stupidity, the apples seem to wander aimlessly instead of pursuing you, which means you have no way to lure them into a hole, other than digging one nearby and hoping that it doesn’t take the ladder right before the hole and meander over the other half of the board. The solution to that might be to dig more holes and trap the creature, but since digging holes is a fiasco this is a less-than-ideal solution. Plus, if you spend too much time on a hole one of the apples will probably run up and kill you.
In short, Apple Panic is ruined by this extremely frustrating control system, and I recommend you skip it. I’ve heard there are versions of this game for other systems. Perhaps they have better control systems and can be fun to play, but for the love of all that’s good in this world, do not play the Atari 8-bit version of Apple Panic unless you enjoy gaming masochism.
Rating: F
Wizard of Wor
What do you get when you cross Ghostbusters, gladiatorial combat, Pacman, stealth technology, Dragnet, and wizards? The answer: either just the facts about Peter Venkman eating dancing fruit while Spartacus and Merlin fly F-117 Nighthawks, ma’am, or the game Wizard of Wor. You play the role of one or two “worriors” placed inside a maze. There are also several panther-like creatures (called “Burwors”) wandering around that you have to shoot with your proton-pack-looking guns. Once you have killed enough of them, other yellow creatures which look like walking cheese wedges (”Garwors”) and red creatures that resemble bell peppers (”Thorwors”) appear in the maze. However, these creatures are invisible unless they are directly in your line of sight, so you have to use your primitive radar at the bottom of the screen to locate them. Also, all of these creatures can shoot you.
Once you have dispatched all these wor-creatures, a “worluk” appears which rapidly circles corridors and is worth mondo points if shot before it escapes out one of the passages marked with an arrow in the screenshot. Sometimes, after it is dispatched, the “Wizard of Wor” himself appears, shooting at you for a few seconds, and then rapidly teleports to a different part of the maze, until you either kill it or it escapes too. Once you finish a level, the theme from Dragnet plays! Neat! Each maze is different, and some have names (like “The Arena,” or “The Pit,” which has no walls at all.)
All of this might seem like a lot, but don’t “worry,” for you can team up with a friend to help rid these mazes of this Wor Machine. You can also gain points for shooting each other if you want to be sadistic. Wizard of Wor is a very fun arcade-style game, especially if you grab a second player to join in the fun. You need all the help you can get, for as Generol Shermon once said, “Wor is Hall.”
Rating: B
Gorf
“The evil Gorfian Robot Empire has attacked! Your assignment is to repel the invasion and launch a counterattack. You will engage various hostile spacecraft as you journey toward a dramatic confrontation with the enemy flag ship…”
So goes the introduction to Gorf a game which is essentially four simple arcade games in one package! You’re a little spaceship dude that has to defend the planet from space invaders. The first level, oddly enough, is a nearly exact clone of Space Invaders, the only difference being a minor one involving your shield! After you beat that game, um, I mean, destroy the invading Gorfian Robot Empire forces, you proceed to the “Laser Attack” level, where two enemy squadrons throw cats at you and shoot you with lasers half the width of your ship that move more slowly than you do. If you destroy the laser shooters and all of the, uh, space cats, you move to the third level, the “Space Warp.” In here random lines are drawn from the center, from which fly more space cats and other ships. In the screenshot you can see them hucking a land-line telephone at you. Once you’ve warped long enough you finally face the enemy flagship, a boss fight of sorts. The first thing you may notice is that he stole your shield from the first level! That fiend! You think robots could come up with innovative technology! But since the best they can do is throw cats at you I guess their artificial intelligence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Anyway, you’ve got to shoot through the shield and then the outer plating of the mother ship, which flies off and can damage the player. Once you finally shoot the core of the mother ship it explodes in a colorful fireworks display! You get half a second to enjoy the fact that, once again, you’ve saved mankind, when the whole thing starts over, only faster now!
Gorf is a pretty fun shoot-’em-up. It touts itself as four different games in one, even though each game is pretty much the same thing, with just a different enemy configuration in each level. I guess it could be accurately described as Space Invaders Plus.
Fun fact: Gorf was originally supposed to be a tie-in game with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which is why the player’s ship looks kind of like the Enterprise flipped upside-down. However, after the film came out they realized that a game truly based on that movie would be composed mainly of still shots of the ship while dramatic music played in the background. So they dropped the franchise name, forcing people to wait at least ten or so more years before a pixelated William Shatner was released on the world.
Rating: B+
That does it for Disk 9. Coming up: Disk 10, featuring Preppie, Qix, and Hard Hat Mack. See you then!
Disk 9, Side 1
Jumbo Jet Pilot
I have absolutely no idea how this game works. I never learned how when I was a kid. I searched online recently for a manual, a review, anything regarding this game other than a ROM download and a cartridge scan, but to no avail. I assume you are a Jumbo Jet Pilot somehow taking off and landing and stuff. The controls, however, are entirely inscrutable. Moving the joystick caused the little lines to move across the top of the screen (the viewport, I assume), while pressing the trigger caused the view to turn red. Random keyboard buttons caused some of the boxes to turn on and off. I guess there’s an altimeter, an artificial horizon, and a fuel gauge, but as for the rest of the controls I have no idea what they are. A scan I found of the back of the cartridge contained the helpful hint to lower the wheels when you landed. In conclusion, go buy Microsoft Flight Simulator or something. Or help me figure this bloomin’ game out. Whatever.
Rating: F
Eastern Front 1941
I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint fans of WWII simulation games with my review. This game, according to many online sources, is an intricate strategy game wherein you actually control the German forces for once, invading Russia. You have two unit types: infantry and cavalry, and can enter up to eight moves for each unit per turn. Then the computer simulates combat for a week (of game time, not real time), after which the units that were attacked and defeated must retreat. The strength and muster of each unit could be damaged in combat, but could be built up again due to supply lines (contiguous units) In time the winter would set in, and the lakes and rivers would become passable, but the units would be weaker and more vulnerable. After winter there is a short spring, but the game ends in March of 1942, giving the player 41 turns to overcome the evil Russian forces, who outnumber the player in terms of units and land controlled, at least at the beginning of the game.
Eastern Front suffers from what I call “manualitis,” that is, a dependence on the manual that makes gameplay incomprehensible without first reading the manual. While this isn’t by itself a problem, it becomes one when a person has acquired this game without a manual and therefore has no idea what’s going on, as I did growing up. Still, according to many online sources, this game is a satisfying war simulation, especially for the time, and I would recommend it for strategists and war buffs. Plus, not many WWII games let you play as the Germans without playing some sort of horrible Nazi character, so I guess that’s something.
Rating: ?
Drelbs
It has been said that, in terms of creative, unique, and compelling gameplay, the king of the Atari 8-bit games was Synapse Software. With classics I’ve already reviewed such as Claim Jumper, Necromancer, Picnic Paranoia, and Fort Apocalypse, as well as some other excellent games I will be reviewing down the line, Synapse certainly does have a unique style of game. But perhaps no Synapse game is as unique as Drelbs, a two-phase game in which you play a nervous eyeball with feet. Your object during the first phase is to wander around a maze of walls that flip when you press against them. Every time you make a box with these walls (and you’re not inside said box), a phone-ringing sound goes off and the box turns into a abstract expressionist painting (well, OK, it’s just a rectangle with two lines, but it makes me think of a Mark Rothko work). Pursuing you during this attempt to enlighten the world with a sense of 1950’s artistic style were two opponents: a stripety zig-zag enemy that circled the playing field taking potshots at you that would ricochet off the walls, and an angry-looking rectangle face with a mouth like the Yip-yip aliens from Sesame Street (or, more appropriately, Telly). Occasionally one of the Rothko works would turn into a green alien with Bart Simpson hair, who would look around shiftily and then destroy your box, turning it back into empty walls that you’d have to reform into a rectangle again. Also occasionally, a heart or diamond would show up, and if you grabbed it you got some points and the mean rectangle guy would turn green and freeze, allowing you to seal him up in a box. This creates a giant close-up of his face where you can see right up his nostrils (not a pretty sight), and he’d destroy your box after a certain time period and begin wandering again, but at least he’d be out of your hair for a while. And rarely, when the green-faced alien would show up in a box, for a brief second a woman’s face would appear and shout “HELP!” Jumping onto the box when the alien was showing was instant death, but jumping onto the woman resulted in a kissing sound and a short cutscene in which your eyeball-foot would cover up a grid of that green spiky-haired alien. This leads me to believe that the underlying plot of this game is that classic sad tale of girl meets walking eyeball, girls falls in love with walking eyeball, girl ends up leaving walking eyeball, girl meets spiky green alien, girl falls in love with spiky green alien, girl feels trapped by spiky green alien, girl misses walking eyeball and wants to be with walking eyeball again. I mean, how many times have we heard that old story?
In any case, once the entire playing field is filled with expressionist rectangles, every single one, in turn, turns into a green alien box. Also, occasionally one turns into a portal that looks like several of you. Jumping onto one of these causes a jump to the second phase of the game, in which you find yourself on a black field with several frozen blue versions of yourself and that green alien again. He starts shooting at you while you run around this field, and every time you touch one of your frozen kin, it turns purple and flies off the screen. That’s it. I don’t know how this game was made, but it totally had to involve LSD.
If you get killed by the green alien you go back to the first screen (with the boxes still filled in, luckily). If you grab all of the frozen versions of yourself, you move to the next level, which is the whole thing all over again, but with two frownie-faced orange rectangles in the first part and two green aliens in the second. Also, as was the style at the time, the colors change a bit and everything moves faster. Also, the title screen features the tune “Wilder Reiter” by Robert Schumann.
Drelbs is one of the weirdest games I have ever played. The graphics are fine if you don’t think about them too hard, and the sound is equally demented, especially during the first stage. However, an odd concept does not a great game make, necessarily. Fortunately, Drelbs is a whole lot of fun, too. The gameplay is varied enough with the two stages and the fact that during the first stage you basically make your own maze, since you create the rectangles. Highly recommended, and it probably works even better if you’re stoned. (Note: the creator of this blog does not promote or condone the use of drugs in any non-prescribed way, particularly in the case of video-game-experience enhancement.)
Rating: B+
Miner 2049er
In Miner 2049er you take on the role of “Bounty Bob” whose job it is to run over every segment of floor in this, mine, I suppose, although what is being mined is never made clear. Every time you run over a bit of floor it turns solid. Once the entire level has been made solid you move to the next one. Sounds pretty simple, eh? There are a few obstacles to this mine inspection process, however. For starters, if you fall too far poor Bob gets squashed inside his own hat, earning him a permanent job as a citizen in Agent USA. To complicate matters there are little radioactive creatures left wandering around that also mean instant death for Bob, making him grow and shrink to some electrical-sounding noise, and also making him inexplicably get squashed inside his hat. To counteract this threat, though, each level has mining tools scattered about (pickaxes, dynamite, candles, inexplicable items like flower pots or wine glasses, etc.) and when Bob grabs one of these, the radioactive creatures turn into happy green harmless drones worth 80 or 90 points each! What a bargain!
There are ten levels in all, and in addition to the difficult jumps, mining tools, and radioactive creatures, each level has its own challenges, from slides to elevators to moving scaffolding machines to a giant vat of radioactive waste to even a cannon. Once you beat all ten levels you start the first one over where (repeat after me) everything changes color and the enemies move faster.
Miner 2049er is an excellent game. The ten varied levels of gameplay add a good replay value, as does the timer, which leads to a higher score if you can finish a level in a shorter time. There is also a cheat available: by typing in the game company’s phone number (found on the title screen) you can pick which level to start on, which is useful if you want to see that tenth cannon level that everyone’s talking about. This game also inspired a sequel, Bounty Bob Strikes Back, which is also an excellent game, I’ve heard, since for some reason I haven’t been able to get it to work on an emulator.
According to online sources, Bounty Bob is apparently a Mountie, although his dayglo outfit doesn’t really fit with their conservative red uniforms. Also, he has no horse.
Rating: A-
Dog Daze
This is probably the only Atari game that revolves around peeing dogs, at least that I’m aware of. In this two-player game, you play as the yellow dog or the red dog. A flashing blue fire hydrant appears on the playing field, and the dogs must race each other to mark the hydrant as his or her own (you can also throw a bone at a flashing hydrant to mark it, but if you miss you have to go pick the bone up before you can throw another one). Every time you get a hydrant you get a point, which is represented by a row of hydrants at the top of the screen. You also get points if your opponent runs into a hydrant of your color, which also stuns him/her. Once you take over the point meter with your color, you win! Ruff! Occasionally, a car honks and drives through, and if your opponent gets run over you automatically win! Woof!
Dog Daze is very simple, and the graphics are very minimalist. In addition, there is no one-player mode, so you must team up with someone to get the most doggy fun out of this game. It’s pretty fun, although very one-note (since it doesn’t have any customizable game options like Race in Space from disk 8), so if you and a friend are bored you might as well take the chance to pee on some hydrants.
Rating: C+
That’s it for side 1 of disk 9. Stay tuned for the second side, in which we review Onslaught, Apple Panic, Wizard of Wor, and Gorf. Catch you then!
Atarieviewer 
