This post is combining five disks, even though it only has three games. This is because I could never get disks 18-21 copied correctly from my actual Atari to my PC, and also I couldn’t remember exactly what was on disks 19 or 20. Disk 19 had some sort of top-down racing game with oil slicks everywhere that I thiiiink was programmed in BASIC, and I can picture it in my head, but for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it. If I ever find it (or if someone reading this knows what it’s called and contacts me) then I will add it to this post. In addition, starting with disk 21, some of the games were repeats from earlier disks, so I am skipping those ones. Disk 21 also had a game that was called “Wizard” on the loading menu, but never worked right, so I have no idea what game it actually was (probably Wizard of Wor though).

With that said, let’s take a look at the games I could pick out of these five disks:

Wayout

I hate this effing game. Hate it with the passion of a thousand suns. My goodness, do I hate it. It. Gave. Me. Horrible. Nightmares! In Wayout you are stuck in a maze and must find your way out (duh). The maze is your standard 3D first-person maze, though you have full range of movement, unlike most “3D” mazes of the time, which only let you turn 90 degrees. Since the walls all look the same and it’s easy to get lost, you also have a compass and an automap function that help you find your way around. However, these aren’t as useful as you may originally think, due to the only real enemy this maze has. Worse than Nazis, worse than demons from hell or interdimensional aliens or whatever other enemies one may face in more modern FPS’s…

…is the Cleptangle.

This horrible abomination of nature at first seems to be just annoying (and probably for most people playing, it is simply annoying and nothing more). It’s just a spinning, flashing rectangle that roams the maze making a horrible random robotic noise, and if it catches you, it steals your compass (the first time it catches you), and then your ability to automap (the second time). After that you have to go chase it down to get your abilities back, but it can then steal them again, and the cycle never ends. It doesn’t show up on your map, and the only way you know where it is (unless it’s right in front of you) is to hear its horrible alarm slowly get louder and louder and higher and higher, while a white line above your viewport gets longer the closer it gets, until suddenly, with a wrenching, schlluuup sound, you’ve lost all ability to navigate in the maze, and are now doomed to wander the identical, seemingly endless corridors in a futile effort to seek your way out…

Forever…

Seriously, even replaying this stupid game to do this review game me PTSD flashbacks to when I played it when I was, like, three. This was my boogeyman, my monster under the bed, this spinning rectangle from the foulest depths of the abyss. You couldn’t do anything about it. You couldn’t shoot it. You couldn’t hide from it. You couldn’t run away from it for long. The only thing you could do was chase it through the endless hallways to get your stuff back, hoping you didn’t get irredeemably lost in the meantime. It didn’t help the creepy factor that, aside from the Cleptangle, the exit, and the sound you made as you slid around the maze, the game was completely silent.

If you are able to make it past that obstacle (and, to be honest, most people playing this above the age of three probably weren’t bothered by it), you still have to find the exit, which is harder than it seems, considering it’s at a random place in the maze (not always on the outside), and it also makes a horrible sound when you draw near. To complicate matters, there is also a wind that blows in a constant direction in every maze, which can sometimes block your movement (the intro maze in particular has the exit six feet in front of the entrance, but you have to loop around the whole maze due to the wind tunnel between the two points) and is represented by little yellow flecks blowing about at all times.

Wayout was a technical marvel of the time, with its ability to do true 3D movement (unlike, say, Ball Blazer, which was still limited to 90 degree turning), but other than that, it’s mostly just a simple “get out of this maze” game. The game does track your steps made and saves the high score to the disk, so there’s at least some replay value (since there are 26 mazes that never change). If you want to get a three-year-old to never sleep again then show this game to him; otherwise, there are more interesting maze games out there.

Rating: C

Blue Max

Something fun about doing these reviews is going back and playing games I haven’t played for years even though they form a big part of my childhood, and discovering all-new things about them I never knew because, as a kid, I wasn’t good enough of a player to find them out. Such was the case when I replayed Blue Max here, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Blue Max puts you in the oversized aviator goggles, leather jacket, and awesome scarf of a British WWI pilot (the game tells you you’re British by blaring “Rule, Britannia!” at you the instant the game finishes loading) flying deep into enemy territory to perform bombing and strafing runs. At first I thought the pilot’s name was Max, or that Blue Max was some sort of title or nickname (similar to “Red Baron”), but no, apparently it’s the name of a medal that you’re trying to win. Kind of like if Call of Duty was actually named Congressional Medal of Honor, or Star Wars was named That Thing That Princess Leia Puts On Everyone’s Neck Except For Chewie’s ‘Cause Screw Him.

You fly over two basic terrain types: a river and its banks, and a street and its, uh, stuff on the sides of the street. The game autoscrolls isometrically, with your movement confined to left-right and up-down (handily, the game lets you decide between normal and inverted controls for that extra bit of aircraft realism), where shooting is accomplished with the trigger, and bombing with the trigger and pulling down. The best way to rack up points, though, is to fly close enough to the ground to just strafe everything in sight (too far down, though, and you end up crashing into buildings and trees). AA guns, boats, and enemy aircraft are firing at you, and if you’re hit your bombs, guns, fuel, or maneuverability are compromised one by one, and if you’re hit when all four of these have been damaged you simply blow up (dying is also accomplished by ramming headfirst into an enemy plane or crashing into the ground due to not paying attention). Damage can be repaired and your fuel can be topped off at a runway that shows up every so often (make sure you press the trigger to lower your landing gear; otherwise, you’ll just kamikaze right into the runway, which would probably be a pretty embarrassing way to go). Nobody explains why there are friendly runways all over the place in enemy territory, but at least it’s a flying game where refueling doesn’t consist of shooting a fuel tanker, unlike pretty much every other game with fuel I’ve reviewed so far.

When I was young I was never good enough to get terribly far in this game, but replaying it recently revealed that there’s actually a third section beyond the river and street portions: an actual city with gigantic buildings. Three obvious colored bombing targets are scattered about in this city, and bombing them all and landing on the next runway causes the game to actually…

wait for it…

END! That’s right, this game has an ending! No “everything changes color and moves faster” for this WWI sim, no sir! True, the ending is just a score ranking and another rendition of “Rule, Britannia!” but that’s more than we usually got from these old Atari games! Well done, Synapse! I can forgive you for Slime and Nautilus now!

Even without this plot twist of the plot…actually ending…, Blue Max is a pretty great game. It has been described as a Zaxxon-esque shooter due to its isometric scrolling, but I enjoyed Blue Max way more than I did Zaxxon. The graphics are sharp, clean, and colorful; the controls and gameplay are fun, addictive, and challenging without ever being frustrating; even the sound effects have the perfect level of bite to them. If Blue Max isn’t the best autoscrolling shooter for the Atari 8-bit lineup, it’s right near the top of the list.

Rating: A-

Survivor

(Disclaimer: I will not be making any references to the Survivor TV show. I’ve never seen an episode, and I don’t really plan to, even just to make jokes about it in a review of an obscure Atari game. I apologize in advance if you were looking forward to some brilliant bon mots in this vein. If it makes you feel any better, I doubt the TV show has made any references to this game or my review of it either. If that changes in the future, I may reconsider my position.)

Survivor stars what appears to be the ship from Asteroids flying around space, targeting and blowing up what I can only assume are space stations, since “irregular 90° shapes covered in guns” doesn’t sound as exciting. There are four stations in all, each protected by its own color-coded cat-food-shaped shielding. Your job is to break through the shields and shoot all of the guns. Said guns also unwisely function as load-bearing apparati, as blowing them all up causes each station to violently self-destruct. Also, on occasion, a red, blue, or green spinning thing (and sometimes two or all three of them) appears on the screen with a wobbly whine and tries to kamikaze into your ship. These don’t directly home in on you, though (’cause that would make them easier to shoot, you see), but instead kind of wobble around drunk in your general direction, as if the aliens in charge of these stations were deliberately trying to rid themselves of the morons in their society by putting them in suicide ships that they clearly can’t fly correctly. Fortunately for you, and unfortunately for these drunken bombers, you shoot out both the front and back of your little ship, so destroying them just takes a bit of careful maneuvering. In addition, they are also destroyed by shots from the guns on their own stations, furthering the theory that nobody liked them anyway.

After destroying every station, the game suddenly dumps you back to the title screen, making you manually have to select a harder difficulty in order for the game to make everything move faster. That’s pretty much it.

Survivor is a decent little game. While the layout is the same every time, the action isn’t half bad, and dodging the homing guys can be challenging. Destroying the stations can get somewhat tedious, though, especially since two of them have some guns in little interior sections that require you to perform a pixel-perfect maneuver to even reach the guns (which immediately shoot you as soon as you get in there anyway), and heaven help you if a kamikaze tries to get you at the same time you’re slowly creeping into one of those spaces. It’s still fun enough for a quick diversion.

Rating: C+

That does it for this wide spread of Disks 18-22, barring somebody telling me what that racing game on disk 19 is called. Next up we narrow our focus back to a single disk, with Disk 23 covering Firebird, Embargo, and Monster Maze. Until then!