Super Pac-Man and Pac & Pal (Arcade Reviews)

May 12, 2024 by Leave a comment

Super Pac-Man
Platform: Arcade
Released September 26, 1982
Designed by Toru Iwatani
Published by Namco
Arcade Archives Release
Included in Pac-Man Museum+
Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet

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Super Pac-Man is the rare game where my review is written for me by the developer, who called it, simply put, “boring.” Well then, I’ll just get back to watching this video of ten hours of silence occasionally interrupted by the Taco Bell dong.

Okay, okay! So, why is Super Pac-Man boring? It’s a little more complicated than “the maze sucks” like I said in my original Pac-Man review. One problem is that it looks boring. There’s no justifying Super Pac-Man’s unfathomable decision to replace dots that cover nearly every surface of the maze with large sprites strips a large part of the original’s liveliness. The 240 dots have been replaced by 15 keys that open 37 gates (though not every gate can be opened), 4 power pellets, 2 super pellets, and 31 items. It seems like it’s still a lot of stuff, but the keys don’t even need to be collected in their entirety to move on to the next stage. Huh? A Pac-Man maze chase with optional objects is kind of weird, isn’t it? Oddly, you are still expected to chomp the power pellets and super pellets. Those aren’t optional. And don’t say “keys aren’t food, that’s why!” because neither are tennis shoes but eventually you have to eat those too. Look at the slideshow above. Doesn’t it just seem.. dead? Amazingly, a mess of abstract dots can have a LOT more personality than a series of sprites that look like food. Or footwear.

While ghost movement is more randomized, all the personalities from the original game carry over, along with their “SCATTER” corners. I will say that Clyde seems to follow you more often. In fact, I’d say that he frequently feels like a second red ghost. Also, the ghosts have random seizures now. I mean that literally, too. They freeze up and go all twitchy, apparently some kind of transition between “modes” though it doesn’t seem to be between SCATTER and CHASE. I honestly don’t know what’s happening when it happens.

And the “super” concept was also botched, but not for the reasons creator Iwatani thinks. He’s of the opinion that Pac-Man gets too big, and not that it doesn’t do anything to the ghosts. All Super Pac does is grant you the ability to dash and eat the gates without the need for a key. The dash can work in collaboration with power pellets to eat the ghosts easier via the dash, which is theoretically a gameplay plus. But, when you stop and think about it, it’s really only adding an extra step to the thing you can do anyway from the first game. It’s not fitting for the term “super.” Frankly, it’s a massive let-down. If Super Pac interacted directly with the ghosts by itself, like say, squashing them into the ground, causing them to be frozen in a spot for a while, that would be better than what they came up with. Or, maybe they did come up with it but changed their minds, because something like that happens in one of the cutscenes, complete with new sprites for the crushed ghosts. The whole concept of keys and gates feels like it only exists to justify the giant Pac-Man. Being able to eat as many gates as you can while big was foolhardy. Even in later stages when it wears off faster, there’s enough time to grab the super pellet and then crash through all the center gates (assuming you hold the run button), opening up the tunnel (where the ghosts slow down, just like the first game) with no tension at all.

Let’s face it: Super Pac-Man only exists as wish fulfillment because one of the cutscenes in the first game had you turn into a giant Pac-Man and Namco probably got letters asking “how do you do that in the game?”  Oh and the cutscenes are back this time, and they’re fine as always. I still think Jr. Pac-Man’s “boy meets girl” story was just about the most adorable thing I’ve seen in any coin-op. It’s weird because in these Pac-Man games, all the gags land.

I’m not a game designer, but I could easily come up with a better idea for the super dots: eliminate the timer for them. Instead, they only work on one thing. Instead of being able to crash as many gates as you can, you can only do one before shrinking into regular Pac-Man. But, if you hit a ghost while on one, the ghost is taken out for, say, ten to twelve seconds and it activates the roulette star in the center for points. The ghosts experience a slightly longer downtime than they would be if eliminated via a chomp and a return to the ghost house. Also, make it so the effect isn’t diminished as you get deeper into the game, unlike the duration of being energized by the power pellets. This would add so much risk/reward. Anything would be better than how they are now. Actually, it’s the strangest thing, because the super pellets are both overpowered and under-powered at the same time. Under-powered in the satisfaction sense, but overpowered in the gameplay sense. Super Pac-Man is an absolute disaster of a game.

There’s bonus rounds that are of the “clear the screen” variety where you’re permanently Super Pac-Man. The fact that they didn’t have to change a thing and this concept works tells you everything you need to know about how overpowered those super pellets are in the early stages.

But yea, Super Pac-Man’s biggest flaw is the maze just plain stinks. There’s too many short wall segments, which can get even shorter if you open the gates around them. Pac-Man never fully demands you make too tight of turns. Super Pac-Man asks it constantly. It’s also tougher to use the walls as a sort of guider for Pac-Man. The way the walls felt in the original game almost gives the maze a race track like quality. If that’s the case, Super Pac-Man’s maze is more like a parking lot full of U-turns and tight squeezes. It makes for a more frustrating controlling experience. Frustration that increases significantly when you try to aim Super Pac. I’d be VERY impressed if someone was good enough to use it without ever letting go of the sprinting button. Sometimes, it honestly feels like Super Pac’s center of mass isn’t actually in the center. I wondered if maybe it was my emulator, but the problem doesn’t exist at all when you’re normal Pac. It’s so odd that Super Pac-Man doesn’t have a maze tailored to the giant-sized Pac-Man’s strengths at all.

Behold, the one and only time I got the max value of the roulette wheel. You get 2,000 points for matching two items and 5,000 if the two items are that level’s “dot.” Often, I didn’t go for the roulette at all because it was either too high risk to do so OR my only means of escape would have involved using a super pellet when I didn’t want to. I hate this game.

So the tricky controls make Super Pac-Man harder, right? Actually, I habitually get to level 10 with minimal fuss, and have reached as high as level 21 without actually playing what I would consider to be all that good. My best game was 207,820 to my father’s 60,960. On one hand, it’s satisfying to have annihilated a sweet old man who I have on good authority has a wife and kids. Shame on me. But, I got so many lucky breaks in that score. As in a ghost literally on my tail only to have one of their freeze-and-shake moments, or hell, once they just slowed down for no reason in the middle of the board. Their speed literally reduced and I couldn’t figure out why. It was like they entered a tunnel, but they hadn’t. Now granted, the difficulty can be adjusted with the dip switches, but the maze can’t be. A single aspect of Super Pac-Man put a smile on my face: eating the ghosts inside the ghost house as Super Pac-Man. It’s just funny how rude it is. Otherwise, this is a baffling game that, again, I think only exists because of that one cut scene from the first game. Before starting this review, the only game in the original series I considered worse than this was Pac & Pal. Having played both back-to-back, I’ve changed my mind. Of all the games in the franchise, Super Pac-Man has the fewest redeeming qualities, and if that isn’t grounds for earning the title of “worst of the franchise” I don’t know what is.
Verdict: NO!

Pac & Pal
aka Pac-Man & Chomp Chomp
Platform: Arcade
Released July, 1983
Published by Namco
Arcade Archives Release
Included in Pac-Man Museum+
Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet

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Congratulations Pac & Pal: you’re officially not the worst game in the franchise, try as you might. You are an absolute bore of a game, but I genuinely think there’s something charming about you. Pac & Pal is a fairly problematic game, owed largely to a dull concept. It’s probably best to think of Pac & Pal as a reworking of Super Pac-Man. The gate concept that I thought completely failed the first time around was retained, only now the keys are replaced with playing cards that correspond to one of eleven “chambers” on the playfield. The cards aren’t randomized, and like with Super Pac-Man, Pac & Pal starts by placing cards close by their corresponding chamber, IE the cherry card is right next to the cherry chamber. Then, the more you progress, the further you have to travel after turning over a card. So, in later levels, a card in the bottom left corner will likely unlock the upper right chamber, and so forth. That aspect is a big turn-off for a few players, but I think it’s fine. It’s a perfectly logical challenge progression for this type of concept. If it’s not fun, it’s because the base concept is just boring. Even when you factor in the addition of the “Pal.”

Unlike Super Pac-Man, where you can go around and collect all the keys, Pac & Pal caps you at a max of three unlocked items at a time. Also, that orange area in the center replaces the tunnels as the “slow the ghosts down” escape method.

The titular twist is that an NPC “pal” named Miru wanders around the maze until you unlock a chamber. As soon you do, it makes a beeline to the item. The name “Pal” is a bit of a misnomer, as the Pal doesn’t bring the items to you. In fact, it’s more like a kleptomaniac member of the Ghost Monsters that doesn’t help you as a “pal” would. Instead, it drags the item to the ghost chamber, costing you the points for it. You have two advantages over the Pal. When Miru drags an item, it moves at half speed and it’s guaranteed that, no matter where the item is, it’ll cross directly under the ghost house before walking around and entering it. If you can snag all the items without Miru managing to vanish any in the ghost house, you get bonus points. Miru doesn’t hurt you, but it can screw you if it collects one of the power-ups. Also, I found the collision detection to be kind of unforgiving, especially when trying to catch Miru and the item it’s dragging.

Trying to chase down Miru before it gets the items into the ghost house isn’t quite as exciting as I think they were hoping for. Also, it doesn’t matter if you play the version with Miru or you play the version that uses the dog from the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. That version was commissioned by Bally Midway, but it was never released in America because, well, come on. They knew this game stank. Thank God for General Computer’s Jr. Pac-Man.

The other twist is that you don’t chomp the ghosts. The “power pellets” are the two items in the center above the cherry and strawberry, and this time around, you fire a short-range projectile that stuns the enemies. It scores the same as chomping, capping out at 1,600 points for hitting all four, but you can actually score a lot more with it. In the early stages, the power lasts longer than the enemies are stunned, and if you time it right, you can continue to score 1,600 points for re-stunning enemies before the power wears off. The problem with it is that it front-loads the scoring to the start of the game instead of the later levels. It’s also probably too powerful, as you can spray your projectile through up to two walls and still hit the ghosts. This includes when they’re in the ghost houses. This is the main reason the game never once feels even a little like Pac-Man. It feels more like Namco wanted a tank game with a Pac-Man heritage.

Are we 100% sure this started development as a Pac-Man game?

Again, I’m open to the possibility that this formula could make for an exciting game, and it’s just that Pac & Pal fumbled the execution, largely because of the terrible shape of the maze. But, perhaps the maze is only terrible because the attack patterns of the ghosts from the original Pac-Man are largely retained. I’ll never understand the logic in that, for this game or for Super Pac-Man. Those behavior patterns were created and then presumably fine-tuned to work specifically within Pac-Man’s 240 dot maze. They make little sense in a game where you don’t have to cover nearly the entire surface of the playfield. They don’t work when mazes have dead ends or hairpin turns. Take Pinky, who is programmed to anticipate Pac-Man’s next move. In Pac-Man, it targets the area roughly four spaces in front of Pac-Man, right? Well, wouldn’t “anticipating your next move” have a completely different meaning in a game where the object is to turn over cards at a max of three of a time, then go grab the corresponding items? Shouldn’t a couple of the ghosts have their attacks be based on, you know, the cards and/or items? Also, there’s now a Dug Dug-like olly olly oxen free moment where the ghosts all go after Pac-Man. Oh, and the “ghosts have seizures” bit from Super Pac-Man is retained. I think they really wanted it to work this time, and while it’s a better game than Super Pac-Man.. it’s not by a big margin. Nah, Pac & Pal sucks.

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Hey look, I’m all for experimenting with established formulas. It’s sort of why I wanted to start Indie Gamer Chick in the first place. But there’s tweaking a winning formula and then there’s forgoing it all together. Pac & Pal, simply put, is not a Pac-Man game. Actually, part of me wonders if Pac & Pal started life as something different altogether. Besides the ghost house, there’s nothing inherently Pac-Manish about the gameplay. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a drawing board concept that they thought would maybe work, and they attached Pac-Man to hedge their bets. But the Pac-Man elements are the problem. The ghosts aren’t fun to be pursued by this time around. The one big change, the power-up, flopped because it lacks the satisfaction that eating had. It’s not a total wash, like I expected going into this. In those rare instances where you have a chance to work with the Pal and not be in a position to race against it, it’s satisfying enough that I get what Namco was aiming for. Maybe if they had tailored the ghosts around that and not just copy & pasted them from OG Pac-Man, it would have worked. One of the great ironies of gaming: Pac & Pal is the Pac-Man game doomed by its own connection to the franchise.
Verdict: NO!

Actually, we DID have a lot of fun with this video. My family probably thinks I’ve lost my f*cking mind, but I left it playing in the background and cheered every time it rang. Soon, they were playing along and doing it too. We left it all day yesterday and it was so fun by the end. Every time it rang, we’d burst into cheers and applause. In those rare instances where the bong rings not long after the previous one, we’d go completely bonkers. It’s so smart, too, not overdoing the bong. You really never know when it’ll ring. I’m telling you, this is my new favorite thing.

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Pac-Man and Pac-Man Plus (Arcade Reviews)

May 10, 2024 by 2 Comments

This review would not have been possible without Chad Birch’s excellent write-up on Pac-Man’s ghosts. A must-read that helped me to better appreciate what Pac-Man accomplished. And I’d like to also give a shout out to the inspiration of that post, the Pac-Man Dossier by Jamie Pittman. If you’ve never read about the ghost patterns in Pac-Man, do me a favor: read those, then play Pac-Man and tell me if the experience feels somehow changed to you. It’s the strangest thing but it feels transformative. I’ve never experienced that before with any game. It’s wild.

Pac-Man
Platform: Arcade
Released May 22, 1980
Designed by Toru Iwatani
Published by Namco
Arcade Archives Release
Included in Pac-Man Museum+
Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet

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I was born in 1989, and I started gaming regularly when I got a PlayStation for Christmas in 1996. Pac-Man had seen better days by that point. It wasn’t an important character to my childhood at all. Not even a little bit. I’m sure my older readers will have an aneurysm hearing that, but it’s true. I did play Pac-Man games, of course. Soon after I got that PlayStation, but before I got the Nintendo 64 for my 9th birthday in July, 1998 that changed my life and really made gaming my thing, my father got me a pair of the original Namco Museum releases for my PlayStation. Volumes 1 & 3, aka the ones that everyone had. I don’t remember playing most of the thirteen games in them, but I know for certain I only played Pac-Man once. Why on Earth would I want to play that boring old version when Ms. Pac-Man had four mazes and bonus fruits that hopped around the mazes instead of just sitting there lifelessly in the center? To 7 year old me, the original world-conquering Pac-Man held no appeal at all. I’m not proud to say that I stuck to my guns on that long after I had launched Indie Gamer Chick in 2011. Pac-Man? Boring! I didn’t change my tune on it until last summer, when my sister asked me pointedly “how is Pac-Man’s one maze any different from pinball? You wouldn’t complain that a pinball table plays the same game, and only that one game.” I couldn’t believe how ashamed of myself I was at that moment. She was completely right, and I had always been completely wrong about Pac-Man.

Few things in life are so satisfying as the 4th chomp of a single power pellet. And yes, I’m playing with five lives instead of three.

The weird thing is, I kept that bias against the original Pac-Man despite taking the time to better understand the maze chase genre as a whole. It was the Atari 2600 port (which is one of several Pac-Reviews in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include), along with my fandom of games like Popeye and Jr. Pac-Man that helped me to figure out why some games succeed and others fail. It’s all about the chase itself. Not the collecting, or the turning the tables on the enemies, or even the presentation and/or theme of the whole package. The entertainment comes mostly from the close calls and exhilaration you get from scratching out just enough distance to free yourself, or just barely beating out a chaser hot on your heels to win a level. Being charming, looking good, or having memorable characters is nice, but if the chase is no good, it doesn’t matter. I never understood why Pac-Man succeeded where so many others failed, but the really weird thing is neither did Namco, or the man who made Pac-Man to begin with.

There’s so many idiosyncrasies that make Pac-Man.. well, Pac-Man that I couldn’t possibly count them all. For example, the places where I’ve put the arrows are known as “blind alleys.” The ghosts can NEVER travel upward along those specific paths. They can go down, but never up. If you perform it right, you can even park in the lower right hand blind alley and remain safe. The ghosts will never find you. Pros use this to take potty breaks (though the use of this is controversial).

Look at many interviews with Toru Iwatani and he’s sure to conclude that people relate to Pac-Man.. especially women.. because Pac-Man, you know, eats. Eating! That’s a thing people do! Especially us women folk, whereas men are too busy for that, what with all the bread winning, and usually opt instead for good old fashioned photosynthesis. Of course, other games are about eating too, but only Pac-Man became a global icon. Or maybe it was the shape, serendipitously created (discovered?) when Iwatani took a single wedge from a piece of pizza? Or the name, which was originally “Puck-Man” until someone turned the P into an F and Namco had second thoughts. Or was it the ghosts? The colorful, menacing pursuers that were each programmed to have their own personalities? The sound effects? Sure, those all matter, but I think if you leave everything the same but have a crappy maze design and Pac-Man doesn’t blow up like it did. The straightaways at the bottom are the exact right length to make players hold their breaths. There’s no unreasonable twisty-turny moments. The ghosts slowing down in the tunnels lends an almost Hanna-Barbera vibe to the chase where you can imagine the ghosts shaking their fists at you in anger as the distance between you and them increases. The eating part is also only exciting because, YOU GUESSED IT, its effect on the chase. Eating dots slows you down, and there’s so many dots! That’s a lot of space where you aren’t going your max speed. The maze is, frankly, kind of perfect.

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Namco figured everything was responsible for Pac-Man’s success, except the maze itself. There, their attitude seemed to be “any maze will do!” They went on to prove this twice in a row. The next Pac-Man game THEY made, Super Pac-Man, turned the abstract dots into the type of food us eating eaters eat. In theory, if eating is the appeal, it should have been a big hit, but it wasn’t. Maybe because the game itself sucked, mostly because the maze sucked. It didn’t lend itself perfectly to the best moments in maze chases. Scratching out distances, close calls, and nail-biting sections? Nope, just a mess of walls and dots with no rhyme or reason. Then they repeated the same folly with Pac & Pal. For all I know, the base concept of those games might be ingenious, but with the mazes they feature, there’s no way to know for sure. I kind of wish a ROM hack existed that changed the mazes. Weirdly, it was a rogue “enhancement board” developer named General Computer that fundamentally got it with Pac-Man and made the best of those early sequels: Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man.

Pac-Man is one of the first cases of the original Japanese script having helpful tips that were lost in translation. Specifically Pinky being “Speedy.” In fact, Pinky doesn’t move faster, but the word for what it meant didn’t have a perfect one-to-one English translation. In Japan, its name is “Machibuse” which roughly means “to ambush” or “being ambushed.” Unlike some bad translations, it’s not a stretch to see how they reached for a word that conveys the concept of an ambush and came up with “Speedy.” The “speedy one” is usually the one ahead, right? Pinky’s attack logic is to use the direction Pac-Man is facing and target an area roughly four lengths ahead of Pac-Man. Clyde (the orange one) is in the same boat. “Pokey” is his name in the US. WTF does that even mean? In Japan, his name translates to “feigning ignorance.”

If the maze design itself is the most important aspect, the chasers are a very close second. When I play a maze chase for the first time, sometimes I need time to figure out if a maze works or not. That’s rarely the case with chasers. If they just immediately make a beeline for you, it’s usually not a good sign. Pac-Man doesn’t do that, and I think that factored really big into why it took off. While the ghosts each have a unique personality and accompanying attack method, all three ghosts collectively run on three “modes” that apply at the same time to all four. The modes are called SCATTER, CHASE, and FRIGHTENED. The main two are SCATTER and CHASE, which run on a fixed timer, with SCATTER running much shorter. Sometimes astronomically shorter. CHASE can last seventeen minutes before giving players another SCATTER, though by that point, you’ll probably just finish the level or die. In SCATTER, each ghost goes to their own designated corner to wander on “patrol” for a few seconds. In CHASE, the ghosts each have a strategy based on using a “target” on the board that refreshes every step they take. The red one always targets the space Pac-Man is currently occupying and takes the shortest route to get there, leading to it feeling like it chases you the most directly. The pink one tries to anticipate your move by targeting four spaces in front of the direction you’re facing. You can use this to scare Pinky off. If you’re near a junction and you move straight at him, his target tile will be BEHIND HIM and cause him to change directions. It works every single time.

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The blue ghost bases its position on Blinky (the red one) and Pac-Man’s position, and if Blinky closes in on you, it’s not rare for Inky to be close by. Finally, Clyde, the orange one, really is kind of a coward. If he’s far away from Pac-Man, he uses Blinky’s targeting system, but as soon as he gets within eight spaces of Pac-Man, he retreats to the left hand corner using the same target tile as his SCATTER mode target. While he’s not specifically dangerous as he doesn’t target you, what he’s really doing is cutting off a potential means of escape. There’s a LOT more complexity. Like seriously, read this and try committing it to memory. I made it to Chapter 3 and about two minutes later, as I tried making sense of which tile counted and how each frame of animation mattered a great deal, my ears started dripping blood. I took it as a sign to stop and just enjoy knowing that I could stare-down the pink ghost.

The ghosts in their “SCATTER” patrol zones.

I was wrong about Pac-Man being boring. Now that I approach it the same way I do a pinball table, knowing that I’m playing one specific maze that operates under one specific set of rules, I think I kind of love this game. Maybe someday, I’ll even commit the professional patterns to memory. Right now, I’m just content to practice and get better at anticipating the moves of the ghosts and utilizing it to make the type of moves I once thought were bold, but now I know are completely safe. Besides, I kind of like how good I am at it now, where scoring a 1,600 point 4th chomp is still a big deal to me. I don’t know if I ever want to cross that threshold where scoring 50,000 points isn’t a “good game” anymore. There’s something comforting about knowing just enough about Pac-Man to do alright, but not enough that I could play it for hours, completely zoned out. It’s a game I have to pay attention to, and that’s kind of what I want out of a maze chase anyway. If I reached the point where my brain is calculating what frame cycle I’m currently in so I can pinpoint exactly what direction the edible ghosts will turn, that doesn’t sound as fun for me. Hey, 50,000 is a good score for me. It’s a pitiful score for pros. But I bet I’m the one having more fun.
Verdict: YES!

Pac-Man Plus
Platform: Arcade
Released March, 1983
Published by Bally Midway
Included in Arcade1Up’s Pac-Man Deluxe Cabinet
NO MODERN NON-ARCADE1UP RELEASE

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Pac-Man Plus is the unofficial-official ROM hack that DIDN’T find its audience. It’s unclear how involved Namco was. MobyGames says it was completely unauthorized by Namco. The Pac-Man Wiki says it was actually made by Namco. Everyone seems to agree that Plus was commissioned by Bally Midway to compete with the prevalence of popular-but-unauthorized enhancement kits and ROM hacks (some of which I will be reviewing soon), the most famous being one that just sped up the game significantly. While Plus retains the same maze as the original Pac-Man, the gameplay is fairly heavily modified. Oh, and the maze is teal now. My father speculated teal might be kinder on CRT monitors than the stark blue of the original. Real life Pac-Man cabinets are NOTORIOUS for permanently searing the maze’s shapes and features into the monitors themselves. By 1983, enough Pac-Man units were probably experiencing monitor-scaring that arcade operators requested that it, you know, not do that anymore. That’s just my pops’ speculation, though. Another cosmetic change is that the first item is a can of Coca-Cola, which is apparently one of the first examples of product placement in a video game. Also, when you eat a power pellet, the ghosts now have stems on their head. It seems like a needlessly cruel reminder that, yes, they’re food now. As if being dead isn’t bad enough. The cosmetic changes are fine and honestly, the stem-head thing is cute, but gameplay is king.

“Aww sh*t. We’re food. Wait, how did ole Pinky not change?”

There are three notable changes to the standard Pac-Man gameplay. (1) The ghosts are “more aggressive” now, by which it means they spend less time in the “Scatter” algorithm and more time in “Chase.” They also move faster, but then again, so do you. (2) The power pellets are now red kryptonite instead of green. In other words, you never know what will happen. Sometimes you’ll get the standard “all four ghosts can be eaten” from the first game, but sometimes the power pellets only work on three of the four ghosts. When this happens, one ghost seemingly chosen at random will not be affected. What the hell? Well, this is “professional-proofing.” You see, by 1983, the patterns that skilled players used to manipulate the ghosts and rack up high scores were widely known. Instead of creating new “marching orders” for the four ghosts, having one not become vulnerable completely wrecks the established patterns used by pros. Oh, you can still use patterns, but you will also always need to think on your feet. Other effects also include making the ghosts invisible, making the stage invisible, and making the stage AND the remaining dots/pellets invisible. Because OF COURSE that happens.

Well, it wouldn’t be a mod of an established game from the early 80s if “invisibility” wasn’t one of its tricks.

(3) The bonus items aren’t just for points anymore. They’re functionally extra power pellets. Not just power pellets, but SUPER INVISIBILITY Power Pellets! When you eat them, the ghosts become edible, but they turn invisible (facepalm) until the blinking starts. If you eat them, they score double the points they normally do: 400, 800, 1600, 3200. Being able to fully utilize this requires you to have a fairly good understanding of the behavior of the ghosts running the “FRIGHTENED” algorithm, since you won’t be able to eyeball which direction they take. Wait, how does FRIGHTENED work? Oh, the directions the ghosts turn are based on a pseudo-random number generator. Well crap. So unless you memorize the frame-by-frame gameplay to be able to predict the behaviors of the ghosts, chomping them with the item is pure luck. Anyway, I played Pac-Man Plus a few years ago and I didn’t really like it all that much, but now that I’ve taken the time to understand the idiosyncrasies of Pac-Man, actually.. it’s okay! It’s not an amazing upgrade. It’s fine, but it is something you have to be really into Pac-Man to appreciate. I can also understand why purists wouldn’t like it. I had a decent enough time messing around with it, but it’s no surprise why Ms. Pac-Man is the official-unofficial ROM hack that became a hit and Pac-Man Plus was relegated to the status of historic curio.
Verdict: YES!

Ignore the “high score” which was done via cheating tomfoolery. This was my legitimate high score.

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Sunman – The Never Released Sunsoft NES Superman Game (Review)

May 6, 2024 by Leave a comment

Sunman
aka Superman
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Never Released Nearly Complete Prototype
Directed by Kenji Eno
Developed by EIM Group
Non-Publisher: Sunsoft

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Sunsoft might be most famous for their Batman games, but did you know they tried their hand at a Superman game as well? Sunsoft turned to the studio best known in America for a game called Panic Restaurant. EIM Group was led by Kenji Eno, who tragically died in 2013 at just 42. Their game, known at this time as simply “Superman” had the engine mostly finished and the first level programmed. The prototype even features an impressive chiptune take on the iconic John Williams Superman theme. So, what happened? According to Eno, DC Comics rejected the game because Superman “can’t die” and “can’t take damage.” Maybe he was told that, but I don’t buy that’s the real reason that Sunsoft removed Superman from their Superman game. Taito’s Superman arcade game was already a few years old by this point, and spoiler: Superman can take damage and die. Also, would this be a good time to point out that Sunsoft planned this for a late 1992 release. What storyline did DC Comics have planned for the Man of Steel in late 1992? (checks notes) Ah yes, Superman takes damage and dies. More than likely, Sunsoft had simply lost the DC license, and perhaps never had the Superman license at all. Either way, Sunsoft ordered the game to be changed to a generic superhero: Sunman.

Sunman is more powerful than a locomotive. Impressive for someone who is approximately one foot tall. That or this locomotive is HUGE. Also, while playing this game, I kept thinking “if Daredevil wore a cape.”

Another possibility is that DC inspected the game and found it to be boring. The sad truth is, I was pulling for Sunman to be a quality lost treasure of a game because it was designed by someone who died young. Instead, I’m thinking my YES! for Eno will have to wait for Panic Restaurant, which I will review in 2024, but I’ve already played it once and it was AWESOME. Seriously, one of the most underrated NES games. Ever. I have to do that before I do his NES “port” of Altered Beast which, yes, exists and.. wow. Yea, that sure is a game that.. happened. Sunman would have gone down as a very middle of the road, bordering on outright bad superhero action game. A game that, oddly enough, has a lot more in common with Nintendo’s Kirby than Sunsoft’s Batman. Hear me out. The big hook with Sunman is the ability to fly at any time. Using that ability, you can circumvent large sections of a couple of the levels, just like you can in the early Kirby games. Unlike Kirby, you might want to fly over the levels rather than play them “honestly” because the brawling is just terrible in Sunman.

I found most of my entertainment in Sunman came from laughing at all the different ways the developers worked to nullify their own gameplay concept. You’re “Superman” and you can fly anywhere, and you generally move faster than the bad guys. What do you do so that people actually play the game? Well, you raise the platform high off the ground, and then you can put an invisible ceiling at where the camera view ends, thus funneling the player into direct conflict with enemies. And this is why a 2D Superman action game can’t work. Eh, at least it’s better than that Kemco abomination.

Sunman has a collision problem. When you fly, it’s hard to punch the enemies who also fly. Your collision box is essentially a square that’s bigger than not-Superman. This box shrinks when you’re not flying and instead walking along the ground. But of course, you have to fly a lot. The level design is built around this, and the combat is just awful as a result. The flying fisticuffs were sloppy at best. There’s also a distinct lack of enemy variety. It’s mostly generic guys with guns flying in pairs and shooting lasers. If not them, it’s usually a little robot that’s firing a laser beam up. The “platforming” stages are never fun. They always feel like a Superman game that hates that it’s a Superman game, because it’s so limited. And, even worse, there’s no power in those stages besides flying. Maybe Sunman would have been too easy if Superman could use his heat vision, but who cares? I’d have had a LOT more fun if I could have zapped enemies out of the sky. There’s also no item pick-ups at all, including health refills. If you’re low on life, you have to beat the boss of that stage. Don’t worry, only one is really hard. Maybe two. As far as I can tell, there’s no point in exploring. Just the same handful of enemies to punch until the five stages are up. There’s occasionally crushing obstacles you have to time your movement to avoid, but even those had terrible collision detection on their edges. Good lord, a Superman game that needs to baby proof corners.

This, the final boss, presumably would have been General Zod if this had gone forward as a Superman game? I assume? He teleports around the room, so I don’t suppose you can discount Lex Luthor in a power suit or perhaps Mxyzptlk.

Occasionally, Sunman trades the platforming sections for all-flying sections. Some of them are still brawlers with the crappy air punch. Others take a shmup approach and now you can fire your laser eyes. Which actually begs the question: why Superman, or hell, “Sunman” would allow himself to take damage on the platforming stages to begin with? The first stage’s boss is a giant helicopter that you shoot. Oddly, in the Superman prototype, you fight this from a laying down position. This is changed in Sunman to the standing position, increasing the difficulty because there’s so much more of you to take damage. I figured they got rid of the laying down sprite altogether, but that’s not the case. After you fight ANOTHER boss with an entirely different standing up sprite that’s not suitable at all for a shmup boss, you finally lay down to heroically fly through a speed tunnel. And it’s horrible. Seriously, this would be like Battletoads speed bike levels of infamous if it had ever come out. It’s the last section before the final boss, but it moves too fast and the squeezes are far too tight. I tried playing it with save states, but I got bored and swapped them for rewinding after about fifteen minutes of dying. One spongy last boss later and the credits were rolling to what would have been a truly boring Superman game.

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I don’t think Superman is necessarily doomed to always produce mediocre games. But, it’s sad that, had Sunman come out, for all its problems, it would have been one of the better Superman games of the 20th century, or ever, really. And it’s just a barely more interesting take on the same type of combat that was already tedious in Taito’s coin-op. If DC really did pass on Sunsoft Superman, I’m leaning more towards DC’s licensing department recognized it wouldn’t have gotten the type of acclaim the Sunsoft Batman games got. Instead, it would have fed into the idea that Superman is an inherently dull character. And he’s not, so I get it if that’s why they said “no.” What’s bonkers is that we’ve made it to 2024 and Atari still can legitimately make a case for having made the best Superman game (scroll to the second-to-last game in Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – Part One for my review). It came out a full ten years before I was born, and with all the technology that has come along, how is THAT still the best console Superman? It’s shameful.

And, as boring as Sunman is, it could have been a LOT worse.

Frankly, it’s not a mystery why Atari’s Superman is THE video Superman. It’s the only Superman game that feels like it’s Superman doing Superman things. Rescuing Lois Lane, changing in a phone booth, repairing a broken bridge, and jailing Lex Luthor. They even managed to work in either x-ray vision or super vision, depending on how you look at it. The Kemco game TRIED all that, and as maligned as their Superman game is, they really did give an honest effort at creating a Superman adventure with all the traits you’d hope for. The only problem is the engine itself is just pitiful. The talent just wasn’t there to create a game that matched the vision. That’s basically what went wrong with the infamous Superman 64 as well. Focusing on his flying is a bad idea. Focusing on combat is too. Superman is an adventure character. Treat him like it and the action side will take care of itself.

This is the real “level complete” screenshot of Sunman. “GRATE!” Oh my god.

I really get a feeling that Superman is an assignment few game designers want. His invulnerability and god-like powers are considered to be too creatively limiting. So, like, why not make it not about living or dying but about saving people or not saving them? Make the Baba Is You of superhero games. Give players multiple possible solutions to a series of adventure challenges where you’re just trying to save the dam from bursting, or stop a missile, and yes, maybe sometimes throw hands with villains, and make the antagonizing factor time itself. “Will Superman make it in time to save the day?” is the quintessential Superman story. Just do that as a game! And don’t have him have to punch waves of identical baddies along the way. It’s Superman! If he’s punching them, shouldn’t their brains be in orbit?
Verdict: NO!

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Batman: The Video Game – The Definitive Review (NES, Game Boy, and Genesis Reviews)

May 3, 2024 by 1 Comment

I’ve reviewed four Batman games so far. I’ve done the coin-op by Atari Games and the never-released in America TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine version that’s a strange top-down action-maze game. Then there’s the incredibly bland Batman Returns Atari Lynx game that, let’s face it, is never coming out again. None of those games got a YES! and frankly, none of them were the Batman games anyone wants to see a modern release or review of. In fact, I’ve only awarded one YES! to the Dark Knight so far. That was for the also never released in America version of Batman Returns for the Sega Master System. But, nobody really wants THAT game either. The one everyone wants is Batman: The Video Game for the NES. But, there’s actually two other games that share the name. Even weirder is that they’re entirely original games. Sunsoft created unique versions of Batman for each platform. Then, those games got a sort of sequel, called Return of the Joker if they’re 8-bit or Revenge of the Joker if they’re 16-bit. Eventually, I’ll do a Definitive Review of them too. So, let’s take a look at the three games that wear the name Batman: The Video Game. Also, for the first time, I’m going to assign value to a set that doesn’t yet exist.

GAME REVIEWS

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

Batman: The Video Game
Platform: NES
Released December 28, 1989 (JP) February 13, 1990 (US)
Developed by Sunsoft
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Where does he get those wonderful graphics?

Batman: The Video Game is one of the most celebrated licensed titles on the NES, and one of the most influential games for the current crop of indie developers. Seriously, I totally understand now why The Storied Sword cites it, even if its gameplay has more in common with Ninja Gaiden. When anyone talks about bad licensed NES games, you can bet your bottom dollar that “Batman was good” will be a counter to that. And it’s especially weird for two reasons. The first is that this feels like a generic sci-fi platformer that was repurposed as a Batman game. For all anyone knows, that might be the legitimate story. Journey to Silius, a Sunsoft-developed NES game currently available to Switch Online subscribers, was intended to be a Terminator game, but the license expired before the game was finished. If nothing else, it shows flipping one property to another is something Sunsoft was experienced with. Batman: The Video Game has so little in common with Batman: The Batman that it’d be almost comforting if they just plugged the Dark Knight into an existing sci-fi build and called it a day. Even the cut scenes, which are the only aspects where you’re like “hey, look, Batman!” are bad. A+ for the Batmobile. That looks just like the movie. The Joker, on the other hand, looks more like the late, great David Warner. Or Guy Fawkes. Or Steve Buscemi.

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The second reason that I’m kind of surprised by the reverence of NES Batman is that it eventually becomes maddening. One of those releases that the generation who made strategy guides and Game Genies a viable business call “Nintendo Hard.” In fact, this and Battletoads are among the most commonly cited “I love that game! Never could get past the X level” titles on the NES. I don’t get it. So, let me get this straight: you love the game, but not enough to actually finish it? Are you sure “love” is the word you want? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say you had a crush on Batman: The Video Game, but then it turned out to be a bitch and you lost interest? Not that my generation is any better. It’s always strange to me when I beat a five year old Xbox game and discover that the achievement for finishing the game is one of those ultra rare ones with the angelic chime, because only like 1% of all owners ever bothered to get that far. The hell? Doesn’t anyone finish games anymore? Well, *I* finished Batman: The Video Game, and I can see why someone who rented the game for a weekend when they were a kid might say they “loved it.” I can also see why people didn’t finish it.

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Oh, I cheated like crazy with save states and eventually rewind, but I did finish it. Batman is a moderately decent sci-fi platformer that just completely loses its mind in the last two (of only five) levels in the game. This is mostly owed to a series of jumping “puzzles” with two elements that would be considered challenging enough on their own being stapled together. The first is having sections of the walls be lethal to the touch. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with forcing players to aim their jumps. That’s sort of the point of a platformer. The second is placing enemies at the top of columns you’re jumping up. Hey, that’s fine too when your player always has three projectiles they can throw mid-air. Combining the two elements would be stretching it, but Batman: The Video Game isn’t done yet. How about cranking up the hit points on the enemy at the top of that column? What about then giving that enemy at the top a lethal projectile spray that it fires in rapid bursts, and then having the column you climb be absurdly high up, so if you fall, you have to start the whole process over. At this point, it feels like the idea of making a fun game had long since been abandoned in favor of straight-up trolling players.

See that little thing hanging from the platform? They drop fast moving drones that can be used to “farm” weapon point refills and health, but they’re also a legitimately threatening enemy, especially when you’re given little movement clearance and surrounded by health-draining pools of acid on both sides. So, you would still prefer to kill it instead of grinding up resources? Have fun with that. They take well over a dozen hits with your high-powered items to kill, enough to drain half of a full 99 point item reserve. What the hell? It feels like the designers got one note too many from management and cranked all enemy stats to the max out of spite. Batman desperately needs rebalancing more than anything else.

On its own terms, I’d call Batman: The Video Game unplayable after the third world. Enemies are too spongy and too cheaply placed. The bosses of those later stages are even worse, and with the exception of the Joker, there’s absolutely no effort to theme them in a way that makes sense for a Batman game. Seriously, for all the teasing I did about the NES Ninja Turtles having little to do with the franchise, Batman is easily the gold standard for shoehorning a license into a game that has nothing to do with it. Because of that, this is a game that should have aged a lot worse than it did. But, thanks to all the bells & whistles of emulation, Batman is a better game now than ever before. Since all the pieces were already in place for a good game, and maybe even a great game, I really enjoyed the “modern” NES Batman experience. That’s because I was able to set my own terms.

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In order to not to completely trivialize the challenge, I only used save states when I reached new floors. Sometimes my placement of where I saved wasn’t ideal for challenge making, but I wouldn’t have had fun with Batman if I didn’t take steps towards nerfing it. Not to the point of killing the difficulty, but just enough to ease the burden. In fact, I only used rewind during one section of the game, which was actually the final vertical shaft right below the final boss chamber. That’s the one I whined about above. Otherwise, I played in a way where death did result in me having to redo large sections of stages. As an unlimited lives experience, Batman worked. I think eliminating lives, adding a death counter, and bumping up the checkpoints would turn this into a borderline masterpiece.

These baddies have unpredictable jumping patterns. I wasn’t a fan, but at least I could tell myself they were Killer Croc.

It’s worth noting that the way I played  Batman: The Video Game wasn’t even my original plan, as I had a ROM hack called Batman (Easy) that I intended to also include in this feature. My plan was to play the original 1989 build of Batman as it was originally designed, then pivot to the ROM hack. I wanted to really show off the power of having emulation work in tandem with modern designers to unlock a game’s fullest potential. But, I found Batman (Easy) was too easy. Item drops were worth too many item points and a lot of the platforming challenges were too nerfed. If you have kids under 12, I’d recommend it for them, easily. For everyone else, it probably took the concept of a kinder, gentler Batman too far. Somewhere between my self-created save state checkpoints and that ROM hack is probably the best version of the game, but that doesn’t exist yet.

It wasn’t until I reached this point of the game that I abandoned save states and used rewind to brute-force my way up this final platforming challenge before the last bosses. Those black gears are lethal to the touch, and several platforms have spongy enemies on them. At the top of this IS an item farm, but even that isn’t a gimmie, as you have close-quarters to try and build up health and weapon points before facing generic sci-fi boss #5 and finally the Joker.

When Batman: The Video Game is fun, it’s really fun. Oddly enough, Batman’s strength isn’t really in the wall jump. The best part was the combat! Batman’s punch is often as effective as the three projectiles, and it was satisfying enough. Of the three projectiles, the batarang was the most useful. Even with limited range, it used the fewest item points and felt like the closest the game came to a Batman-like experience. The second weapon is a gun with relatively slow bullets that I almost never used, except I wouldn’t have come close to finishing the third boss without it. Finally, there’s a weapon that look like a gun, but its bullets quickly split into three projectiles that continue on in a wider horizontal trajectory. This is easily the coolest looking weapon, but it was only really useful when I couldn’t expect to aim a shot. All the items are fun to use, but there is one thing that annoyed the hell out of me: item select is mapped to START while pause is SELECT. Over the course of two hours, my brain refused to remember that and I was constantly pausing the game when I meant to change weapons. It was annoying at first, but by the end of the game, it really just felt like another example of Batman: The Video Game trolling players.

If we go off my theory that Batman was a generic robot sci-fi platformer that they barely reworked in order to be a Batman game, I would have initially guessed the Joker was the one element not on the drawing board, since it’s a guy pointing an enormous gun at you. HEY, JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIE! But then he calls down lightning strikes, and it feels more like a Dracula fight from a Castlevania game. So much for that theory.

This is one of the stranger verdicts I’ve had to render since I started doing retro reviews, because my answer of whether or not Batman is worth money today, in 2024, is entirely dependent on the emulator. And actually, just the ability to save and load states isn’t enough. Batman needed quick save/quick load. I even tried this, making myself pause the game before activating save/load, and it did more harm than good. I’m mostly thinking of that final vertical wall-jumping maze, and having to pause to undo a costly mistake was too much. I prefer mapping quick save to left stick click and quick load to right stick click. You can’t possibly hit those buttons by accident, especially since I’m using a D-Pad. I assume that’s what most people will use when playing an NES game. If you’re using a retro platform without that barest minimum of options, fuhgeddaboudit. Batman’s fun will likely stop about 60% of the way in. If a Batman Sunsoft collection is put out by a company who stubbornly refuses to include that, or only allows, say, two seconds of rewinding (not calling anyone specific out), I would give Batman: The Video Game a NO! But, I didn’t play it that way. I played Batman on MY terms. With a thirty-second rewind and/or quick save/quick load, I found that Batman works both as a fun, peppy sci-fi platformer AND as a historical curio. It’s actually really weird this game wears the Batman label, and there’s enough amusement in how bonkers it gets that it kept a smile on my face for most of the two hours I needed to finish it.
Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to a hypothetical Batman collection.
BONUS: Throw in another $5 if they also included a ROM hack similar to Batman (Easy).

Batman: The Video Game
Platform: Game Boy
Released April 13, 1990 (JP) June, 1990 (US)
Directed by Cho Musou
Developed by Sunsoft
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Super Wayneio Land

It’s probably best to think of the Game Boy version of Batman: The Video Game as Super Mario Land 1 with a gun. It doesn’t have much to do with the movies either, but at least you knock Jack Nicholson into a vat of chemicals. Hey, the NES game didn’t do that! The NES game also didn’t feel like a “break the blocks” platformer with Batman heroically saving the Mushroom Kingdom. Okay, so this is not the Batman game anyone would want. That’s why I feel especially silly making the following statement: of all the early era Game Boy games I’ve played, which admittedly is a small sample size, Batman is probably the best of the bunch. I enjoyed it a lot more than I liked Super Mario Land. Like, it’s not even close actually. I swear, these Sunsoft Batman games are so weird.

Batman does the old “invisible gap” trick that was all the rage in the 8-bit platformers. But, actually this does it better than most. The areas where the invisible gaps are have incredibly subtle tells, and once you figure it out, it feels like an earned challenge element and not a gotcha. Surprising and kind of wonderful. Hey Simon’s Quest: you were just bitch-slapped by puny Batman.

Batman: The Video Game on Game Boy is really short, at only about thirty minutes to finish, and it’s probably more suitable for younger children. Replace the “jump on the enemies” gameplay of Super Mario Land with Mega Man-style guns, then lobotomize the challenge and you get the idea. You get unlimited ammo, but you can only carry one gun at a time, which you find by shooting dark-shaded blocks. One pick-up, “the short gun” is functionally a whammy, as it leaves you stuck with a weapon that has no range and can’t pierce platforms and walls. Try to avoid them. The other guns are mostly fun to use. The power gun is basically a Mega Man pea shooter that can shoot enemies through walls. The wave gun is like the power gun but the bullets travel in a shallow sine wave. The “T” gun, which is presumably tear gas, is a large projectile that pierces walls AND can break three blocks at once. You’ll rarely need to break that many blocks. My favorite gun easily was the batarang gun, which is weirdly designated with an “R.” It shoots powerful batarangs out. Really, all the guns but shorty are fun to use. The one thing Batman HAD to do was have the action be fun, and it is!

Also, if you pick up white gun icons, you increase how many bullets you can shoot at once. I have no clue what the max is, but it goes up to at least 6. There’s also dark gun blocks that decrease your ammo by one. By the time I reached the Joker (pictured), I was essentially a tank with pointy ears.

Even if I think of Batman GB strictly as a children’s game, it’s a damn good game. Little kids need games too, and Batman has satisfying pew-pew action and enjoyable level design. The most impressive thing is how well balanced the platforming and the gun play is. It really feels like equal parts both. What completely nerfs the game is the shields you can pick up. If you see a Batman icon (his symbol), it creates a shield that spins around you. You can pick-up as many as four bats to circle you, and then you can even pick-up pills that make them spin faster. Although they do minimal damage upon making contact with an enemy, having four that spin like a figure skater on her tippy-toes can make you almost unstoppable. Almost. In what feels like the wisest choice the game made, the shield isn’t so effective that you can just walk through enemies with impunity. As easy as Batman is, you actually do have to make an effort. When I made it to the final boss, I tried to cheese him by just spamming the attack button to let my six batarangs fly at him. I almost lost a life doing this, as I was damaged down to my last hit. BUT, I did win!

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Batman shares even more DNA with Mario Land, as like Mario Land, it has two shmup levels that feel like they belong to a completely different game. Unlike Mario Land, the two stages where you pilot the Batwing are played back-to-back. They’re the game’s entire world 3. Also unlike Super Mario Land is the fact that I actually liked Batman’s auto-scrolling shmup levels. Like most of Game Boy Batman’s stages, they’re both too easy. The closest this build comes to putting up a challenge is the final level. Batman ends on an auto-scrolling platforming stage that often forces you to sacrifice your shields since its platforms are usually small, usually have an enemy on them, and usually leave you with little time to stop and aim your jump. And that’s fine, because the last level should put players to those kinds of risk/reward decisions. Batman’s two standard bosses are kind of boring, but otherwise, I’m surprised. I’d already played this before and remembered it being just okay. It’s a little better than that. In many ways, I liked this more than the NES game. It’s still pretty generic, but it also packs a lot of fun into very little game. I didn’t expect the Game Boy Batman to be one of the highlights of this feature. Sunsoft’s best decision was creating a new game that played to the Game Boy’s strengths instead of trying to copy a technologically superior game to a less capable platform.
Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to a hypothetical Batman collection.

Batman: The Video Game
Platform: Sega Genesis
Released July 27, 1990 (JP) June, 1991 (US)
Developed by Sunsoft
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Rain, rain, go away. My rubber suit is already enough of a pain.

The final installment of the Batman: The Video Game trilogy is also the only one that’s unambiguously based on the Tim Burton film. Actually, at times it feels sort of like Sunsoft was trying to create a more complicated home console approximation of the Atari Games coin-op. Which is actually impossible since this came out first. Maybe it’s the other way around and Atari Games was trying to make a better version of the Genesis game. Either way, the end result is a strange brawler-platformer hybrid that never quite feels like it gets out of first gear. And that’s kind of weird because it does feel like a Batman game. You use a grappling hook, punch generic crooks in the face, the batarangs don’t actually return like boomerangs, and you pilot both the Batmobile and Batwing in convincing fashion. All the pieces are in place for the Genesis version to stand tall as the only authentically Dark Knighty version of the franchise. And yet, this is easily the worst of the three titles called Batman: The Video Game.

The first stage is a literal straight line. No up and down movement required, unless you jump up ONE TIME to pick up an item refill. Otherwise, it’s a long ass street where you walk right, punch enemies, then walk right and punch enemies, etc, etc until you reach a boss. It took one level to realize that Sunsoft phoned this one in.

Genny Batman is an incredibly boring game. The combat is so flavorless, as you only punch and do a leg sweep type of kick. You can punch when you jump, but I never really found this useful and usually took damage when I attempted it. You only get one item in the platforming segments, the aforementioned non-returning batarang. While it completely trivialized a few of the boss fights (including the last one), it lacks the visual satisfaction that the NES game accomplished with a lot less horsepower. I also found the “block” move where Batman puts up his dukes to be generally ineffective. Without decent fisticuffs, Batman absolutely needed quality platforming gameplay to carry the day. Unfortunately, the platforming is even worse than the brawling. I’ll start with one of the worst double jumps I’ve ever seen. Early in the second level, I found myself unable to get past a stack of crates (“CRATES! MY ONLY WEAKNESS!”) until I dug up the instruction book via Sega Retro. That’s when I learned that if you quickly press the jump button a second time, Batman does this flippy move that’s more about helping to cover horizontal distance instead of jumping higher. Allegedly some enemies can be damaged by pouncing on them, but it feels like it was a coin flip on whether I’d damage them or they’d damage me.

This museum must pay through the nose on insurance premiums.

The biggest hook in the figurative sense is a literal hook in the corporeal sense: the grappling hook. It can only be used in designated spots and is little more than a manually-operated elevator. It put the slightest smile on my face that the hook actually does work like real life grappling hooks do, where you have to overthrow and hope the hook snags on a surface. Like.. yea, that’s how it would work. I can’t believe they put that in the game. Neato. But, the problem with using real life logic is that, while you wait for the hook to bind to a surface, you’re likely being shot at by a bad guy. In fact, late in the game, the areas where you’re supposed to use the hook are populated by enemies specifically placed to cause damage during the process. It takes a little bit to go through the motion of throwing the hook up. Also, when you finally start to make the climb with it, it’s like a bungee cord that fires you upward. So of course they put spiked ceilings around the hook areas in the final climb before you fight the Joker, and sometimes you haven’t scrolled the screen enough to be able to know they’re there. So, the hook doesn’t really work to differentiate the Batman games. It’s really dull and badly implemented.

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Therefore, the highlight of Genny Batman is the Batmobile. A basic but competent auto scrolling car combat section where you shoot enemies. Here, your batarangs are replaced with missiles that are fired two at a time. If there’s two enemies on screen, the missiles will each target a different one, and they’re so satisfying to use. The missiles also show up in the Batwing section, but I found that to be a frustrating slog. The problem is the Batwing’s sprite is too big, especially when you bank up and down, which you will since it’s a shmup and you’re trying to avoid getting shot. It leads to major issues with screen cramping. Come to think of it, Sunsoft really got it backwards. It’s the Batmobile that should feel cramped and claustrophobic with larger sprites to mimic navigating the narrow streets of a major metropolitan U.S. city, while the action in the skies over Gotham should feel more free and open on account of, well, it’s the literal f’n sky! Anyway, the Batwing stuff is pretty awful but it’s over with quickly. The Batmobile is a little more complicated. The action starts fun enough. Really fun, actually! But then the stage refuses to end. By the time the Batmobile has overstayed its welcome, you’re just over halfway done with it. So the best part of the game still manages to become boring. They should have broken it up into chunks of sixty seconds or less, then inserted those between every level. Dumping this all into one overly long segment was the price to pay for following the Tim Burton movie’s set pieces in film order.

I actually had to rewind to get a screenshot of the Joker shooting at me. The first time I played the last boss, he barely got a chance to run on the screen, as I all but stun-locked him with my batarangs for the easiest last boss victory this side of Shredder from Ninja Turtles.

It’s not that the Batman Genesis game isn’t ever fun. Actually, the best thing I can say about it is, besides the Batwing section, I never found it to be an actively bad game, at least mechanically speaking. It’s just so lazy and uninspired. The level design is basic, and the combat is basic, and the driving section is basic, and are you catching a theme here? During the NES review, I often wondered if the extreme difficulty was blowback from the development team getting one note too many from management. With the Genesis game, I wonder if they were all just burned out on the Dark Knight by the time they needed to develop the Sega game. This is a total paint by numbers licensed game that does just a good enough job that any child in 1990 could say “yep, that’s a Batman game.” But, Batman: The Video Game on the Sega Genesis never stood a chance at passing the test of time. Maybe Sunsoft was onto something by replacing the movie set pieces with robo-ninjas, guys dressed like mechanical bugs, and Contra-style bosses. They should have ended Genny Batman with Bruce Wayne throwing batarangs at a giant heart while alien spiders nibble at him. I’m picturing a stoned Jack Nicholson playing the game in his apartment and being like “wait, was this in the movie I made?”
Verdict: NO!

Bahmah?

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The Fall of Elena Temple (Review)

May 1, 2024 by Leave a comment

The Fall of Elena Temple
aka Elena Temple 2.
Platform: Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Playdate
Released April 30, 2024
Developed by GrimTalin

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Most games don’t require the most in-depth reviews. Take GrimTalin’s new indie sequel to their cult hit The Adventures of Elena Temple. That game was based on searching a fifty-screen map for treasure. This time around, Elena stars in a single-screen puzzler based mostly around the concept of falling. And it’s a really, really short game at only twenty stages. I don’t know exactly how much time I needed to finish them all, as I knocked out a few stages at a time, then did something else, then turned on the game and knocked out a few more, and so forth. The fact that I played The Fall of Elena Temple like that and still finished the whole experience in a single day says something. All in? It probably took me an hour-and-a-half. A really fun and perfectly acceptable ninety minutes, mind you. I can honestly say I was never bored. Unlike the previous Elena Temple adventure, this is 99% a puzzle game, with only the faintest hint of platforming, making this feel more like a spin-off than a proper sequel.

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This is especially true thanks to the graphics looking a bit like Game Boy and a bit like Playdate. The previous Elena Temple was themed around a game by a hapless game developer who kept making their flagship game for the wrong platforms. This time around, it’s more like “hey, remember Game Boy?” You can zoom as far in or out as you wish. I needed to zoom all the way in, but your mileage may vary. The object is to collect all the coins and then get to the exit. The big twist is that most rooms have an item that grants you the ability to undo your previous fall from a platform, only you get to keep any progress you made towards the whole coin collecting. It’s actually a pretty good twist, but it’s also one that puzzle aficionados should be able to reverse-engineer with only a bit of trial and error. It’s intuitive to use, at least. The amount of falls you’re able to undo varies from room to room, and each fall is numbered so you know where the undo button is sending you. It works wonderfully and it does make for a fun gimmick. In fact, it’s so fun that I was sorry when it wasn’t in a room.

Probably the best thing I can say about Elena 2 is that it successfully creates “THE BIG OVERWHELM” which is my term for puzzle games where, at first, a level seems so vast and multi-dimensional that you initially think “okay, maybe time I’ve met my match.” The beauty of THE BIG OVERWHELM is that it doesn’t require a complex puzzle, but only the appearance of one. Look at Portal, where none of the puzzles are THAT hard, no matter how the scenario is presented. The payoff is, when you actually finish the stage that looked so overwhelming at first glance, it’s that much sweeter. The Fall of Elena Temple pulls that off, which is pretty impressive for a minimalist puzzler. Plus, Elena 2 keeps throwing twists at you the entire length of the game. Crumbling floors. Disappearing/reappearing floors. Boots that let you skip a space. Hearts that let you absorb one hit of damage. Keys. Snakes. Spiders. All of it paced out so that there’s something new in nearly every level, right to the bitter end. Actually, past the bitter end. I couldn’t believe my eyes when a never previously used magnet showed up in one of the three bonus stages, and then even more stuff is added after that. Hey, finally “bonus stages” that live up to the name. I can’t stress enough: this is GrimTalin’s best game and one of the absolute best puzzlers I’ve played in the last few years. The Fall of Elena Temple is really good.

Even with THE BIG OVERWHELM, Elena’s levels are rarely actually as overwhelming as they look. Oh, and it took me about half the game for my brain to stop needing to tell itself “you can’t climb the vines, stupid.”

But, there’s really two big problems with the whole “stay fresh until the end” design mentality. The first is that, when you only have twenty levels, by necessity, the learning curve is going to be more like a gentle slope. You need the difficulty to scale, so you can’t do simple tutorial levels with the new items, but you also can’t really go completely bonkers with them either. Which, don’t get me wrong: I prefer Elena’s scaling to something like Gateways, where the learning curve was more like a straight wall made out of middle fingers (and mind you, that’s a game I liked a lot). But, there were also maybe, at most, only three or four levels that really had me scratching my head, and one of them was a “bonus” stage. The other big problem is that most of the ideas for special items are fun, but with the exception of the undo mechanic, they all feel underutilized. The twenty-three levels combined absolutely does not feel like it stretches the limits of what this puzzle formula can do. I suppose GrimTalin could do DLC, or a special edition later on like they did with the first Elena Temple. Hell, I’d be fine if they released level packs at $1 a pop for, say, ten new stages and just kept releasing new ones for quick cash, since that initial $3 felt underpriced to begin with. $3 for ninety damn fine minutes of puzzle goodness? What else are you going to do with $3? For me, I had to decide on a large lime slushie or this. I’m sure I made the right choice. Pretty sure. No, wait.. yea, I’m sure.
Verdict: YES!
$2.99 was parched in the making of this review.

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Akka Arrh (Arcade Review – Atari 50)

April 29, 2024 by 1 Comment

Akka Arrh
Platform: Arcade
Year: 1982
Unreleased Prototype (Compilation Debut)
Designed by Dave Ralston & Mike Hally
Included in Atari 50
Includes Dip Switch Options? No

If you glanced at screenshots, it looks kind of like Robotron. This doesn’t even share the same DNA.

This was meant to be in Atari 50: The Definitive Review – Part Two but I had a lot to say about Akka Arrh, so it’s getting its own review. And yes, I’ll do the Jeff Minter remake sometime soon.

Apparently the victim of a poor reception in route testing, Akka Arrh made its retro collection debut with Atari 50. The whole situation with it reminds me of one of those stories you hear about a baby being abandoned, only to tearfully reunite with their biological family years later when they’re all grown-up with a family of their own. After four decades of all but pretending like this never happened, it finally feels like Akka Arrh was welcomed into the Atari family with open arms. It even got a widely-promoted remake led by certifiable legend Jeff Minter. That type of fairy tale ending almost never happens with cancelled games, but it does beg the question: were those players who tested Akka Arrh in 1982 the real villains or did they get it right all along? A little of both, actually.

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The idea is you’re a turret in the center of a series of zones that gets bombarded by waves of enemies. In the larger overhead shot, you have a chance to wipe out entire sections of the swarm by bombing the segment they’re in. If any get through, you have to zoom in to defend your turret directly. Atari 50’s menu says that Akka Arrh borrows gameplay elements from Missile Command, but really, the similarities end with the game’s use of trackball-controlled crosshairs. Also, if you’re on consoles, sorry, but you have to use standard controls, though they work fine, really. The camera is NOT automatic and it’s up to you when you change views. It takes a LOT of getting used to, and at first, I didn’t like Akka Arrh. It’s not intuitive like the best coin-ops of this era are. You almost have to rewire your brain for this specific play style. Once you do, it’s actually not a bad little game at all. Easily the best part is how the overhead combat works. In the overhead view, the entire section that your crosshairs are currently aimed at is highlighted. You don’t have to aim directly at the clusters of enemies. A single shot on any part of the currently highlighted area kills every enemy within. And it’s AWESOME!

As you get deeper into the game, some of the overhead patterns get downright ridiculous (not to mention confusing), and it lessens the potential for those oh-so-satisfying big shots. It’s still a lot of fun, though.

So, half of Akka Arrh is really fun and so incredibly satisfying that it’s almost unbelievable that it didn’t get released. Then you get to the close-up view of the turret, where you have a standard gun, and you’re stuck with gameplay that just isn’t very fun. Despite the fact that your bullets don’t stop at the crosshairs, you do need to actually aim the crosshairs on the enemies in order to kill them. Total bullsh*t! The problem is the enemies are too fast and often move too erratically, no matter how fast or slow you set the crosshair in the options. Even worse is that there’s no pizzazz to the turret part of the game. The enemies are very generic, and they don’t have satisfying POPS to them when you successfully shoot them. At least with the overhead part, you get a rush when you hit a big wave. The turret has none of that charm. Even if you zoom in to watch yourself use your once-per-level center-clearing bomb, it doesn’t feel like you accomplished anything. For such a beautiful game, it somehow has NO personality, and that’s just weird for this era of Atari.

I think a lot of the problems with Akka Arrh could have been fixed if the shields placed by the enemies weren’t as spongy as they are. The enemy patterns are hard enough without them hiding behind what can become a lot of shields.

But, do you know what’s even odder? For whatever reason, Akka Arrh’s close-up gameplay just didn’t feel as intense as the stakes seem to dictate it should. The turret is protected by a shield that enemies have to ping their way through. When that becomes heavily damaged, you should be sweating every time baddies make it through your initial volley of shots in the overhead view, but you don’t. It’s just not exciting at all, and this is one of those times where I don’t have a satisfactory theory on why that is. Maybe it’s because the warning noise is this underwhelming “boop boop boop” sound, or maybe it’s because the game quickly becomes too overwhelming to the point of hopelessness, or maybe it’s just because the enemies are so bland that they don’t command a sense of urgency.  More than likely, it’s all the above. Another issue is that when the turret playfield is full of enemy shields, just recognizing the enemies becomes a challenge. They don’t stand out very well. Robotron: 2084 proved you can spam the screen with things and still be able to tell specific characters and enemies apart. Here, it just all bleeds together. It’s one of the most visually noisy games of this era.

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Akka Arrh is that rare game that’s lesser than the sum of its parts. But, that ultimate sum is still pretty fun. Once you get the hang of it, Akka Arrh feels like it manages to succeed despite itself. The scoring is well handled, with further away zones in the overhead view scoring more points, but at the cost of a small-but-pronounced delay in when you can fire your next shot. This opens the gameplay up to allow players to come up with their own strategies, and I’m all about that with arcade shooters. Further enhancing the risk/reward gameplay is the fact that you score the most points in the significantly harder and more dangerous turret view. If you’re feeling brave, you can allow the enemies to reach the core and pick them off there for 4x the points. There’s also the timing factor, as you’re given one bomb per level that can be used to bail you out and clear the core if too many enemies reach the center.  When and why to use that bomb is up to you. Even better is you don’t have to zoom in to use it. The only downside is you can’t bank unused bombs. They got around the logic of this by calling it a “power blaster” that recharges between levels, implying that it has a max charge. Hey, this is war! Get some more batteries or something!

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Each level has a different layout on the surface and consists of three waves of enemies. The third wave is always made-up of enemies who, instead of attacking the turret, drop things around the turret that eventually clog-up the playfield and make it more difficult to shoot the baddies who aggressively attack. Once again Akka Arrh presents a perfect risk/reward scenario. So, what do you do? Kill the attackers with the bomb, or kill the things that aid the defense of the attackers in later rounds? In terms of raw gameplay, Akka Arrh is deceptively deep. Really, I just wish the core turret gameplay was a lot more fun than it is. The really heartbreaking thing is something as small as increasing the size of the enemies or the size of your bullets could have made this a lot more fun. Sure, it’s frustrating when the enemies straddle the dividing line of the barriers on the surface, but there’s some genuinely fun and amazing ideas at play here. It took a lot of time, but once I got the hang of Akka Arrh, I couldn’t put it down. What was supposed to be one final hour long play test before I wrote the review turned into the best six hours I spent with Akka Arrh. It just finally worked for me.

Normally, Akka Arrh would use a trackball, and if you’re playing on PC, that’s still an option. If you’re on consoles, you’re going to want to adjust the sensitivity of your analog sticks, as the default is just not fast enough for the gameplay. I found moving the slider to where I have it in this screenshot worked best for me. Fast enough to react to most enemies, but still accurate enough to not overshoot your targets. I also highly recommend that players experiment with ASSISTED toggled both on and off. When it’s on, your movement is automatically slowed down while you’re actively shooting. My Dad preferred it on. I easily had my best games with it turned off. The best thing I can say about Atari 50 is that they loaded every imaginable controller option.

At the same time, I totally get why this wouldn’t have been a hit in 1982. The learning curve is one of the steepest of any coin-op shooter I’ve seen. Everything that makes for great arcade gameplay is here, except the instant gratification. It takes a while to figure out when to switch views, and why you would. On top of that, learning the enemy patterns and getting a feel for the game’s flow takes longer than normal because everything is so damn generic looking. It doesn’t help that the two styles of graphics, for the overworld and the turret, look nothing alike. You’d swear this is two games combined into one. It sort of is! For players weaned on Asteroids, Space Invaders, Carnival, King & Balloon, etc, I imagine Akka Arrh was like the difference between driving a truck and driving a tank. Despite what the menu in Atari 50 says, Akka Arrh isn’t really all that much like Missile Command, or any other game from this era. It’s a one-off. While I ultimately did find the fun in Akka Arrh, it took me multiple play sessions over the course of sixteen months to get to that point. I guess that best answers the question of why Akka Arrh failed in route testing.
Verdict: YES!
$39.99 couldn’t get that episode of Dinosaurs out of her head in the making of this review. “Akka Arrh I’m dying you idiots!”

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The Making of Karateka- The Definitive Review (Includes Bonus Reviews of the NES & Game Boy Karateka)

April 27, 2024 by Leave a comment

Before starting this review, I’d never played Karateka. I didn’t even know what genre it was going to be. Apparently I wasn’t alone. The first video in the museum features legendary designers of games saying they weren’t sure what to expect when they saw Karateka on shelves. Some thought maybe it would be like Karate Champ or a similar one-on-one fighter. I was thinking it might be more like Kung Fu, aka Kung Fu Master, aka Spartan X. Actually, we were all right AND not even close. I decided, for this review, I would go in completely blind, and I’m going to review all the builds and prototypes in this set in the actual sequential order they’re presented in the program’s five chapters. This includes a review of every prototype and every build of the games Karateka, Death Bounce, and Asteroid Blaster, the final two of which never released. Each game review below was written immediately following the specific build was played, before I moved on in the museum’s narrative. The sections on Presentation & Features and Emulation were written after the game reviews were completed.

The Making of Karateka retails for $19.99, and therefore it has to create $20 in value to win my seal of approval. After I finished reviewing the games, I assigned extra value for the emulation quality and the quality of what would be called “extra content” or “bonus content” in most other collections. For The Making of Karateka, that content is equal to the games themselves, but I’m still going to treat the games like they’re the reason people would buy this. Like with Atari 50, I’m not setting fixed value on any YES! game. Instead, I’ll say what I think it’s worth.

I used the Nintendo Switch version for this review. I’m pals with many people at Digital Eclipse, but that doesn’t factor into this review.

PRESENTATION & FEATURES

For the purposes of this review, any video game prototypes or features that require actual gameplay are scored separately.

Wow, where do I begin? Using the same menu system created for Atari 50, The Making of Karateka is essentially part book, part documentary, and part whatever you call all the other extra features you’d typically find on a Blu-ray or DVD. It’s really not JUST a Karateka feature, either. It’s probably best to look at this as “Jordan Mechner and The Making of Karateka” because Jordan’s background and entrance into game design takes up the entire first chapter (of five total). This really is an all-encompassing experience. I’ve heard Making of Karateka get compared to Criterion Collection, and that’s spot-on. Name something you’d want, and it’s here. I’ll start with the typical things you’d expect. Making of Karateka is overflowing with the usual “drawing board” items like concept art, graphs showing the sprites, deleted ideas, box covers, instruction books, and advertisements. I’m hugely into this type of stuff. Some people aren’t. If pencil drawings or old magazine ads do absolutely nothing for you, it’s fine to knock $5 off the value I award at the end of this section.

Don’t look at Making of Karateka as game design 101. This is specifically about Karateka and Jordan’s path to getting it made. Some aspects are very educational (especially Mike J. Mika’s audio commentary track and a feature on music), but for the most part, the package is focused more on being inspirational. Like with Rotoscoping, you’re not getting a full history on the technique. Instead, you get only the smallest of primers on what it, where it came from, and how it works, with the majority of the video dedicated to how Jordan used it. If you’re interested in rotoscoping, this is my favorite video ever on it and how it was used to create the 1940’s Superman animated films.

Going a step beyond concept art, there’s correspondence between Jordan and the publisher of his Death Bounce prototype, including the results of a focus testing. You never expect to see that type of thing, even in a feature like this. It feels almost taboo, and I loved them. By the way, viewing these documents is intuitive and easy. As far as engines designed to read documents using video game controls, I can’t imagine doing better than this. Of course, the main highlight is several documentary-style interview segments. Thankfully, only two are the usual fluff like having famous designers talk about their love of Karateka and what it meant to their gaming upbringings. Actually, one of them cracked me up pretty good: where the famous creators talked about the, shall we say, less than enjoyable aspects of Karateka. When Tom Hall talks about the gate or the bird, the look on his face and his body language do not match the praise he’s giving, which gave me a terrific giggle. I mean, look at him!

Oh, I’m sure he loved Karateka. I’m cherry picking the hell out of this and leaving out the parts where his admiration and love for Mechner’s body of work are plainly obvious. But, where’s the fun in that? For just one brief-but-glorious second, he completely slips into this mode, where his mouth says one thing, but his face says “you know what? You’ve made your fame and fortune and now it’s forty years later, so now admit it, Jordan: you were a bit of a turd with that bird!” Hmm, actually, now that I think about it, maybe Tom pirated his copy. You’ll get that joke if you listen to the Karateka: Remastered audio commentary.

The behind-the-scenes stuff is some of the most educational gaming features I’ve seen. The three main subjects of the clips are creator Jordan Mechner, his father Francis (who did the music), and Veda Cook, who led the first two ports (Commodore 64 and Atari 8-Bit computers) after the original Apple II build. All three of them are so dang charming that you can’t help but like them. For me at least, it totally made me scream fewer cuss words at some of the more infuriating design choices of Karateka. I especially liked Francis, who is one of those renaissance man types where you hear his story and all the things he’s done with his life, that it makes you reevaluate your own life. He was a concert pianist, research psychologist, a  famous creator of game soundtracks, invented the question mark, and convinced Wendy’s to use square-shaped patties. I made up those last two but you could believe otherwise with this guy. But what makes it really special is Jordan is next to him, and he has the eyes of a man who is so proud of his father. I found myself wiping away tears just seeing that look. You can tell that having him there to talk about what they achieved together meant the world to him. I loved these interviews. And I loved the information in them, too. Cook gets one of the longer videos to talk about the challenges in the ports. There’s a clip devoted entirely to rotoscoping. There’s some interviews explaining things from Brøderbund’s side of the project. They covered more bases than I expected.

One of the best features is this nearly seventeen minute long breakdown of the Francis Mechner musical score for Karateka by Kirk Hamilton. He does an EXCELLENT job of explaining how it’s not like Jordan’s daddy just threw together a series of bleeps in a harmonious fashion. Oh no. Think of this as a crash course in the style of music used, along with how and why music is incorporated into both film and games. All of it in plain layman’s terms that even a tone deaf moron like me can understand, and it’s so well done that I tracked down his podcast. When people talk about going the extra mile, THIS IS that extra mile, where Digital Eclipse didn’t just present the music, but found someone to explain what kind of music it is and why it matters. Nobody would have asked for this before Making of Karateka, and now I’ll be disappointed if this type of concept doesn’t show up again in future prestige releases.

There’s one non-interactive audio commentary included, for the Apple II version of Karateka. The commentary features Jordan & Francis Mechner and runs close to twenty minutes. I’m all for more Francis in this set, and he’s all over this commentary as his musical cues are discussed in his own words. Combined with the feature in the caption above, and I really feel like I came away from Making of Karateka having learned actual applicable lessons about the usage and implementation of music in visual media. So, hot damn, I didn’t expect that. There’s also behind the scenes footage of how they actually created the rotoscoping effect, using Francis as the model for the hero. This directly ties to one of the coolest features I’ve ever seen in anything like this, which I suppose you have to lump-in every DVD/Bluray I’ve ever browsed: Rotoscope Theater. Using sliders, you can manually adjust the Super 8 footage shot for the rotoscoping with Jordan Mechner’s line drawings AND the final sprites of the game. It’s such an inspired idea. We ended up spending close to ten minutes just playing around with these four short segments. My family is really big into filmmaking and learning about the production side of things, and the two Rotoscope Theater parts of the presentation were a BIG hit in my house. Everyone was so happy fiddling around with them. Just when I thought Digital Eclipse had gone the extra mile, it turns out the extra mile had extra miles.

I’d like to see more things similar to this, even without the rotoscoping factor.

What’s missing? Jeez, I had to think quite a while about this. I guess I’m semi-curious what Jordan’s final grades were at college since that’s such a big part of the feature. Really, the only major thing I would have loved to have listened to was audio commentaries from Veda Cook for the Commodore 64/Atari 8-Bit versions she ported. Preferably both, but I’d settle for one. Or maybe Cook alone for one, and Cook with Jordan in the other. Maybe they felt the six minute feature on the ports was enough, but I still would have enjoyed it. And of course, I’d have liked if the “bad” versions of Karateka were included. I guess fans call the original three the “holy trinity of Karateka” and Mike said in the audio commentary of Remastered that ports like the one to the Atari ST didn’t “get it.” I’ll have to take his word, because they ain’t here. Not that I would have wanted to play Karateka a dozen times, but I am morbidly curious why they’re so disdained by the fandom. Otherwise, even if you ignore the games, there’s easily three hours worth of material here and not a stinker in the bunch. This is as good as a prestige collection like this gets. For all the features in the main presentation, I award the max $20 in value to The Making of Karateka. And like I said, if you’re really not into concept art or marketing materials, you’d probably want to deduct $5 off that.

Max value is fixed to each set’s MSRP, so future sets might get a higher value for such features.

EMULATION

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The Making of Karateka has a fully-powered Infinity Gauntlet of Emulation: save states, rewind, button remapping, optional hardware enhancement (in this case, enhanced frame rate for the Apple II & Commodore 64 versions of Karateka), display options/screen effects, and full gameplay videos with optional jump-in. It’s worth noting that enhanced frame rate is NOT an option for any prototypes. It’s also not an option for the Atari 8-Bit version, but I can’t penalize that as it’s not a platform you can really do that without fundamentally altering the core gameplay in negative ways. You can also change the CRT effect of the ground in Karateka. The most important feature, besides the hardware buff, is the option to change the standard one/two button combat into a Street Fighter-like six button scheme. It works fine, too, but oddly enough, I actually liked how the one button gameplay for Commodore 64/Atari 8-Bit worked and preferred it to the six button. But I also very much enjoyed replaying the Apple II with the six button scheme. For the emulation, I award The Making of Karateka $10 in value, which is my standard for having all the bells & whistles.

GAME REVIEWS

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account, at least for the games themselves. For The Making of Karateka, historic value absolutely will factor into my review of the prototype-based content. Otherwise, I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

Asteroid Blaster
Platform: Apple II
Year: 1981
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

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Asteroid Blaster is why I love the Gold Master Series concept as much as I do, as even if the games get a NO!, Digital Eclipse is certain to more than make up for it with the extra features. In the case of Asteroid Blaster, it’s only here because it’s the introductory game to Jordan Mechner’s career. At just the age of 16, he wrote.. and sold.. this visually impressive take on Asteroids. At a time when the market was flooded with wannabes of varying quality, I can’t imagine the astonishment of the people at Hayden Software when they first played this. It looks more like the vector graphics coin-op original than any other Asteroids port of this era. The biggest problem with Asteroid Blaster is the speed. It just never has the same level of pep in its step as the real mccoy. This becomes especially pronounced when you’re a couple levels in and the controls begin to suffer greatly from input lag. Because of it, moving around too much is a bad idea. Even with the lag, the difficulty feels like it stops scaling after just a couple stages. It’s too easy to point straight down at an asteroid and tick off most of its particles before they have a chance to separate. It’s still Asteroids, with gameplay better than the 2600 version, easily, but I’d not want to play this for entertainment in 2024. It’s still a damn shame a giant asteroid with WARNER BROS. LEGAL DEPARTMENT stamped on it prevented Asteroid Blaster from releasing, as this probably rises to the level of being satisfying enough in 1981.
Verdict: NO!

Star Blaster
Platform: Apple II
Year: 1982
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

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In an attempt to stave-off the giant WARNER BROS. LEGAL DEPARTMENT asteroid, Mechner changed the UFOs in Asteroids. The bigger, slower one is now a smiley face. As ridiculous as that sounds, much like Berzerk’s Evil Otto, there’s an undeniable creepiness to it. Meanwhile, the little UFO is now a mushroom that looks like something from Super Mario Land a full seven years before that game was released. That’s not the only change from the previous build of his Asteroids knock-off. The game plays much faster this go around, and it was certainly a nice touch to have final pieces of rubble speed-up. This is so close to getting a YES! that it can taste it. One thing that impressed me a lot is how accurate the collision detection is. As far as I could tell, it’s pixel-perfect. But, the input lag is still an issue, and you really don’t want input lag in a game like Asteroids. What I find particularly astonishing was that Hayden Software’s proposed solution to get around Atari’s ownership was to eliminate the shooting and create an avoider-type game. Seriously? Hey, avoiders can be fun. Some LCDs successfully built games around it, but if people see asteroids, they’re going to want to shoot them. Mechner knew that and offered to turn the asteroids into soap bubbles (clever!) but Hayden declined, and that was the end of this project. If *I* was running a game company and a 16 year old brought me a remarkably convincing Asteroids port, I’d hope I would recognize the long term potential he had as a game maker and not let him get poached by the competition. Hayden no longer exists, as a software developer OR a book publisher. I can’t imagine why.
Verdict: NO!

Death Bounce – “First Prototype”
Platform: Apple II
Dated April 28, 1982
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

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Building off his Asteroids engine, Mechner reached out to Brøderbund with a spin-off of the concept that replaced deep space and rocks with bouncing balls and physics that feel more akin to playing Asteroids on an air hockey table. It’s not the worst idea by any means, but it just wasn’t as fun as you’d hope. At first, I was convinced that the collision detection was off. Upon closer inspection, this seemed to be an optical illusion where the animation of the gun combined with the high velocity the balls move to give the appearance of the bullets traveling through the side of the balls. Or, maybe I’m wrong and any shot but dead center scores a kill, but I’m willing to accept that Death Bounce is creating eye trickery. Instead, the main issue is that the targets are just too small. With the exception of a giant white ball that appears every few seconds, all the targets are equal in size to the smallest pieces of rock in Asteroids. I did like how the shield works, as you go skidding off when the balls collide with you in a way that makes you look like a hockey puck. A bigger problem is that the giant white stalker ball appears too close to you sometimes. As a first build, this isn’t awful, but I’m grateful he kept working on it.
Verdict: NO!

Death Bounce – Colored Balls Prototype
Platform: Apple II
Dated June 5, 1982
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

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Death Bounce’s second version changed the stalker ball to a stalker ship, and now the balls that were already hard enough to shoot take multiple shots. Once again, it’s not the worst idea by any stretch, and this time around, your shield’s fuel has a very helpful gauge that refills between stages. So nice to have. But, I actually preferred the first version. Both builds of Death Bounce thus far have an issue with the stalker spawning too close to you, but it happened a lot more often in the second build. Because the game speeds up to the degree it does, moments like the one in the above slideshow happen constantly. Expecting players to react in the literal small fraction of a second they were given isn’t a reasonable challenge. It’s just not. This was inching closer to being a good game, as I think the formula would work. This is why I hate reviewing beta builds. I feel like a bitch for all these NO!s.
Verdict: NO!

Death Bounce – Little Man Prototype
Platform: Apple II
Dated August 4, 1982
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype for an Unreleased Game

Stick a fork in this one.

After three prototypes, I’m now fairly certain that Death Bounce, as the concept stands, never had a chance of working out. This build wisely sets the shield to holding down the button instead of toggling it on and off. That was smart. It also adds lines that make the balls look like tennis balls and gives the game a sense of motion. Also, now there’s an animation of a little guy running into the ship every new life. Adding a little flavor is never a bad idea, but, all the gameplay problems that have been there from the start are pretty much still here. The stalker ship can still sometimes spawn too close to you to give you a reasonable chance of defending against it. I haven’t even mentioned the frame rate drop when too many objects appear on the screen at once. This is then countered by everything moving too fast when the screen starts to empty. But, the biggest problem of all is that Death Bounce just plain isn’t fun. I still think the concept could work, and I believe the dullness here is mostly tied to the targets being so small and hard to aim at. All the main targets are the same size, over and over and over. The stalker ships are not at all effective in breaking up the monotony. Having targets of different sizes would have gone a long way towards helping with that even if they didn’t shrink between each shot. This is boring, and I think it would have been considered boring even at the time. It’s bizarre too, because Jordan went from making a version of Asteroids so convincing that Atari had to stomp it out to making a less dynamic, significantly less fun version of Asteroids.
Verdict: NO!

Death Bounce – Space Train
Platform: Apple II
Dated January 20, 1983
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype of an Unreleased Game

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I take back what I said! I TAKE IT BACK! Had THIS version of Death Bounce ever been released and, you know, actually gotten purchased by anyone, it would have gone down in history as one of the worst video games ever made. Where do I even begin? You have two movement speeds: faster than light, and stop. So, imagine playing an Asteroids-like shooter with bouncy walls where the slightest press of the thruster takes you from the center of the room to up against the wall. And mind you, that was the absolute fastest tap of the trust button I ever did. Most of my other attempts at barely touching the button gave me enough thrust that I bounced off the top wall, then the bottom wall, then made it halfway back to the spot center spot I started on. Holy crap!! Is the ship greased with Clark W. Griswold Jr.’s kitchen lubricant?

Changing the enemies to birds was a positive. Now, the balls are bombs the giant birds spit out that eventually hatch Joust-style into more of the basic birds.

Now, take THOSE movement parameters and play the same game seen in the previous three reviews. Except this time, the enemies are much bigger and easier to crash into. If you use your shield, you’re going to go flying from the impact, usually hitting a couple walls before you come to a stop. Use counter trust, you say? I tried. It didn’t work. I just instantly went flying in the opposite direction. The intuitive Asteroid-like physics are gone. The only time movement isn’t miserable is when you die, ironically. That’s because in order to be able to use your extra lives, you have to guide your character to the right door. Fail and it’s game over no matter how many lives you have left. Now THAT isn’t a bad idea at all, and thankfully the controls support it. And finally, in this version, when you finish all the enemies, you have to exit the left door. Have fun with that. Just the act of moving to the next room is agony. Now I know why he abandoned this for a karate game. After playing Death Bounce, I was in the mood to hit something too!

Oh, and once you finish all the levels, a Metroid-like timer starts and you have to sprint for the exit. Actually, this is the earliest build of any game I’ve seen do that, so that’s something at least! Of course, had I not allowed myself to die against the final bomb, then respawn with a straight line towards the exit, I would never have made it. There wasn’t enough time for even one mistake.

Okay, so it goes without saying..
Verdict: NO! BUT..
While the entertainment value of the six non-Karateka prototypes isn’t there (honestly the best of the six was probably the third version of Death Bounce), as a critic of games, I did enjoy experiencing first hand the linear progress of this whole project, including the correspondence between Jordan Mechner and his publishers. For that final version of Death Bounce that I deplored, there’s even a letter that details the result of a focus testing. Presumably a focus test that ended with the subjects killing and eating each-other in protest. The important thing is I’m pretty sure this is the closest I’ve ever come to getting into the mind of a young, aspiring game designer from this era. For the all Asteroid Blast/Death Bounce prototypes and their presentation, I award a bonus of $3 in value to The Making of Karateka.

Funny, because after playing that last build of Death Bounce, I said the exact same thing. But, there’s one last note on Death Bounce. Digital Eclipse wanted to take a crack at it.

Death Bounce: Rebounded
Platform: Reimagined Series
Year: 2023
Designed by Dave Rees and Jeremy Williams
Published by Digital Eclipse

It looks like pure chaos.. but this is the good stuff.

The creators of VCTR-SCTR, Haunted Houses, and Swordquest: Airworld from Atari 50 took the base ingredients from Death Bounce games, especially the fourth version, and created a wonderfully slick and modern twin stick shooter as a bonus game for Making of Karateka. Even I admit I was a little worried when I saw that was the inspiration, but worry not, dear reader. Every wrong there is righted here. The controls are amazingly intuitive. The collision detection is god-tier. The pacing is intense. The shooting is satisfying. I even enjoyed getting all the fake achievements. Mind you, this is an all-but-ignored bonus game that basically got no promotion or hype, even as publications were declaring Making of Karateka the best thing since the invention of carbon. NOBODY would have bought the set for this game, but actually, it’s one of the most enjoyable shooters I’ve played in recent memory. The type of game that would be heir-apparent to Geometry Wars if sold separately.

The bomb sequences make thrilling climatic moments. Having players crash deliberately into the opening was a stroke of genius.

It’s a really simple game, too. You fly through the space train from Death Bounce’s final build, shooting the enemy birds that you need to clear out to progress. You get bonuses based on how quickly you clear each room. Each train has a different number of cars, but the final car is always a bomb with a protective shield around it. The “Death Bounce” name isn’t just there as a hold-over from the prototypes. Rebounded is almost like a twin stick shooter set inside one of those inflatable castles. The effect on your ship is subtle, but the effect on your bullets is what makes it work, as you can ricochet your shots. It’s still a teeny-tiny bit annoying to get through the door after you clear each stage, but thankfully it’s not even in the same galaxy of annoyance as the fourth Death Bounce prototype. Meanwhile, every aspect of the bomb rooms is so exciting. Once you pump enough bullets into the bomb’s core, you have to crash your ship into it, and oh, it’s so satisfying. Really, the whole game is. Even the little touches help, like how you’re temporarily invincible when you first enter a room, but the enemies aren’t, and crashing into more than one gives you bonus points. That’s one of those ideas that feels like it’s a band-aid over the potential problem of cheap enemy placement, only it would be like if that band-aid gave you super powers.

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It’s not perfect. When you lose your last life, it still does the “escape to the door” bit. There’s probably an Easter Egg or some kind of one in a million chance of getting an extra life, but in a couple hours of playtime I never did it. Having the last life still end the same way every life does is completely immersion breaking. Besides that, and besides the lack of online leaderboards, the only complaint I really have is one of the same ones I had for Jeremy Williams’ VCTR-SCTR: no time attack mode. Weird that Digital Eclipse keeps making games perfectly suited for such modes, yet is failing to capitalize on it. BUT, that’s so nit-picky. Really, Death Bounce: Rebounded has amazing movement physics, excellent scoring balance, and a breakneck pace. Death Bounce: Rebounded is one of my favorite gaming surprises ever. Hey, I found a LOT of enjoyment in Making of Karateka, but the reason it’s not being deleted from my Switch after the review is completed is Death Bounce: Rebounded. It’s the type of game I want to keep on stand by for when I have ten minutes to kill, or when I just have an itch for a really good twin stick shooter.
Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to The Making of Karateka
You only get initials, guys? TWO? I ought to fine you ten bucks for that 🤪

Karateka – Jordan’s Prototype
Platform: Apple II
Dated May 1, 1984
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress/Proof of Concept Prototype

We’ve arrived at the main course.

This demo was, to the best of my knowledge, my first experience ever with Karateka. My first initial thought was “gosh, I hope the finished game plays faster than this.” (Cathy from the future to Cathy from the past: “wish into one hand..”) Yea, yea, old computer game. I know they go to the beat of their own drummer. Oddly enough, for a game that runs so slow, Karateka’s combat has decent, bordering on good, OOMPH. For my first-time readers (who are hopefully going to end up just plain ordinary readers), that’s what I call video game violence that feels like it has real world weight and impact. Karateka achieves this by having gigantic impact stars when you land a hit and a satisfying noise that I’d describe like the sound I make when I flip down on my oversized bean bag chair. Which, hey, I love that sound! I just wish I loved the rest of the game as much.

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So, the birds. This is one of those “good idea, less than ideal execution” situations. Between the fights, and near the end of the game, you have to fight a bird. And this bird’s collision detection has absolutely no logical visual cue or basis on its sprite OR your sprite. The moment when it’s actually vulnerable to attack is completely arbitrary. Something a player has to figure out by trial and error while also programming their brain to ignore the logical point of impact, AND, you have to factor the lag it takes to stop moving and get into your fighting stance AND the lag that happens when you throw a punch. It’s a deal breaker for me. The weird thing is, it was around the time I started whining about this that a few people started coming out and saying that, neat as this Gold Master Series kick-off is, Karateka has always been kind of a crappy game. Apparently the birds are so notorious that a parody account exist on the former Twitter centered around them. Well, that’s ominous. See, this isn’t a “GIT GUD” thing. If the sprites for what you’re trying to punch or kick don’t directly tie to the collision of the object you’re trying to hit, that’s just bad design, no matter how many times you rotoscoped your father jumping over a car. And I didn’t even really get into how the controls are very unresponsive. There’s this frustrating lag and slowness to everything. So bad was this prototype that I cancelled my plans to not touch any of the other Karateka builds, just to make sure it gets better. It does, but the version I could enjoy most wouldn’t release until 2023.
Verdict: NO!

Karateka – The Brøderbund Prototype 1 & 2
Platform: Apple II
Dated July, 1984 and August, 1984
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Work-in-Progress Prototype

I made the mistake of not keeping the screenshots organized and had to make new ones.

The first time I went to attack in the first Brøderbund prototype, I pressed the kick button, and then about two seconds later the kick actually happened. The next time I did it, I literally counted it out, pressing the attack button and saying “ONE-ONE THOUSAND, TWO-ONE THOUSAND” before the kick actually began. Holy mother of god. This was input lag on a scale I’ve never seen before. And that’s assuming the button press even worked at all. Sometimes it didn’t. Have you ever tried to load up a new game on an old computer? That’s what playing that prototype was like. Do I even need to waste a NO! to explain further? So, I loaded up the second prototype, which is supposed to be near complete, and thankfully it played much better. It’s still really slow though. At this point, I decided to quit the work-in-progress builds and begin playing the Karateka games properly, as I was afraid the prototypes would sour the overall experience for me.
Verdict: NO! but I’m again awarding $3 in bonus value for the inclusion of the prototypes, along with all the documents and correspondence related to them. Mostly because I want to see more of this in future prestige releases like this.

Karateka
Platform: Apple II
Release Date: December, 1984
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Published by Brøderbund

If the Princess Diaries taught me anything, it’s that true love happens when your foot pops. Sadly, MY foot didn’t pop for Karateka.

After hours of pre-Karateka prototypes, production notes, interviews, lessons on rotoscoping, and even an audio commentary from a music expert where I actually learned things about film and game musical scores, I finally got Karateka. About ten minutes later, my brain said “all this hubbub over a game that’s not even that good.” Put down your pitchforks and torches, classic computer gaming fans. Nothing I can say should be able to ruin your childhood memories. If me saying Karateka isn’t very fun in 2024 makes you angry, that says a lot more about you than it does me. Besides, it’s not like I didn’t want to enjoy it. I don’t remember ever being so heartbroken by a game, but to say that Karateka didn’t live up to the hype would be an understatement. It was unlikely Karateka, a game that pushed the boundaries of PCs in 1984, was going to survive the test of time. I just didn’t think I would end up questioning the test of 1984.

This gate is an infamous moment, but thankfully I can just cheat via rewinding. I only failed at it once too. I wish I could say the same about the bird.

I wanted to like Karateka, especially after watching all the videos of Jordan Mechner and his adorable father. While it might have been jaw-dropping in its day, if a game released tomorrow that had as much unresponsiveness and lag as Karateka, it would be critically lambasted as one of the worst games ever made. The really weird thing is there’s universal agreement that Urban Champion is bad, right? I mean, not completely universal, because I actually gave it a YES! on the grounds that it felt like two angry guys throwing hands on a street, and I enjoyed the satisfaction of knocking a guy into the sewer. Karateka is sort of cut from the same cloth as Urban Champion. The fights ideally should have that rock/paper/scissors vibe, since you have six forms of attack: punches and kicks that can be thrown high, low, or middle. No blocking. So far, so good, at least for a game from 1984.

The last boss was weird, because first you had to kick a door down to get to him, but upon entering the door, he cheap shots you. I guess that’s realistic to how an actual villain would be, so I’ll allow it. You ultimately end up in the previous room for the final showdown. Then, you die if you don’t run into the princess’ arms. She kills you if you approach her in your combat stance. So much for gratitude.

The problem is any amount of finesse or strategy is almost entirely negated by the input lag. Lag that happened even after I turned on the optional “enhanced frame rate.” This DID make things better, but the lag still got progressive worse the closer I got to the final level. By the end, the lag was so bad that the fights were practically choreographed by satellite delay. Because of that input delay, you can’t really plan to counter your opponent’s move because by the time the game registers your movement, the enemy has already done the move you’re planning to counter and might even already have started the animation of their next move. The end result is you’re forced to button mash and really just hope the stuff you press lands.

The notorious bird, where the collision box isn’t logically bound by the sprite, wasn’t even that big a problem. In theory, you can eventually adapt and learn to clock when it’s vulnerable or not. Except you can’t after you factor in the input lag. It really does reduce landing a hit to random chance. I’d never finish this without being able to rewind. Then again, I wouldn’t have wanted to play this at all without it.

I tried playing this like a martial arts movie, with deliberate and graceful strategy, and maybe on a couple of the earlier fights, that’s totally doable. But by the time you’ve entered the dojo, the enemies are too advanced. Anything but button mashing isn’t going to work. I would normally complain about the lack of a block button, but in the case of Karateka, the lag wouldn’t allow for a working block anyway. It’s a reminder that all the revolutionary aspects of Karateka, from the rotoscoped graphics to the “cinematic” presentation, all came at a very steep cost to the gameplay. Maybe the trade-off was worth it in 1984, but it’s 2024 now, and it’s just not acceptable for a game to be this unresponsive. Even the best emulation money can buy from Digital Eclipse couldn’t fix it. I salute Karateka and Jordan Mechner for their contributions to the pastime I love, but I would also never have wanted to play Karateka at all outside a set like this.
Verdict: NO!

Karateka
Platform: Commodore 64
Release Date: June, 1985
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Ported by Veda Cook
Published by Brøderbund

Wait a second.. is that Ico?!

After the Apple II version, I genuinely didn’t think I’d enjoy any of the three original versions of Karateka. It wasn’t long into my session with the Commodore 64 that I realized that might not be the case. The control scheme, assuming you use the default controls, is the biggest part of that. The Commodore 64’s joystick only had one action button, but Karateka was written as a two-button game. To compensate for this, the port by Veda Cook has an ingenious solution: tap the button for punches and hold the button down for kicks. I loved this, as it finally gave the tiniest hint of finesse to the fighting. The input lag from the Apple II version takes longer to arrive, but it does arrive. The effect is just less pronounced because instead of you having to time two separate button presses, if you stick to the kicks, you only have to do one. Instead of mashing attacks, you almost guide them via the joystick. Just having that as an option made all the difference in the world.

Well, at least until the end.

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During the bird attack that’s the penultimate fight before the final boss, the lag was the worst it had ever been on the C64 up to this point. The problem is that the bird itself moves faster than the input lag, often not leaving you enough time to factor in both the lag and the position of the bird. This is where the “hold a button down” works as a determent. Since I couldn’t land a single punch on the bird, I ended up having to switch control schemes and utilize the six-button layout provided by Digital Eclipse for these ports. EVEN WITH THAT, I never would have gotten the bird without rewinding. Thankfully, rewind is an option that Digital Eclipse was wise enough to provide instead of being one of those companies that screams “GIT GUD” at old games. Karateka is an all-or-nothing, win every fight and get past every obstacle in one life or start over from the beginning. That doesn’t work for me, so for all the fights except the one with the bird, I utilized save states at the start of encounters. If I died, I’d start the fight itself over from the beginning. And low and behold, I had a good time in that format, where it was okay when I died, and a thrill when I finally won a bout. Still a challenge, but not the type of insurmountable one I’d never want to face on its own terms.

The final boss wasn’t the hardest guy, oddly enough. The bird is easily harder, but one of the last minions I had a much harder time landing shots on.

Surprise! I actually had more fun than not with the C64 version of Karateka. It’s still a problematic experience. I played with the enhanced frame rate option turned on, and the game still felt like the emulated device playing it could catch fire at any moment. A lot of ambitious games from this era made sacrifices to the visual experience in order to optimize the gameplay. Karateka didn’t do that, and the “cinematic experience” comes at a massive gameplay cost. The input lag has this strange “it’s a feature that makes the game harder, not a bug that makes the game less polished!” vibe to it. To believe that, you’d have to believe that it was possible the game might NOT have had the lag and it was a conscience decision to allow it, just to increase the game’s challenge. Such a decision would get a game burned at the stake by critics today. I can overlook that to a certain degree because the fights are fun AND, indeed, cinematic. Fighting games age badly, and games that cross the limitations of their era age really badly. That there’s something enjoyable left in Karateka in 2024 is a small miracle. It wouldn’t take a lot of modification to turn Karateka into a convincing Enter the Dragon licensed game. That counts for something. Not much, but something.
Verdict: YES! – $2 in value added to Making of Karateka

Karateka
Platform: Atari 8-Bit Computer
Release Date: October, 1985
Designed by Jordan Mechner
Ported by Veda Cook
Published by Brøderbund

The final installment of the original three Karateka ports started with so much promise.

At first, the 8-bit Atari port of Karateka seemed like it was going to run away with the title of best version of the so-called “holy trinity.” For about the first third of the game, it doesn’t suffer the horrendous lag that the other two versions do. It allows you to appreciate what feels like the first elegant and authentic MMA-style fighting game. The “hold the button to kick” gameplay from the C64 port is back and it’s awesome, and those first handful of fights where the game plays at its maximum frame rate are such a joy to behold. I could never get bored playing THAT Karateka. If that type of pace lasted until the end of the game, it would have gone down as one of my favorite martial arts retro games ever. Of course, it doesn’t last, but what I wasn’t prepared for was how bad it gets.

This is the moment the frame rate collapsed. It returned to something resembling the full speed the game started with in the middle of the dojo before again falling into a constant state of severe input lag. Damnit.

For a brief, shining moment, Karateka was everything I wanted it to be. A satisfying, hard-hitting karate game where the snap of your foot landed right on your opponent’s noggin is a joy to behold. A pleasure that vanishes completely just so the game can paint a door at the end of the hallway you’re on. A door. A DOOR! That’s the source of the lag. Let’s measure the potential for enjoyment. Option 1: full-speed karate action. High-impact punches and kicks that the player feels like they have direct control over due to the lack of input lag, with a beautiful mountain in the background as you walk forward towards rescuing the princess, and then the screen turns to black after you reach the end of the scene because you’ve entered the next area. Hell, create a new screen that’s just the door and let players walk through it, without any encounters. Still cinematic, but gameplay is still given the sense of importance it deserves. Option 2: slow motion karate action where sometimes it might be as much as two-to-three seconds before your button press translates to an on-screen action as you inch your way towards rescuing the princess, ending with the illusion of walking through a static door. You can’t even say “at least it’s more immersive” because there’s NOTHING immersive about control lag. Do you know what’s a lot more immersive than walking through a door? Pressing a button and having the action happen instantaneously.

The bird crossed the line, even with rewind.

The amount of end-game lag for Karateka on the Atari 8-Bit was almost a deal breaker. The brilliance of the early fights feels like a tease by the end. Yes, having to kick open a door is fun, but only someone dangerously high on their own vision would choose that and laggy primary gameplay over no door and lag-free, enjoyable karate action. To give you an idea of how bad it is, take the bird encounter, where, depending on where you’re standing, you basically have to choose which of the three channels you’re going to attack before the bird even shows itself. The lag wasn’t consistent, either. Sometimes it lasted one second, and sometimes I’d press the button, the bird would cross the room and attack me, AND THEN I’d throw the kick that I’d cued up when the bird first entered the room. Release a game like that today, and no matter how celebrated or decorated the designer was, the press would lop their heads off. And yet, when the fights are fun, they’re really fun. If the frame rate had held, I’d say this is a $7.99 game even in 2024. But it didn’t, and it ain’t. It’s just barely better than the C64 port.
Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to The Making of Karateka

Karateka: Remastered
Platform: Reimagined Series
Release Date: August 29, 2023
Designed by Mike J. Mika
Published by Digital Eclipse

This has some of the most subtly beautiful graphics of this type I’ve seen.

Don’t go into Karateka: Remastered looking for an entirely modern remake of Karateka in the same way Yars’ Revenge: Remastered was in Atari 50. While there’s large aspects of it that are decidedly modern, such as having a checklist of extra goals and a very flexible lives system, this is not an attempt to create a 2020s version of the early 80s classic. Instead, think early-to-mid 90s. In the audio commentary for Karateka: Remastered, designer Mike J. Mika revealed that he was inspired by two driving forces. The first, and likely the biggest, was how letdown he was in his youth by hypothetically more advanced ports of Karateka that just didn’t capture the essence of the original. Second was he wanted to capture how he felt when he first experienced the upscale that happened between Prince of Persia if you went from an Apple II to PC. In essence, he created the Karateka that he always wished for that never happened. Karateka: Remastered is the PC version that never was, based around what a hypothetical computer running Prince of Persia in that era from that era could do. This was apparently one of his dream projects. No pressure or anything.

Part of me loves Mike to death, and part of me wants him to be cursed with armpit breath until his dying day. How did the guy who conceded that lives are a good thing, despite his own personal inclinations to not include them, also not factor in that, yea, it’s a game where you instinctively press DOWN a lot, so maybe it’s not the wisest choice of button assignments for how to replay the chunks of commentary?

Speaking of the audio commentary, it’s not something you can detach from the game itself, like you could with the commentary for the Apple II version with Jordan & Francis Mechner. This commentary is context sensitive, sort of like the kind found in Portal. I loved the commentary track. Like the best filmmaking tracks for movies, it features a passionate creator mixing the right blend of personal history, technical explanations given in layman’s terms, anecdotes, and oddball factoids. I actually did learn things I didn’t know even after I finished the entire Making of Karateka presentation and walked away with a greater appreciation of what Jordan Mechner accomplished with it. But, the track does create its own set of problems. First off, you actually DO have to play the game, and if you want to hear the whole track, you have to beat it. Commentary plays automatically when you reach an activation point, and it’s reactivated by pressing DOWN. In a game where you often want to press DOWN to perform low attacks, that gets very annoying very quickly. In the final rooms, there’s TWO spots in each room, meaning if you want to engage in low attacks, you have to retreat and straddle the two context sensitive spots. Sadly, unlike the emulated versions, there’s no button mapping. Logically, you’d want the replay button to be something you wouldn’t expect to be able to hit on accident. Clicking the right joystick makes the most sense to me, since you don’t use the right stick at all. Maybe Mike factored in the 0.01% of PC players who will use a retro controller versus the 99.99% who use a standard dual-stick controller. Or, maybe he has a sick sense of humor. It’s probably that one.

Despite the “cinematic” quality, really, Karateka is a game of subtleties, whether it’s “remastered” or not. Six moves. No block. The most advanced it gets is the dick move “the princess kills you if you don’t run into her arms” bit. The story is basic and cliched. Simple sound effects. The most dramatic aspect is easily the musical score, but even that is nuanced instead of overpowering. Complexity isn’t necessarily a virtue. Karateka is proof, because in terms of gameplay and presentation, there’s really nothing all that complicated about it, yet it’s one of the defining games of the generation that came before me.

As for the gameplay, yea, this is the version of Karateka to play. It’s more or less the same game I’ve already played three times, only without any hiccups to the frame rate. The input lag is still there, but it’s different this time around. Because it’s not based on the performance of the hardware being emulated, you quickly realize that it’s based on when you’re moving or standing still. Once I understood that the movement happening or not happening was based on things I was doing instead of what the hardware was doing, it became predictable and avoidable. In fact, it was so predictable that I realized that if you handcuffed yourself to a copy of the original three versions, you’d probably know when the input lag would happen and adjust accordingly. It would take a while though, and it would never be as immersive as it could be. That’s ultimately what I love about the Remastered version: without performance issues, you can finally lose yourself in it.

If you DO handcuff yourself to Karateka, you’ll probably enjoy checking off all these extras, which are based on the things Mike and his friends used to challenge themselves to do back in the day.

On some level, Karateka is the type of game I’ll never fully be able to appreciate in the same way my older readers do. The closest I can come is to remind myself that, once upon a time, I didn’t know what made a game good or bad. The first ever game I got after I got my first console for Christmas in 1996, the original PlayStation, was Bubsy 3D. Do you know what? 7 year old me didn’t comprehend I was playing a bad game. Handing Karateka to 34 year old me is like handing Banjo-Kazooie to my nieces and nephew today. If they enjoy it, it almost certainly won’t be on the same level I did when I was their age. Not with those pointy polygons, foggy backgrounds, and occasional.. okay, fine, FREQUENT.. slowdown. Hell, even I’m like “wait, was it really this bad when I was their age a quarter-century ago?” Yes, Cathy, it was.

I’m stunned I beat this on my first attempt. Well, I did crank up the lives to 11, but still, I was happy.

That’s why something Mike said in the audio commentary stuck out to me. He said something to the effect of “games that defined your childhood are rarely as good as you remember them” and that, For Karateka: Remastered, he wanted to make a version of Karateka that lived up to his own memories. And you know what? I could feel that even before I played the game with the commentary turned on. He wanted to make a version of the game that was enjoyable for those who grew up with Karateka, for crotchety millennials such as myself, and for the wide-eyed children of Gen Xers like my niece, Sasha. She’s only 8 years old, and yet, she was positively dazzled by Karateka: Remastered. Sasha practices Taekwondo and knows her Asian martial arts, so I wanted to get her opinion. When she, a child who has never seen a hand-drawn Disney film release in her lifetime and who calls any 2D video game “retro”, saw that the stances and technique of the punches and kicks looked like what she’s taught in her dojo? Wow. She was so overjoyed that it was worth the $19.99 price for the look on her face alone. And for just a brief second, Karateka: Remastered gave me a glimpse into what seeing the original game for the first time four decades ago must have felt like. So, maybe not every version of Karateka holds up to the test of time, but the heart of the game clearly must.
Verdict: YES! – $10 in value added to The Making of Karateka
$10 in bonus value awarded for the style and content of the audio commentary track.
And I’m issuing a $2.50 fine for the lack of input options and a $2.50 fine for using what I feel is the wrong button to replay the track.
$15 in total value for Karateka: Remastered
FINAL VALUE: $71
$19.99 flipped the bird to the bird in the making of this review.

BONUS REVIEWS

Hey, Digital Eclipse worked hard on Making of Karateka, so it’s only fair that I do the same with my review. So, I present to you my reviews for the NES and Game Boy versions of Karateka that never came out in the United States. Remember, these are NOT included in The Making of Karateka. This is just for funsies.

Karateka
Platform: Famicom
Released December 5, 1985
Published by Soft Pro International
NEVER RELEASED IN AMERICA

Wow.

You’d think a publisher in the United States would have been all-over Karateka for a US release. One of the best selling PC action games of the era and they passed on it? Even Acclaim? If you think there must be something horrifically wrong with Famicom Karateka that NOBODY would roll the dice on it, you’d be right. On the plus side, no lag. On the negative side, the game is broken. Specifically, the gate just plain doesn’t work in this version. Even the guide I found at GameFAQs describes the process of trying to trigger it to drop so that you can eventually run through it as “nearly impossible.” And, yea, actually that was my experience. I spent AN HOUR wiggling back and forth next to the damn thing, throwing every type of attack in my arsenal at the air in front of me. It never triggered unless it was killing me. Even with the virtue of having rewind and save states, this just didn’t want to activate. And mind you, if you take too long or step too far away from the gate.. which isn’t very far at all.. it spawns a new enemy. I thought “maybe you have to defeat X amount of enemies before it works.” That doesn’t seem to be the case, either. Spare a thought for the poor bastards that tried this WITHOUT rewind or save states. It’s not like this is the only problem. Punches are basically worthless, and even when it seemed like I should have been landing them, instead, they went right through enemies. In general, the look and feel of the game is like a stripped-down form of the game everyone remembers. It’s easy to get why no NES publisher ever picked this up, and why Digital Eclipse didn’t bother.
Verdict: NO!

Master Karateka
Platform: Game Boy
Released December 28, 1989
Developed by Tose Co., Ltd.
NEVER RE-RELEASED

Well, at least it’s different.

What’s with this “MASTER” Karateka malarkey? It seems almost presumptuous, doesn’t it? Logically, shouldn’t this be one of the weakest versions of Karateka? Well, yes and no. In terms of audio-visuals, honestly this does a much better job replicating the look and animation of the holy trinity of Karateka than the Famicom/NES version did. The walk animation has the PC-like fluidity that the NES version didn’t even attempt. That’s not nothing. And this brings the best aspect of the NES game: no lag. To be honest, I didn’t expect that from the Game Boy of all platforms. In fact, this might be the fastest version of Karateka I’ve played, including the Remastered game. It might be. That really depends on you, and how YOU play it. See, the big twist with this version of Karateka is you choose your own load-out right from the start.

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Despite what the screenshot says, I put the lion’s share of my points into power, and it reduced the fights of the game into trivial encounters where three to four strikes were enough to take enemies down. Otherwise, this is the same basic Karateka game I’ve already reviewed seven times. There’s three levels, a bunch of guys with different helmets, cut scenes, a bird, a gate, and a last boss. A few of the enemies.. as in I remember it happening three times.. throw ninja stars you have to block, but otherwise, it’s the same old Karateka. OH, and one final key difference: you can block in this game. I never needed to, as it only seems to be there because the enemies use it. The ones who seemed like they blocked everything had an easy to figure out exploit: just step back. When they step forward, perform a middle kick. This helped me to make minced meat of the normal fighters. Like the NES game, punches are basically worthless, but kicks do the trick just fine. It wasn’t until I reached the gate that I actually struggled at all.

Did I win or lose here? You’d be surprised.

The gate, like the NES version, is so bad that I can’t believe anyone ever beat this game without the virtue of rewind. It makes me appreciate how clockable the gate in the three holy trinity versions is. I only needed to mess up once on those before I was able to get past it, and while it would have been VERY frustrating if I had to start over when I died, I don’t think it’s a challenge that I would have so little patience that I could never overcome it. That wouldn’t have been the case on the Game Boy, where I would have needed around 100 attempts to get it right, and when I finally won, it almost seemed like I clipped through the damn thing.

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You might have noticed there’s a space for “items.” What’s that about? Beats me. I just finished the game twice and the only “item” I found was a jar laying on the ground at the start of the third level that did nothing. Like all other versions of Karateka, your health slowly refills if you do nothing, and I had a full health meter on account of having just started the level anyway. I didn’t bank it, either. I’m not even sure what it did. On my second playthrough, I punched and kicked the air between enemies and nothing ever showed up. I consulted the FAQ at GameFAQs and it doesn’t even contain the words “item” or “jar” anywhere. Maybe this is a relic of an earlier concept that got deleted. I have no clue. Anyway, the final boss blocks every single attack you throw. To beat him, you have to walk back into the previous room, which is actually something that sort of happens in other Karateka games, only the “blocking” is replaced by sucker punching you as soon as you walk into the room. The final battle usually happens in the room where you fight the bird. Only, in those games, he follows you into the previous room immediately. On the Game Boy, you might have to wait quite a while. Like, over a minute, maybe two. Ridiculous. Even worse: the moment he enters the room, you might as well drop the confetti because the game is over. He won’t attack and he likely won’t successfully block your shots. In short, every addition to the formula Master Karateka makes is undone by some haphazard design. Interesting concept, and the execution was SO close to earning the faintest YES!, but that last bit with the final boss sealed it. What were they thinking with that wait time?
Verdict: NO!

“That fish was about yay big.” “That’s not how you tell a big fish story, Dad!”

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Atari 50: The Definitive Review – Part One – The Atari Reimagined Games & Yars’ Revenge

April 21, 2024 by 3 Comments

Hey, have you heard of Atari 50? Well, I started reviewing it in November of 2022, then I actually read what I’d done and it SUCKED. It was my worst work ever by far, because the joy I felt playing this collection didn’t come across at all in what I was writing. That was late 2022. Now, it’s mid 2024, and I’ve decided to give another crack at it. I really need to, especially since Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include is one of my most popular features. For those games, read Parts One, Two, and Three, and E.T. got its own review! I figure before I do Part Four, I should really talk about the games Atari 50 DID include.

There’s a LOT of games in Atari 50. After a free expansion to the original collection hit, the total became 115, and there’s still a ton of games left they could add that require no license. Hell, they can even add Berzerk now that Atari owns it. Hopefully even more additions will arrive, especially the coin-op games. I’ve decided to break this up into four parts. Doing it this way allows me to take a break between parts if I get worn out.

Atari 50 costs $39.99. That means it has to generate $40 in value. Spoiler: it gets there easily. My usual compilation format is going to be anti-climatic, so let’s make it REALLY fun. Instead of setting a universal value on quality games, like say, $5 for a good game, any game that gets a YES! can be awarded any value. Besides, when I do the Atari 2600 section, I can’t very well say with a straight face that 3D Tic-Tac-Toe, a YES! game (yes, really) is worth $5. I need flexibility with Atari 50. So, any game can be awarded any value up to $40, the cost of Atari 50. And I’m going to start with the original games created by Digital Eclipse for this set.

I already reviewed LED memory tester Touch Me in LCD Games IX. It got a NO! Since it’s counted as one of the 115 games in Atari 50, I have to count it too. It’s just a typical memory game that isn’t remotely fun at all, though I’m happy it’s here to represent Atari’s attempts at handheld gaming before the Lynx. What would have been REALLY cool is if they could have included ports of unreleased Atari LCDs like the Cosmos system or the Super Breakout LCD that was designed by Tod “Pac-Man 2600” Frye. Digital Eclipse, I’m telling you: an LCD collection at $30 or under would probably do pretty good if the popularity of my LCD Games of the 1980s features are any indication. Verdict: NO! Scorecard: 0 YES! 1 NO!

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m friends with several people at Digital Eclipse and some of the designers of the games, old and new, included in Atari 50. That doesn’t factor into my reviews. They wouldn’t want to be my friend if it did.

We’re going alphabetically.

Haunted Houses
Platform: Atari Reimagined
Year: 2022
Designed by Dave Rees

This is cute and everything until you really stop and think about the fact that you’re playing as disembodied eyeballs.

When I review games, I dislike saying “it accomplished everything it set out to do.” It just seems wishy washy, doesn’t it? I’ve had people who are fans of a game I disliked ask me “did the developer accomplish everything they set out to do?” I usually fire back “I don’t know! I wasn’t there! Maybe they set out to make a totally different game and this was the best they could do?!” That’s not the case with Haunted Houses, where “the developer accomplished everything they set out to do” is spot-on. Well, presumably. If Dave Rees set out to climb Everest and this was the end result, fail. If he set out to remake the Atari 2600 classic Haunted House in 3D while retaining the gameplay and feel of the original, good job. It does just that. You’re a pair of eyeballs that can only pick up items if you’re actively using some kind of light. To win, you have to get the three randomly placed pieces of the urn to the front door.

For those not playing on Nintendo Switch, Haunted Houses offers a lot more meat. Stuff like finding all the radios, jump scares, etc, award you achievements. For people playing on Nintendo Switch, such as myself, the existence of all these things not only serve no point, but they actually create confusion. A sense that you’re missing something integral to finishing the game. It wasn’t until a couple hours of gameplay that I bothered looking up why all these things are there. It’s a massive oversight by Digital Eclipse to not include a checklist of all the hidden aspects of Haunted Mansions for Switch players. I have no objection to fake achievements in Nintendo games. You can’t just leave things in a game that make sense on other platforms without creating an alternative for everyone else, unless you want to generate a whole lot of confusion, FOMO, or both.

But, it’s not a one-to-one voxel remake, as there’s just enough modern gameplay mentality to prevent Haunted Houses from feeling like it’s shackled to gaming’s past. The biggest change is in the scoring system. The levels are set on a timer, but it’s not a “do or die” timer. If you run out of time, instead of dying, you just get paid less money at the end of the level. You lose more money if you run into the spiders and bats that knock your light out. Also, every single time you activate your light source, you lose $10. You have unlimited lights, but each one costs you. At the end of a stage, assuming you don’t run out of lives from getting caught by the ghosts, you’re assigned a letter grade based on how you did. The levels themselves are full of references to other Atari games and the occasional jump-scare. Old school, yet distinctly modern. THIS is how you pay tribute to classic games, folks.

Haunted Houses is full of references to all kinds of VCS games, including a few that aren’t in Atari 50. I don’t know if this is clever or cruel. I mean, hey, here’s the sprites from Space Invaders. Look, there they are! Enjoy them, because this is the closest you will come to playing Space Invaders in Atari 50. It’s not one of the 115 games included. I have thoughts on that, mostly based around how other game companies could admit that VCS ports hold little to no value outside a collection like Atari 50 and they could have done the gaming world a solid and come to terms on a cheap ass license for Atari and Digital Eclipse.

In a way, Haunted Houses feels like the type of oddball game that could have been a cult hit on the Nintendo 64. I just wish it had more levels. A dozen would be perfect. I’d settle for eight full-sized stages. How many levels does Haunted Houses actually have? Three. Four if you count the tutorial. Haunted Houses feels almost like a proof of concept (the glass half full point of view) or a novelty appetizer that’s set apart from the classic games main course of Atari 50 (the glass half empty point of view). Taking the glass half empty point of view, Haunted Houses is too married to abstract design. There’s moments where your torch goes out that are seemingly tied to jump scares that serve no purpose on Nintendo Switch, and it’s not always clear what you need to do to trigger them anyway!

For a voxel game, this is actually pretty eerie at times. I feel that deserves extra credit given the absurdity of this whole thing.

There’s also too many bats and spiders that tend to cluster-up with apparently no way to defend against them unless you’re holding the scroll, which causes them to ignore you. But, since you’re limited to carrying one item at a time like you are in the 2600 game, if you’re using the key or retrieving the urn pieces, the scroll doesn’t help you at all. It’s only after you beat the third stage that you gain access to a character that can attack the ghosts, but honestly this guy is so overpowered that it sort of nerfs the game. Level balance is an issue too. Assuming you count the tutorial as level one, I found the fourth and final level to be too easy. I beat it on my second attempt in a way that made it feel like pure luck. The third level is much bigger and more complex, and even level two took me a lot longer to finish. It’s even worse, because as the last stage, it assures that Haunted Houses ends on a massive let-down.

The ghosts are creepy, so mission accomplished there. You can even defeat them with the starting character if you have enough time to charge up your torch to create a temporary ring of magic. If you can lure the ghost into that ring, it dies. Well, I mean.. actually now that I think about it, it’s probably already dead. So you actually purgatorize the ghost.

If you take a glass half full view, Haunted Houses really does feel exactly like someone took Haunted House and cast a spell on it to make it a 3D game. A perfectly decent and quite entertaining 3D game. Nice camera. Good controls. Crisp graphics. It just works well. Not only does the formula feel authentically VCS-if-3D, but all the charm of the original game is retained. The premise is a little bit silly. The settings are a little bit spooky. The ghosts are a little bit frightening. This IS Haunted House, only 3D. And that’s funny because there’s been multiple attempts at creating follow-ups to Haunted House over the years. 2010 saw an Xbox Live version of Haunted House that’s still for sale that got middling-at-best reviews. Last year ANOTHER 3D remake of Haunted House that completely slipped under my radar, this time a roguelike, was unleashed upon the masses. Even indies have gotten in on the action, as 2005 saw a homebrewer create a sequel to Haunted House by doing a ROM hack of Adventure. That was apparently good enough to be included in Atari 50. I’ll be reviewing it when I get to the Atari 2600 games of the collection. I had no idea that Haunted House was so beloved that it would spawn that many remakes. That’s why it’s especially weird that the best remake of it is this throwaway gag game that’s part of a 100+ game collection.

Haunted Houses works really well as a co-op game. Well, assuming your partner remembers they can do something besides soiling themselves when they see a ghost.

I figured it was probably smart to keep Haunted Houses short, as there’s no way the novelty wouldn’t wear off by the time I finished the last level. Not only was I wrong, but I feel like Haunted Houses has so much left on the table that Atari really should commission a full $19.99 – $29.99 game based on this engine. It just works so well. That there’s only three real levels further hammers home the whole “proof of concept” vibe. It feels like there’s so much more you could do with this formula. Haunted hospitals, hedge mazes, schools, bunkers, etc. Increase the levels, make the set pieces just a little more interactive, and maybe add hidden trinkets to find to enhance the replay value, and Haunted Houses has potential to be a flagship game for the new era of Atari. It does one of the best jobs I’ve ever seen of replicating a specific 2D title’s gameplay in a 3D environment. The fact that it’s basically a +1 afterthought for a massive collection of games is heartbreaking enough, but the fact that it’s unlikely to advance beyond the three full levels we got is downright depressing. It would be like finding out the game that provided your favorite demo at E3 got cancelled. A painful punch in the gut. I suppose it’s fitting for a game where you play as a pair of eyeballs, because Haunted Houses has legs that we’re never going to see.
Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Atari 50
Scorecard: 1 YES!, 1 NO!
Total Value: $5

Neo Breakout
Platform: Atari Reimagined
Year: 2022
Designed by Jason Cirillo

Spoiler Alert: the classic Breakout games won’t be getting the most glowing of reviews. I respect the franchise’s contribution to gaming, but without authentic paddle controllers, they didn’t have a prayer of winning a YES! from me. That’s why I’m so completely shocked by Neo Breakout.

The first time I played Neo Breakout was the exact moment I couldn’t believe Atari didn’t sell the Reimagined games as their own collection. It runs neck-and-neck with Strikey Sisters as the best brick breaker I’ve ever played, and it does it without the aid of wacky power-ups. That alone is insanely impressive. Instead, the twists are mostly tied to the bricks themselves. The one that matters least to me is that you get bonus points by hitting identical colored bricks in a row. I just don’t have enough skill at aiming the ball to even think about utilizing that strategy deliberately. I will say that it’s really cool how the giant cube in the background changes colors to represent the active color you want to aim at in the chain. There’s also themed bricks. Some of them create new bricks if you hit them from the bottom, while another does the opposite and shatters bricks it shares a column with. There’s also crush bricks, which move in the opposite direction they’re struck and break any brick they run into. This includes the otherwise indestructible iron bricks. I’ll get to those in a little bit.

Playing the two player mode, alone or with family, was about the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Nobody could keep a ball in play. In it, the object is to create enough bricks to reach the end zone of your opponent. Every time you miss the ball, the center line is moved closer to you, and hitting the center line creates new bricks on your opponent’s side. It’s a clever idea, but games of it tended to last FOREVER even when we did play well. Did I have fun? Not really, but thankfully this is a bonus mode to a bonus game. The single player stuff more than holds its own.

The other twist is that most of the levels in Neo Breakout have one of three kinds of game modifiers added to them. Speed modifiers only apply to rooms with a red ceiling. If the ball hits the ceiling, its speed increases dramatically. It only happens once per ball, but it lasts until the ball dies or you clear the room. Levels with a blue ceiling cause the paddle to shrink if the ball hits the ceiling. Again, it lasts until you die or the room is cleared. Finally, rooms where the wall gradually becomes yellow drop the blocks one row closer to you every time the yellow completely fills-in. Some of the rooms stack multiple modifiers. The concept of special rules for certain levels is well implemented and works to make Neo Breakout feel new and fresh in what should be a very tired genre. The restraint shown by designer Jason Cirillo to forgo even basic Arkanoid style power-ups, let alone the overpowered type of items typical for modern brick breakers, was astonishing. But, the end result is a game that’s better than any games that do.

Mostly fun room themes, too. There’s fifty-one levels, and only maybe three or four stink.

The closest Neo Breakout comes to having power-ups are the “whammy ball” and the “cavity balls.” The whammy ball is completely optional and activated entirely by the player. In fact, I beat Neo Breakout without knowing of its existence because I didn’t read the instructions. You’d think after Fantasia I’d have learned my lesson, but no. If you hit the left trigger just before the ball makes contact with the paddle, the ball becomes a fireball that travels at a very high velocity for the remainder of the stage, or the ball’s life. While the fireball is active, you score double the points. Meanwhile, only some levels feature cavity balls that can be released on the playfield. Once a ball stuck in a cavity enters a clearing where their trajectory is no longer trapped above their starting position, they become playable balls. The one time this failed, on the 41st stage, it was to my benefit. While the ball was technically free, I never once needed my paddle to play it, which I think technically means it should have remained an inactive ball that bounces harmlessly off the bricks. I don’t know what activated it, but it happened near the top of the screen. The downside was the ball kept bouncing at the same leisurely pace it would have if it had remained trapped. So yea, Neo Breakout is a bit glitchy, and I think most of the glitches are tied to the metal blocks. Call it a hunch, but every time something went wrong, they were there. The biggest offender of which was this:

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The gimmick with the iron bricks is that they’re indestructible. In theory, a line of them is a solid line. Except that obviously isn’t the case, as the ball literally bounced itself right through a gap that sure looks smaller than the ball itself. Now, I really, really like Neo Breakout, but hooooo boy did I have a tantrum when this happened. Granted, that was mostly on account of me trying to playfully act like I was going to throw my controller, only my timing was so far off that I popped myself right in the chin with my own controller. And mind you, this wasn’t the only time the ball behaved in weird ways around the iron bricks. It wasn’t rare at all for the ball to ricochet downward off the side of one when it was on an upward trajectory. In fact, that one happened constantly. Also, sometimes I finished a couple levels without breaking every brick. I’m not even sure what happened in those stages. When it happened a second time is when I finally consulted the instruction manual and found out about the Whammy ball. Finishing stages even though there’s still bricks left? Sometimes more than one? I found nothing, so I’m just going to assume the stages surrendered to my awesomeness. Stop snickering.

My hunch tells me the whammy ball was really included as a sneaky.. and clever.. way of helping lessen “last mother f’n brick syndrome” that’s common to the genre. That’s because the activating hit travels upward in a straight angle, making it the easiest shot to aim in the game. It’s not an automatic way of eliminating an annoyingly-placed final brick, as you still have to get the rebound directly under it. But, just having it as an option I found worked well for eliminating the often sloggy end of stage moments that plague brick breakers. Gosh, how I wish I had read the book, as this would have come in handy in the later stages.

Okay, so Neo Breakout is slightly unstable, but hey, so am I and I’m doing pretty good, and so is Neo Breakout! Technically, it’s a bonus throw-in for a retro game collection anyway. But, it’s also my choice for the best of the Digital Eclipse originals in Atari 50. It even has hidden value in the form of Double Neo Breakout. On the second title screen, press the Y button (or presumably the square button on PlayStation) until you hear a chime, and you get a double paddle AND get to play two balls at once. It’s not even a throwaway extra, either. It’s a genuinely fun experience that plays just slightly different enough to be worth everyone checking out once. It’s seriously a lot of fun. All of Neo Breakout is a lot of fun.

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The only part I didn’t enjoy was the versus mode, where my fun was muted by the fact that nobody in my family could keep the ball alive (including myself). Otherwise, Neo Breakout is one of my favorite games in Atari 50. It helps that the controls are some of the most intuitive non-dial controls the genre has ever seen. There’s even dual-stick gameplay, as the left stick moves the paddle at a normal speed while the right stick moves it at super sensitive high speed. If I have to complain about something, it’s that the right stick is too fast and there’s no option to adjust it. Unless I was using it to catch a rebound next to a wall, the right stick was too dangerous for me to use and led to overshooting more than it was actually helpful. Thankfully, all other options are available. You can adjust the main paddle’s sensitivity to find your comfort zone, and if you wish, you can set the paddle to return to the center of the playfield when you release the stick. So, yea, rough and glitchy as it can be, Neo Breakout feels like a true love letter to the Breakout franchise. It’s the rare franchise tribute that’s authentically, no doubt about it tied to the series, but in a way that feels totally new and modern. I literally can’t believe this is part of Atari 50. It could easily have been sold all on its own. Then again, that’s true of most of these Digital Eclipse games.
Verdict: YES! – $15 in value added to Atari 50.
Scorecard: 2 YES!, 1 NO!
Total Value: $20

Quadratank
Platform: Atari Reimagined
Year: 2022
Designed by Mike Mika

You can do any combination of AI or human players. You can even do four AI, but the instruction book says to please not use it for betting. Pssh, you ain’t the boss of me. $20 on ole’ bluey!

I didn’t get the best possible multiplayer experience out of Quadratank. It wasn’t a matter of finding players. I had my nieces and nephew, ages 8 to 12, along with my sister, a couple of her friends, and my parents. Everyone but my dad and I spent the entire game whining about how hard it was to control the tank. If you grew up with an Atari 2600 and put a lot of time into Combat, you probably won’t have any problem steering in Quadratank. For everyone else, yea, this is pretty tough to get the hang of. There’s even three control schemes that you can switch on the fly with the simple press of a button. While that sounds great in theory, when you’re playing with disinterested children or grown-ups who act like children, it’s inevitable they’ll accidentally press the “change controls” button when they don’t mean to and then whine even more about how tough the controls are. Quadratank is also pretty limited in terms of flexibility. Three maps, two gameplay modes (three if you count two-on-two combat and two-on-two capture the flag separately), and two types of terrain: normal and icy. The most important options are the starting weapons, which includes ricochet shots. I highly recommend that mode. In fact, I wish I had turned that on at the start. It was the final mode we tried for this review and it was closest the larger group came to having a good time. But, by that point everyone had already made up their minds that Quandratank wasn’t for them.

There’s only three arenas as far as I can tell, with only two modes. If there’s unlockables, besides being able to unlock Combat Two in the Atari 50 library through highly convoluted means, I ain’t found them.

Back in 2022, *I* had a good time playing Quadratank, but it’s worth noting that it was one of three party games my family played that month, along with indie hits Hidden in Plain Sight and Chompy Chomp Chomp Party. Since then, we’ve played HiPS a dozen or more times. We even broke it out for our Super Bowl party earlier this year, and Chompy has gotten a replay or two. The one Christmas 2022 game nobody wanted to touch again, including me, was Quadratank. In my case, it wasn’t because I disliked the game so much as it’s no fun to play a game where everyone else never stops bitching. When we busted out video games to pass the time this last Christmas Eve, when everyone was both excited and feeling festive, my mother and some of the kids specifically said “not the tank one!” So, you can imagine how everyone reacted on a Friday in 2024 when I all but begged for thirty minutes so that I could write a game review none of them care about for a blog they don’t read.

The only two games that even got the faintest hint of smiles from the heartless jerks I was playing with were ricocheting shots and rockets & lasers.. ON ICE. Of course, those two modes were pure chaos. That’s always fun even if it’s not exactly elegant gameplay. Congratulations are in order to Mike for creating a game where slippery ice improves the game.

Two years later and nothing changed. I enjoyed playing Quadratank. My father had a good time. Everyone else whined about how hard it was to control. It’s not that we didn’t have ANY fun. Again, I made the mistake of starting with the most basic default settings. Bad move on my part. But, even with the settings at their wackiness, the amusement came from the sheer chaos, and not the merits of the gameplay. Sixteen months after the game didn’t go over as well as I expected it would, and even with the kids being almost a year-and-a-half older, history repeated itself. I don’t think it’s entirely on the age group, either. Quadratank DOES have problems, the biggest of which is there’s a very sharp learning curve to the controls for anyone not used to tank games. Another issue is that it’s easy to lose your place in the mayhem. Despite that complaint, it’s a shame this couldn’t be an eight player game. My niece astutely pointed out that the arenas are too big for only four players, and she’s right! Sure, that prevents you from being spawn-killed, but it also causes the action to be too stop-and-go. Either way, *I* still like Quadratank, but it’s got a very specific audience and apparently I don’t have that audience to play with. More than any other Digital Eclipse original in Atari 50, Quadratank feels like a bonus extra instead of a legitimate featured game, and that’s perfectly fine in a set like this.
Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Atari 50.
Scorecard: 3 YES!, 1 NO!
Total Value: $21

Swordquest: Airworld
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 2022
Designed by Dave Rees

For what it’s worth to Dave Rees, this is the hardest game to review in my nearly thirteen years of doing this blog. Remember the whole “achieved what it set out to do?” thing I talked about with Haunted Houses? This is the dark side of that.

Swordquest was meant to be the ultimate video game contest that combined the efforts of three Warner Bros. subsidiaries: Atari, DC Comics, and the newly acquired (as in 1980) Franklin Mint. The plan was to create four action-adventure-puzzle games in the Swordquest series, with each game getting bundled with a DC comic book. Players would find clues in the games that pointed to pages in the comic that contained different clues that players would use to solve an ultimate puzzle. The basic exploration is the same in all four games: a series of interconnected rooms based on mysticism themes. Some of the rooms had mini-games that needed to be completed once. BUT, the real gameplay was basically picking up junk from one room and dropping it in another room. If you dropped the junk in the right room, it would point you at a specific page in the comic book. The gameplay was as abstract as you can get, but if you could sort it all out and mail in the correct answer, you would be invited to come to Atari’s HQ to compete with other correct guessers in a specialized version of the game. The ultimate winner of each individual game’s final contest would win corporeal junk work $25,000. Then, the four winners would come together and compete for a jewel-encrusted, gold-handled sword worth $50,000. Still with me? Okay, here’s where it goes nuts.

Do you know what I think is the strangest part of all of this? The Swordquest comic books are actually pretty dang good. That’s especially surprising, given the fact that other Atari comics, like the one included with Yars’ Revenge, were TERRIBLE. For Swordquest, all three comics that were released are in Atari 50, inside each game’s instruction manual. The writing is on-par with DC’s output from this time, maybe even a little better, and the art is top notch. Even Waterworld (panels of which are pictured above), the one that you’d expect to be phoned-in, is really high quality for this time frame. Sadly, while we got the video game conclusion to this, we never will get the comic book conclusion, as DC comics apparently never even got to the writing/inking part, and creating a new comic from the ground up was a bridge too far for Digital Eclipse. I can’t say I blame them. Unless they hired actual comic artists, it would never live up to the expectations. Strangely, people can make convincing Atari games in the 2020s, but comics that feel distinctly “80s” are a bit of a lost art form.

For the first game, Earthworld, eight people got the correct answer and were flown to Atari. For the second game, Fireworld, so many people got it right that Atari had to issue homework as a tie breaker. I’m not even joking. The seventy-three players who got the right answer were told to write an essay on what they liked about Swordquest: Fireworld. From those essays, Atari selected the fifty entries most likely to be able to afford to lawyer-up who had the best essay on the game, scout’s honor. Then came Waterworld, and much like the Kevin Costner movie of the same name, everything went to hell. By this point, it was 1984, the video game industry had completely collapsed, and one of the guys who helped create the Marlboro Man was now in charge of Atari. That must have been quite the change for him, going from customers dying from his product to the company itself dying because of the product.

I’ll be reviewing the other three Swordquest games when I get to Atari 50’s 2600 games. God help me.

Warner Bros., who was looking to dump Atari, wanted to cancel the contest. But, their lawyers said the Waterworld contest had to go forward because they already advertised for the specific game’s release and accompanying contest. So, Atari sold Waterworld only via mail order to Atari Club members. That’s why it’s a sought-after rarity among collectors today that’s rated a 9 out of 10 in rarity by AtariAge, who will be proud to hear Google’s spell check knew that their name is one word: AtariAge. According to my Atari collector friends (hi Steve!), people whose entire hobby is seeking out finding games at yard sales and junk stores would be considered incredibly lucky to find one game rated a 9 out of 10 without using the internet.. well, ever. So, in the case of Swordquest: Waterworld, we’re talking VERY few copies circulating, then and now. And yet, it somehow got even worse. While the Waterworld contest was considered active, Atari was sold to Commodore founder Jack Tramiel, who again tried to get out of the contest. In fact, apparently people who entered the contest were told they were ineligible, but once again, the lawyers said “NO!” Allegedly, the Waterworld contest was held in secret and a winner secretly crowned.. literally. They won a crown. The remaining contest could legally be cancelled with each of the prior winners and the Waterworld finalists accepting cash buy-outs instead of competing for the grand prize sword. Of the five gaudy prizes created by the Franklin Mint for this epic disaster, only one is still believed to exist. What a fiasco.

If you want to learn more, including the ultimate fate of the prizes, go here or here.

I’m not a lawyer, but TECHNICALLY didn’t they advertise a four game contest? It sure seems like it. I know there were probably disclaimers up the wazoo. Not that it matters, for reasons I’m about to get into.

Apparently the fourth and final Swordquest game was something of an urban legend in Atari circles. Despite being probably the most sought-after prototype of all time, no Swordquest Airworld prototype has ever been found. Given the sheer volume of unreleased Atari 2600 games that have been discovered over the years, combined with all the work-in-progress builds of released games, if Airworld hasn’t been found yet, it’s likely that no prototype exists at all. While Tod Frye says he started work on it, not even so much as a screenshot exists. Only concept art for the box, and nothing more. Knowing Digital Eclipse, if they had anything to work with, they would have said so. They didn’t, so for Atari 50, they created a whole new Swordquest: Airworld from the ground up, keeping only the promised theme of the game. Each of the Swordquest games are based on mysticism. Airworld uses the I Ching, just like how Earthworld used the Zodiac, Fireworld the Tree of Life, and Waterworld chakras. The end result is a monster-sized version of Swordquest that dwarfs the other three combined, with a map that looks like this:

The biggest difference, besides the girth, is that there’s no comic book to reference clues this time. Instead, Airworld gives players a very detailed instruction manual that presents players with sixty-four riddles; one for each room, and fifty-six items, some of which there’s duplicates of. You’ll want a pen & paper when playing this game, or you can open up your phone and take notes like we did. Sometimes, the clues are outright spelled out for you. The clue for Room #25: Innocence is “let simple and natural forces guide you, like a kite on the wind.” One of the items is a kite, so obviously you’re not using the upper jaw bone in that room. To use the items, you really just pick them up when you find them and put them down in the corresponding room. You can hold five items at a time. If you drop the correct item(s) inside the correct room, instead of being told which comic book page to look up, you’re given the hexagram for a different room. It looks like this:

Like previous Swordquest games, sometimes rooms will have minigame challenges that must be completed in order to get all the junk in the room. If a room does have a minigame, once you’ve completed it (and gotten all the coins out of it if there are coins), you don’t have to play it again for that room. There’s four minigames in total, all of which repeat several times with varying degrees of difficulty, and three of which play and control a lot like the 2010s unfathomable fad hit Flappy Bird. In the case of one of the games, Tianma’s Flight, it really is Flappy Bird with what feels like a slightly oversized character sprite. In it, you move horizontally and have to continuously flap your wings while avoiding barriers. A couple of these levels are actually pretty dang tough. The hardest one took us probably close to twenty attempts to finish. If you fall or collide with a barrier, you have to start over.

Tianma’s Flight. Actually, it’s one of the better Flappy Bird-likes (please don’t use the term “clone”) I’ve played. It helps that, by being part of a larger game, this version of Flappy actually feels like it has stakes. Plus, each round of it is kept short.

Another game, Draconic Descent, has you flapping while moving downward, though this time you can drop pegasus pee underneath you. Barriers get in the way that you have to shoot to remove, all while stationary dragons shoot fireballs across the screen. While you can take out the dragons with a single dribble of pee pee, you don’t have to. In fact, many times I accidentally fell several stories, bypassing all the obstacles. Mind you, you actually do have to collect the coins (if there are any) in each stage, so there’s some incentive to keep flapping and not just dive blindly towards the unseen goal.  If you get shot, or if you miss the exit, you have to restart from the beginning.

Draconic Descent was the easiest of the four minigames in Airworld. It’s not even close.

The final of the Flappy-likes, and the bane of my existence, is Atmospheric Ascent. In it, you have to fly upward. If you touch anything, you temporarily lose your ability to flap. It’s really a cross-the-road style game where sometimes you get very little clearance to advance. On top of that, sometimes the channels of obstacles are so close together that it’s hard to keep a rhythm of flapping that keeps you between them while you wait for an opening. If you touch anything, you could get stun-locked by multiple rows of clouds or birds or whatever and end up falling all the way to the bottom. One round of this took me and my father THIRTY MINUTES to finish. That was totally our fault for having the wrong strategy, but by time it was over, my hands were sore and I was in a foul mood. A big part of the problem is that none of the games scale “naturally.” You repeat each of the games multiple times, BUT, the difficulty of each one is tied to the room it’s in, not the order you played it. Or maybe it’s tied to the numerical order of the rooms, which are scrambled up, and I didn’t notice. I could be wrong, but either way, I’d prefer if the first time you played a game, no matter which room it’s tied to, you played the easiest version, then the next one up, etc, etc. None of the three Flappy Bird-like games are particularly fun, but Swordquest isn’t exactly famous for fun minigames so at least it’s true to the source material.

Oh how I hated Atmospheric Ascent. You do want to sort of move along with the scrolling obstacles, but the timing is super hard. It’s akin to trying to thread a moving needle while pumping the fingers holding the thread up and down.

Storm Siege, the best of the four minigames, and indeed the best minigame ever in the Swordquest franchise, is a clever take on Space Invaders. It’s really just Space Invaders, but with a twist that actually works wonderfully for adding stakes and plenty of close calls. As you shoot the targets on the playfield, instead of UFOs scrolling across the top for bonus points, clouds drift from left to right. Every-other cloud is a rain cloud, and if you don’t shoot it fast enough, it shoots lightning. You have a protective barrier, but it can only take so many lightning strikes before it wears off. You have to clear the entire playfield of all the targets before the enemies reach the bottom OR before the lightning strikes the ground. This reminded me a lot of From Below, which is just plain old ordinary Tetris where a tentacle pokes the stacked blocks up sometimes. It’s the smallest of changes, yet that change yields massive gameplay dividends. The same goes for Storm Siege’s cloud/force field formula. That one change amplifies the excitement far beyond what such a small change should do. If Digital Eclipse does further expansions to Atari 50, they should consider expanding this to a full game with scoring.

Oh and you can only shoot one bullet at a time. It makes you kick yourself every time you miss.

So the minigames went 1 for 4, but the overall puzzle in Airworld isn’t bad. It’s also not as good as I remembered from my 2022 play session. I’ve now finished it twice, and by far my biggest complaint is all the red herrings in it. The majority of the items have no purpose, but all sixty-four rooms have riddles, and since we’re using fortune cookie logic, there’s really no way to tell what is a room that requires you to drop items in it and which are just there to distract you. In reality, only a little over a quarter of the sixty-four rooms are part of the item-dropping puzzle. Some of the “red herrings” have gameplay implications if you’re holding them when you enter a minigame, but if you play this blindly, it’s not like you can replay the minigames (I don’t think at least) to experiment. The only way to really do it is to purposely lose levels and fall back to the main puzzle, then swap the item you’re holding one at a time. There’s fifty-six items! It’s not practical.. though I can probably guess one of them in retrospect.

Dear Atari: I want my $25,000 Philosopher Stone. I mean, I did sort of write an essay on all the reasons I like Airworld AND Atari 50. So, do I win? No? Crud. Eh, it was worth a shot.

Like I said at the beginning, this is the hardest review I’ve ever had to do. At its best, Airworld offers the same type of “okay, I get it, ta-da” and high-fives all around enjoyment of escape rooms. But, the actual solution is such a fraction of the bigger game that it might be the least tight puzzle of this type ever made. Yes, the other Swordquest games had false clues and red herrings, but it’s taken to such an extreme here. Going back to the escape room analogy, which isn’t a perfect analogy in Airworld’s case as there’s no time limit, but, if I did an escape room where there were sixty-four puzzles but only sixteen were actually valuable for getting out of the room, me and my whole family would be f*cking furious. That’s not good puzzle design. That’s just dirty pool. Do you know how we beat the game? BOTH TIMES? While trying to find the rooms to drop the stuff in, we accidentally triggered a previously unheard audio cue that you’ve stepped in the room that’s the start of the final pathway to victory. That’s when we stopped trying to find what room the boomerang goes in and checked our notes, and victory happened about 15-20 minutes later. We stumbled upon the final sequence. Twice. At least we have the excuse of the two sessions taking place sixteen months apart, but I could have sworn there weren’t as many red herrings as there were. There’s too many.

UPDATE: So, the 64 riddles thing is legitimately part of the I Ching itself. So, while I still stay firm on the belief that it’s inevitable players will go on wild goose chase, Atari and Digital Eclipse stayed true to the nature of the theme itself. Commendable. Infuriating, but commendable.

For all my bitching, seriously, this was a surreal, almost magical experience. I can’t imagine what this would mean for fans of Swordquest. Airworld proves how much Digital Eclipse loves its audience, because folks, THIS is a love letter.

So, how the heck do I review this? First off, if you’re a genuine, no BS fan of the original Swordquest games.. not someone who played with them for like two minutes after watching the Angry Video Game Nerd’s episode but an actual FAN who got deeply into solving the puzzles.. ignore everything I’ve said. FOR YOU, putting hypothetical value on a priceless experience is pointless. If you really love Swordquest, Atari 50 is worth buying just for Swordquest: Airworld. Even without the comic book, it’s everything you’ve wanted for forty years now. There’s even an option to unsmoothen (I don’t care what my spell check says, because that’s a word, dagnabit) the HD graphics and add VCS jank if you so wish. For everyone else.. eh, it’s a lot better than any of the three Swordquest games Atari put out in the 80s, but beyond that, it’s give a little, take a little. GIVE: you actually can logic-out the riddles. TAKE: only 1 of the 4 minigames is fun. GIVE: that goes up if you’re a big Flappy Birds fan. TAKE: it goes down quite a lot if you hate Flappy Bird. GIVE: All the charm of an authentic Atari-developed VCS game is here and beautiful. TAKE: except there’s no DC comic tie-in. GIVE: My Atari-loving father and I had a good time. TAKE: my non-fan mother and sister thought we were out of our minds. It’s my blog, and while I’m not a fan of Swordquest at all, I enjoyed the experience a little more than the downtime that frustrated me. Airworld is a dream game. Just not my dream game.
Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Atari 50
Scorecard: 4 YES!, 1 NO!
Total Value: $26

VCTR-SCTR
Platform: Atari Reimagined
Year: 2022
Designed by Jeremy Williams

This is not a game that lends itself to screenshots.

I have a feeling this is going to be like Undertale, where even though I really like the game, fans of it will be livid with me for not liking it as much as them. VCTR-SCTR is a tribute to Atari’s vector graphics output. It’s also the most arcadey-game in the Atari Reimagined lineup, for better and for worse. The idea is you play a sequence of snippets of Atari vector classics. There’s four games that go in the following sequence: you have to clear a screen in Asteroids, land a Lunar Lander, clear out all the UFOs in a shooter that combines aspects of vector games not included in Atari 50 such as Speed Freaks and Battlezone, then finally clear out all the Flippers (the red x-shaped things) in Tempest. Once you complete a cycle, a new cycle at a higher difficulty immediately begins. Getting the biggest problem out of the way: making Lunar Lander part of this was incredibly misguided. Mind you, I’m a really big Lunar Lander fan. It’s one of my favorite coin-ops ever, but it does not fit-in at all with VCTR-SCTR.

And I’m not even factoring the tethered mode into that statement. VCTR-SCTR can be played two ways: a single ship or two ships tethered. In the solo mode, the sequence of games is spot-on in terms of difficulty: Asteroids first, Lunar second, VCTR-SHMP third, and Tempest fourth. That sequence makes NO sense for the tethered mode, where Lunar Lander is easily the hardest of the four games. The green ship has no thruster. You have to land the dead weight on a separate platform. In the tethered mode, Lunar Lander should have been the fourth game in the sequence. No doubt about it.

Sometimes having games feature a wildly-shifting tone works. It doesn’t work here at all. Having three very intense shooting sections broken up by a game that’s about finesse and conservation is akin to placing a braking section on a roller coaster after the initial 80 mph drop. Then, after thirty seconds doing 10 mph along the ground, following it with a launched 80 mph section to complete the rest of the track. Nobody would do that, because it wouldn’t be fun. The Lunar Lander segment is just plain not compatible with the other games. Even more problematic is that it doesn’t yield enough points to provide any stakes at all. It’s as close to dead air as I’ve seen in any action game. Again, Lunar Lander is one of my favs, but I wouldn’t want it to show up in the middle of a game of Asteroids or Tempest, which is exactly what this does. I’m certain that the huge fanbase of VCTR-SCTR is going to be furious with me for stating that, but sorry, they’re just plain wrong. The third segment, a new game designed just for this, proves that Jeremy has the chops to come up with something that fits-in with the other three games better.

There’s two co-op options, one of which tethers the players together. Ironic for a game that involves shackling players to each-other, it’s bound to drive people apart. Also, worth noting is that the children who I could barely get to play Quadratank *HATED* VCTR-SCTR because of the Lunar Lander section, which they never got past. Not once. I tried to calmly and gently explain the concept of easing on the gas, conserving fuel, and feathering the analog sticks. They didn’t care, got frustrated faster than I thought humanly possible and quit almost immediately. I asked one of them how on Earth he could recreate set pieces from Attack on Titan in Minecraft but he couldn’t grasp the concept of barely touching the analog stick. I’ve never feared for a coming generation more than I did after trying to explain Lunar Lander to kids. Good lord, the planet is so screwed in thirty to forty years.

The rest of the game is brilliant. It works as a homage to an era of gaming that never got its due. This is especially true of the third segment that I’ve dubbed VCTR-SHMP. The blistering speed it cuts, along with the close calls and near misses that comes from dodging enemy fire, made for one of the most exciting games I’ve ever played. So good is the third segment that I’m kind of bummed that it didn’t get further expanded into its own game. Fans of VCTR-SCTR will be REALLY pissed at me for saying that I almost wish it had been the whole game. Seriously! As much as I enjoyed the Asteroids and Tempest segments, I’ve played those games. They’re in Atari 50, along with Lunar Lander. The third segment is one of those “it’s like every arcade game you’ve played and no game you’ve ever played before” type of situations. I haven’t played a game like that since Donut Dodo, which I loved! If the third segment was ALL of VCTR-SCTR, I honestly don’t think I would have missed the other three segments at all. That’s why it’s kind of sad that it’s here in Atari 50, where the concept is likely to never be expanded upon. If you did this same game, with more enemies and obstacles, dare I say it could be an action game of the decade contender.

To be honest, I wasn’t in love with the Tempest or Asteroids segments either. Oh, they’re great here, but that’s because they’re great by themselves. Which anyone would know since they can play them by themselves in Atari 50. At this point, I’ve played Asteroids and Tempest to death, and I’m not even of the Golden Age of Arcades generation. I’m going to be 35 in three months. I missed the arcade era altogether. I imagine people older than me are going to have put even more time into VCTR-SCTR’s inspirations. Even though I love VCTR-SCTR, the only standout sequence is the one created just for it. I want a lot more of it.

As much as I’ll daydream about a game that will likely never exist, I really did have a blast with VCTR-SCTR. The only big thing missing from it is online leaderboards. Yea yea, they didn’t have those in the good ‘ole days. Well, they didn’t have the internet or consoles more powerful than all the world’s Atari 2600s combined, either. If it would have bumped the price of Atari 50 by $10 or even $20, hell, this is the greatest game collection ever, and I have a feeling such a price hike would not have affected the sales at all. Besides, challenging for high scores is the whole point, right? Then again, my best score was just under 100,000. I never got past the fifth wave. Oh, and do you know what else is missing that would be perfect for this type of game? A time attack mode. It’s such a no-brainer that I’m stunned that’s not an option. Not that it NEEDED it, obviously. The best thing I can say about VCTR-SCTR is I told myself I would play this one a couple hours at most. I ended up spending a whole day on it, dying and dying and dying, but trying and trying and trying. And, like so many of these Atari Reimagined games, the passion held by the developer for this type of game is loud and clear.
Verdict: YES! – $10 in value added to Atari 50
Scorecard: 5 YES! 1 NO!
Total Value: $36

Yars’ Revenge: Enhanced
Platform: Atari Reimagined
Year: 2022
Designed by Mike Mika

And hell, I might as well do the original while I’m at it since it’s (almost) the same game.

Yars’ Revenge
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Designed by Howard Scott Warshaw

This is one of those situations where I had to merge two separate screenshots in order to make one that represents the appearance of the game. You see, Atari can’t run that many sprites at the same time, so it cheats by having one frame load half the objects and the next frame holding the other half. If an Atari game has flicker, that’s the reason why, and it makes taking screenshots of Atari games a pain in the ass that creates extra work for me to do the review. It’s even worse when you take clips on Nintendo Switch, as it skips every-other frame. That means a video of Atari gameplay taken on Switch looks like half the content is missing.

Atari fans might want to have a paper bag handy to breathe into. Ready? Yars’ Revenge is a teeny tiny bit overrated. STOP! Deep breaths. Calm. It’s okay! We’ll get through this! Listen, Yars’ Revenge is also a lot of fun and certainly one of the best.. if not THE best.. arcade-style games on the 2600. It’s possible to be both fun AND overrated. There’s no game that’s true of more than Yars’ Revenge. Fans talk about it like it arrived on our planet alongside baby Jesus, who was holding the polio vaccine in one hand and the first loaf of sliced bread in the other. Of all the games to get that kind of reverence, why this one? I like Yars’ Revenge a lot, but I also don’t get why it’s practically been deified. It’s a perfectly fine arcade-style shooter. Smack your bug against the force field of the enemy to charge up a cannon. Then, line-up with the enemy and fire the cannon, with the twist being you have to duck out of the way of your own projectile after firing it. It’s a good idea and it works wonderfully. It makes for a relatively intense experience, especially given the hardware limitations at play here. It almost feels like you’re playing a game of chicken with the enemy since you have to run up and dry hump the barrier around it.

The funny thing is, Yars’ Revenge wasn’t even going to exist. It started life as a licensed game based on the Cinematronics (of Dragon’s Lair fame) vector graphics hit Star Castle. The problem was, Howard Scott Warshaw determined the 2600 could never create a port that lived up to the arcade game. Some tinkering later, and a brand new hall of famer was born. Also, the name is a pun on then Atari president Ray Kassar. Y-A-R/R-A-Y, and the instruction manual says the game is set in the Razak system. R-A-Z-A-K/K-A-S-S-A-R. Ray Kassar’s Revenge.. on Activision’s designers. Yes, really, the name and storyline are petty in-jokes because some of Atari’s best game designers left to become millionaires instead of making $26K a year and getting no credit and heartless “bonuses” like a free frozen turkey because your game was a best seller. Let petty vindictiveness rule the day!

There’s only two levels that repeat on harder difficulties each cycle, which is a bit of a bummer, but this was the Atari 2600 era so it’s to be expected. The replay value comes in the form of a couple extra modes. I’d never played mode 6 before, aka Ultimate Yars’. I’m so happy I did, as this is easily the best way to play the game. In it, instead of charging up the cannon just by bouncing off (“eating”) the force field, now the cannon operates on a scoring system. You have to collect five units of power called TRONS by eating the shield (1 unit per cell), touching the enemy, aka the “Qotile” (2 units) or catching your own missed cannon blast when it ricochets off the shield (4 units). Oh, and yea, in this mode, your cannon ricochets off the shield. The fastest way to charge-up unwatchable Jeff Bridges sci-fi movies is by touching the enemy itself. If basic mode Yars’ feels like a game of chicken, Ultimate Yars’ feels like when Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck plant a big, sloppy, sarcastic kiss on Elmer Fudd before hopping away, taunting him. Even better is you can bank more TRON points than the cannon needs, giving you multiple shots at the Qotile. Finally, to load up a cannon shot, you just have to touch the left border of the screen. I loved this mode. And I really like Yars’ Revenge. It’s fun. One the best ever? I’ll settle for one of the best games from this era, but even playing Ultimate Yars’ in the enhanced version, it got old quickly. In 2024, Yars’ is instead the type of game I’d play with a few minutes to kill. Hey, the world needs those games too.

Now here’s the part where the fans REALLY get angry..

As for the Enhanced edition, it’s literally the same game. No new levels. No new modes. It’s supposed to be a 1 to 1 remake of the 2600 game that even uses the same code. But, it doesn’t feel the same. Maybe it’s just the placebo effect and I’m imagining things, but Yars’ Enhanced sure feels like it plays faster, especially when it comes to the swirly attack of Qotile and your own cannon blasts. Because of this, the gameplay feels much more intense, and I loved it. And that’s hardly the only upgrade. For a game saturated in so much bloom that it’s like playing video games in the middle of a nuclear explosion, oddly enough, I ultimately prefer the enhanced edition to the 2600 original because I found it much easier to see what was happening. In the 2600 version, by far my most common reason for dying.. besides shooting myself in the ass with my own cannon.. was getting killed by the little dot that slowly stalks you. I was constantly losing it when it crawled into the neutral zone in the middle of the screen.

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In Enhanced, the dot is replaced by a galactic space triops that’s just plain easier to track. Visibility matters, and being able to see what’s going to kill you makes games more fun. Plus, the score and your remaining lives are on the screen, and if you play Ultimate Yars’, the amount of cannon shots you have is displayed on the bottom. So, Enhanced is the clear winner for me. Besides, there’s nothing inherently sacred about the original Yars. It’s just the old version. It only looks the way it does not because of artistic merit but because that was the literal best the console was capable of doing in that era. If you like it more, hey, whatever floats your boat. Given that Atari recently put out another remake of Yars’ that offers 30 waves, I’m fine with this upgrade to the 2600 game staying true to the original. In fact, Mike did such a good job that the only real downside is that Atari 50 didn’t have more enhanced 2600 classics like this. Maybe Atari 100 will, and that’s assuming I live to be 83. Finally, an excuse to start doing CrossFit.
Verdict for Yars’ Revenge for the Atari 2600: YES! – $3 in value added to Atari 50.
Verdict for Yars’ Revenge Enhanced: YES! – $10 in value added to Atari 50.
Scorecard: 7 YES!, 1 NO!
Total Value: $49

As I suspected, the original games by themselves are worth more than the price of admission alone. And to think, we’re just getting started. Next time: the coin-ops of Atari 50!

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Retro Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – Part Three

April 16, 2024 by 1 Comment

From here out, Atari 50: The Games The Couldn’t Include will be twelve games per post. I originally intended to do more and created the placeholders for several games that either looked interesting or had interesting stories behind them. When I was finished, I had over 250 placeholders. So I did the only logical thing and.. added more. I like doing these. Play them an hour, some a little less, some a lot more, write-up my thoughts. Time flies by. It’s not that different from my LCD features.

And, as always, Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include wouldn’t be possible without the incredible Atari resources out there. Huge thanks to AtariMania for their instruction book library and AtariProtos.com for their directory of unreleased Atari games.

GAME REVIEWS

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

The Activision Decathlon
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1983
Designed by David Crane
Published by Activision

My non-athletic side apparently carries over to digital form.

For all the credit Konami gets for Track & Field, I don’t think those games hold-up especially well. So, it stands to reason the same style of game done with fewer buttons and a lot less horsepower shouldn’t hold-up at all. You can imagine my surprise that Activision Decathlon is the best of its breed I’ve ever played. This squeezes a LOT of potential out of the simple Atari 2600 joystick with ten events that use every style of button mashing or joystick wiggling you can get out of it. Most of the games require you to move the joystick. Not “rotate” or “move left and then right.” Just.. move it, by whatever technique you find most comfortable. I like that. It allows for you to come up with your own strategy. It helps if you use a control stick and not a d-pad, and it REALLY helps if you don’t play this game immediately following an extended session of a Katamari game with blisters all over your hands. But seriously, use a stick for this one.

I let out a cheer the first time I completed a high jump.

There’s really only one event that’s outright boring: the 1500M. In it, the running meter is changed to require a more steady pace for the first 1,300 meters before it returns to the “wiggle the stick as fast as you can” sprint meter for the final 200M stretch. This event takes a few minutes and it’s just lifeless and boring. I’d also recommend against playing the 400M if you value the top layer of skin on your fingers. All the other events hold up pretty well, actually. The shot put/javelin/discus and even high jump/long jump events all feel kind of samey: wiggle the stick, then press the button right before the line. The only real difference in those five events is how much room you’re given to build up speed/power before you have to press the button. The pole vault changes it up somewhat, as you have to press the action button once, but you have to keep the stick movement going until you reach the top of the jump, at which point you press the action button again. I preferred the hurdles event to them, where you at least have an action button to break-up the furious stick twerking.

Before I render a verdict, I might as well do the 5200 version.

The Activision Decathlon
Platform: Atari 5200
Year: 1983
Designed by David Crane
Released in 1983

I’m exhausted from winning this one race by 0.02 seconds. Good lord, these games really do feel like they require athletic ability.

You’d think the Atari 5200 version would utilize the keypad, but thankfully that’s not the case. This is still a one button and stick-whirling experience. The big difference in the Atari 5200 version, besides a respectable graphic upgrade, is the addition of AI competitors. I couldn’t really gauge their difficulty because it seemed like the AI adjusted in real time based on my performance. You see this in the 100M especially, where no matter how I did, the AI opponent and I tended to trade the lead back and forth until the photo finish. You’re still probably better off playing against real players if that’s an option. These days, I have tremors in my hand and slower reaction time. I’m not really the best person to review games like Track & Field or Activision Decathlon. It took me multiple attempts to win the 100M dash, and I only did so by two one-hundredths of a second. I found the 5200 version to require a lot less effort in the stick moving, which was very welcome. I was still exhausted by the time I finished my playtime with these titles. The 5200 version also does a much better job of making the ten events feel distinct from one-another.

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No matter which version you play, Activision Decathlon is one of the most remarkable surprises I’ve encountered in my thirteen years of reviewing video games, because it’s still fun 40 years after release. I love that events don’t have you pressing specific directions. It feels genuinely athletic, where you get better as you improve your form, a form you create and learn all on your own. For all the credit David Crane gets for Pitfall, I honestly think he deserves more for Decathlon. In terms of surviving the test of time, the degree of difficulty is so much higher in any sports game. Pitfall struggles to keep its modern relevance, but Decathlon can make a compelling argument for being the best Olympic game ever, and not just “for its time.” It works as both a casual track & field game, but also provides enough raw gameplay to satisfy hardcore players or button mashing aficionados. Sure, not every event is a winner, but the overall package still offers as much fun today as it did in 1983, and that’s a very rare quality for games of this era. Crane’s legacy is built largely on Pitfall, but it’s Activision Decathlon that proved to me he really is one of the all-time greats. These are phenomenal, and the best their genre has ever had, even four decades later. Wow.
Verdict: YES! and YES!

Airlock
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Published by Data Age

Those pink things are called “torpedoes” in the instruction book. Yes, because torpedoes are famously the ballistic weapon that, when fired, prowl rooms by walking back and forth until someone fails to jump over them.

You’ll remember Data Age as the company who tried to cash in on the Atari fad and then went all-in on the Journey license. And also as the team that put together the sublime Frankenstein’s Monster that really should have been their flagship title since it slaps. Airlock doesn’t slap. It wasn’t originally set to get a review, but then I read the premise. “A boat is sinking and you have ten seconds to exit a room before it fills with water.” That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Sadly, the actual game is like a stripped down version of Mattel’s 2600 stinker Adventures of Tron (also in Part 2). It’s actually weird how closely it resembles that game. You zig-zag from left to right, jumping over one moving object per floor and two bumps. You have to jump up and get a key on both sides, then walk to the elevator. If you play on modes 3 or 4, you have to clear an additional room where the lumps come in pairs.

The ending screen looks more fun than playing the game itself.

And that’s the whole game. It almost sounds like there’s not enough material for anything to go wrong, but that’s not the case at all. The stationary things you have to jump over have inconsistent collision detection. If you short the jump, you’re pushed backwards away from the key you need to get, at least in theory. Sometimes, I was pushed forward, with seemingly no logic behind what causes a push back and what causes a push forward. In the modes where the bumps are doubled, there is a small learning curve towards angling the jump so you don’t just end up getting stuck between them. And of course, you have to jump over the “torpedoes” that offer almost no challenge besides making you sometimes stand still to time jumping over them. The other major problem is the game ends after 5 floors (modes 1 & 2) or 10 (3 & 4). There’s no endless mode. Not that you’d want such a thing for a game this boring, but still, when you reach the top, the game is over. There’s only two modes: 5 floors and 10, each with a two player option. That makes Airlock arguably the shortest platform game ever. I refuse to believe they couldn’t have come up with more modes. Even something as small as giving the torpedoes different patterns (say, jumping up and down themselves) would have given this desperately needed replay value. Airlock feels like the proof of concept for a platforming engine that could be used to create more ambitious games. I’m open to that being the case, given Data Age’s internal issues. By itself, it’s one of the worst on the Atari 2600.
Verdict: NO!

Amidar
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Designed by Ed Temple
Published by Parker Bros.

I’m the little Space Invader looking thing. That’s supposed to be a gorilla. Jeez.

I wasn’t familiar with Amidar until I began going through Atari games. It’s essentially Konami’s “what about us?” answer to Pac-Man. To Konami’s credit, it’s not bad at all, and actually is one of the stronger wannabes to follow in Namco’s wake. I’d like it a lot more except it only has two levels and is absurdly hard. The Atari 2600 port from Parker Bros. does the best it can with the limited technology to recreate the point of the coin-op. It somehow both succeeds AND it completely misses the mark and only feels like the arcade game in the sense that you have to avoid the enemies and traverse the map to collect territory. It also lacks the personality of the coin-op, leaving you with a bare bones, no frills experience. You just walk along a grid, and when you completely walk around the edge of a square, you collect it. You have to collect the whole screen while avoiding enemies. Like the arcade game, you can make the enemies jump and run under them. When you convert all four corner boxes, it’s like getting the power pellet in Pac-Man and you can eat the enemies.

Apparently the idea behind the arcade’s second level was too advanced for the 2600.

While Amidar probably ranks among the better Atari 2600 maze chases, I have to imagine that any fan of the coin-op would have been very disappointed with this port. Not only is the charm lost, but the bonus stage is missing AND the gameplay mechanic of the second (of only two) stages isn’t present. The first level of the arcade game involves collecting dots, but that’s gone in the 2600 version and replaced by just coloring-in the pathways. That’s fine, right? It’s functionally the same thing. Well, yea, until you get to the second level. In the arcade’s second stage, you switch from a gorilla to a paint roller, and instead of collecting dots, you.. paint the walkway. Wait, which arcade level is the home version based on, again?

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Except, there’s a twist to the paint part in the arcade game: the paint doesn’t work and breaks off if you travel too far before completing a box. This fundamentally changes the gameplay, making those stages slower, more methodical, and much more intense. While you do become a paint roller every-other level in the Atari port, the paint-breaking-off mechanic didn’t make the leap home. So, functionally they’re just the same levels, only with pigs chasing a paint roller. Mind you, I still enjoyed Amidar well enough. I’m sure with enough time, I could clock the enemies and ruin the fun, but in small doses, it’s actually a thrilling and fun game of close-calls. At the same time, I could imagine a child who was a BIG fan of this in 1982 was probably heartbroken playing this stripped-down, nearly completely gutted port. Amidar 2600 stands on its own, but it also feels a tiny bit like a dirty trick.
Verdict: YES!

Arkyology
Platform: Atari 2600
Unreleased Completed (?) Prototype
Designed by Paul Walters & George Hefner
Non-Publisher: Enter Tech Ltd.

Honestly, if you were to adapt a biblical story, Noah would probably have the best potential. Not that anyone has met that potential yet.

Enter-Tech is one of the most generic sounding names ever, so much so that multiple companies with the same name have sprang-up in the years since. This particular Enter-Tech was working with Sparrow Records, a Christian music label famous for a series of children’s albums called Music Machine. Sparrow Records still exists to this day under the Universal Music Group umbrella. It makes me wonder if some account at Universal is going over warehoused assets and saying “what the fudge? What the h-e-double-hockey-stick is an Arkyology?” In my head, they would censor themselves while reading a Christian company’s assets. It’s just polite. So, what is Arkyology? An arcade-style action game where stages alternate between opening windows selected randomly one at a time inside Noah’s Ark and then feeding the animals within, again randomly one at a time. The target also changes if you don’t get to the current one fast enough, and you never know which will be the next to “light up.” You have to quickly shimmy up and down ladders while avoiding sliding animal turds and falling porcupine turds. In later levels, baby alligators show up to guard a floor, and you can’t jump over them.

I’m not sure why Noah is dressed like Hugh Hefner (thanks Rafael!) but it makes perfect sense since the toughest part about this game is getting off….. the ladders. The baby alligator is an interesting idea for a game like this, as it will move towards when you start to climb up or down to its platform, then stop moving. It provides a greater challenge than simply going from point A to point B. SMART. See, even the worst prototypes can have good ideas.

You expect religious-themed games to be bad, and yea, Arkyology is horrible. But, it didn’t have to be. Where it goes wrong is in the ladder mechanics, which make you long for the staircases in Castlevania. Getting on the ladder is easy. It’s the getting off them part that isn’t. Even lining up with the platforms isn’t the problem. According to the Arkyology page on AtariProtos, you have to use diagonal movement to get off the ladders, but even that was a coin flip on whether it would work. Well, more like a dice roll, as a coin flip is 50/50, and I spent most of the game stuck on the ladders while wiggling the controller trying to let go. Because the target is constantly changing, this is a deal breaker by itself, but it’s hardly the only problem. While the baby alligators are a good idea, speeding up the action to the degree Arkyology does is a really bad idea. By day four, I found the game unplayable. Collision is a problem, as hitting the latches that open the doors, or feed the animals, was inconsistent. You seemingly have to jump at angles, but often I clipped right through the target and had to complete several passes before it registered. Fix this, and especially fix the ladders, and I think Arkyology might have risen to the level of the best “Christian” game ever. I’m not even joking. It’s not a bad idea for an action-arcade game at all. Unfortunately, with the broken movement mechanics and collision detection, all this brought forth was two of every swear word.
Verdict: NO!

Assault
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1983
Developed by Onbase Co. Ltd.
Published by Bomb
No Relation to Assault (Namco – 1988)

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Who the heck is Bomb? Apparently they were the North American partner of Onbase Co. Ltd. Who the heck is Onbase Co. Ltd.? Apparently they were a Hong Kong-based game developer who did a few Atari games. One of them is named “The Great Escape” but it has no connection to the famous Steve McQueen movie. I would have done that one, but it was too generic. Assault had decent graphics, and even if the gameplay is generic, it’s generic within the acceptable parameters. There’s a mother ship that drops enemies onto the playfield, maxing out at three big ones at any time. After a few stages, the big enemies split into two smaller ones. After killing ten of one enemy type, you move to the next wave and next enemy. There were several moments playing Assault where I spontaneously died and I have no clue why. I rewound the game looking for projectiles or some kind of indication. Eventually, I figured out that the meter in the bottom right corner tells you whether your cannon is overheating or not.

As far as I could tell, there’s no way to destroy the mothership. Oddly, the instruction book implies that it’s possible. Really, the game needed more things like the fireballs enemies drop, or it needed to give the mother ship more of a reason to exist. It’s not bad, but it had no chance of holding up at forty years.

It’s not the worst idea for a gallery shooter, as the heat meter successfully discourages spamming the fire button and incentivizes accuracy. Interestingly, firing upwards into the playfield is done just by pressing up. One enemy type can drop fireballs onto the floor that will heat seek the player, and that’s when you press the action button while moving in their direction to shoot them down. Eventually, Assault resorts to that tried and true Atari cliché of off-and-on invisible enemies. Honestly, Assault isn’t that bad a game for budget label release by a nobody developer. Original? Nah. Almost decent? Yea, actually. I wouldn’t want to be stuck with it today, but it’s not a bad little game. Moderately decent scoring system. Moderately decent learning curve. It feels like an actual effort went into it. A reminder that not every samey space shooter on the Atari is drowning in cynicism. I can’t give it a YES! because I wouldn’t actually want to play it today, in 2024. But, I found it comforting that kids in 1983 could buy really cheap games by a no-name developer and not get stuck with unplayable garbage. At a time when Space Invaders was cutting edge, I imagine a game like Assault would have been a lot more exciting. My review system might not take that into account, but my heart does.
Verdict: NO!

Atlantis
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Designed by Dennis Koble
Published by Imagic

I love how the instruction book gives an overly-elaborate explanation for all the stuff on the screen. Atari developers really went all-out on their games.

Atlantis as a game isn’t that interesting. It’s like a less complicated version of Missile Command. You control three cannons and have to shoot down enemy ships. The ships fly in a straight line over the playfield, and every time one avoids your gunfire, it makes another, closer pass. Eventually they’ll get close enough to unleash an attack on one of seven structures on the surface. Lose all those and it’s game over. Shooting the center cannon is easy-peasy. Just press the fire button. But, my damaged brain refused to work with the other two cannons, which shoot diagonally. For some reason, my gray matter only made it as far as “if you want a bullet to intercept a ship on the left side of the screen, shoot the left side of the screen!” when really I wanted to shoot the right cannon. It took me a while to get the hang of it. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, and I especially liked how satisfying it was to hit the little ships out of the sky. Not only do they score more points, but they knock out the other ships on the screen. Like many Atari 2600 games, this would have certainty been a much more exciting game when it first released, but the test of time hasn’t been kind to it. Popular in its day, in 2024 Atlantis gets old quickly. Normally I’d render my verdict here, but there’s a funny story about Atlantis. Back in the day, it was part of a competition, and players who scored over 900,000 points were given a “sequel” cart, Atlantis II, for the championship round.

This screen is of Atlantis II.

Atlantis II is really more like a fifth mode for the game with the difficulty set to the extreme. The ships are much faster and the scoring is much, much lower. But, it’s the same game that I couldn’t wait to be finished with. The carts were shipped to homes, and whoever put up the highest score on this cart would win $10,000.. IN GOLD! I’d like to think there were grizzled prospectors out there that devoted their lives towards getting good at Atlantis, all while saying “gimme that gold!” But here’s the really funny part. Apparently, the Atlantis II carts were just Atlantis I carts with a new game in them. They shipped in normal Atlantis I boxes, only these had a plain white sticker stuck on them that bluntly says “ATLANTIS II” on top of the normal Atlantis I art. Guess what the carts themselves DO NOT have on them? No identification they’re Atlantis II at all. So, if you’re reading this and you have a copy of Atlantis on the Atari, your copy could actually be Atlantis II, a highly desired collectible. That story was so much more interesting than the games themselves. Even with bad Atari games, I’m often caught off guard by how much time has passed since I’ve started playing them. With Atlantis, I kept looking at the clock and wondering how so little time had passed. Eventually I decided thirty minutes was quality time enough.
Verdict: NO!

Bank Heist
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1983
Designed by Bill Aspromonte
Published by 20th Century Fox

It ain’t much to look at, but this wasn’t that bad. Kind of weird 20th Century Fox couldn’t find a heist movie to tie this to.

On a platform with a plethora of maze chase games, Bank Heist actually does manage to somewhat stand out by changing up the formula. The collecting concept is simple: banks randomly spawn on the map (or appear in preset locations if you toggle the RIGHT DIFFICULTY SWITCH to B). Grab them and score points. The simplicity ends there, and actually, Bank Heist is pretty convoluted with its rules. When you collect a bank, after its score vanishes from the screen, a cop car spawns that begins to either chase you (LEFT DIFFICULTY A) or follow a preset pattern (LEFT DIFFICULTY B). As you move, your fuel slowly depletes, and it also goes down a notch every time you use dynamite. Every time you rob a bank, the meter showing how much fuel you’ll have in the next town goes up a notch. If you drop dynamite in a way that blows up a cop car, another bank will spawn in the town, maxing out at $90 per bank per town. The maze has tunnels just like in Pac-Man that pop you out the other side, BUT, the longer right tunnel advances you to the next town over. If the fuel meter is higher than the tank, you get more gas, up to a full tank if the meter is all the way at the top. If it’s under your current gas line, you get no extra fuel in the new town.

The soundtrack is a terrible car engine noise if there’s no cops, and sirens if there are. It’s awful racket.

Don’t bother with having the cop cars not chase you. There’s no tension at all unless you play on the A difficulty. The cops can’t do u-turns in either mode, and so following them is actually a viable strategy if you need to do tight squeezes. However, you do actually have to kill them in order to build up your fuel, and to do that, you have to let them be right on your tail. The dynamite has a short fuse, and getting the timing of it down is really tricky. This is probably one of the better maze chases on the Atari 2600, and I still didn’t love it. It probably was a good idea to try and make a more complicated maze chase. I’m sure Atari owners were ready for that by this point. But, the final product still needs to be fun, and Bank Heist is just sort of dull. The mazes lack elegance and the type of logic that creates tons of close calls that makes the Pac-Man formula work. It’s the classic mistake that so many of these types of games make: the chase is the fun part. Collecting stuff is just a means to achieve that. So, Bank Heist is a NO!, but it’s near the top of the NO! pile because it plays fine. It’s just not fun in 2024. Close, but not quite.
Verdict: NO!

Barnstorming
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Designed by Steve Cartwright
Published by Activision

Besides towers, this is the whole game. And it’s kind of awesome.

Oh for the days when you could release a full-priced game where the average round lasts under a minute. An even more remarkable achievement is that Barnstorming doesn’t even feel like a rip-off. Of course it helps that the game in question is roughly as addictive as crack. Barnstorming’s concept is simple: dodge birds, avoid windmills, and fly a plane through barns. If you just hate life, you can even shrink the clearance in the barn, but we went for the easiest mode. It was tricky enough. If you hit the windmills or the roofs of barns, you recoil. The birds, on the other hand, are pushed forward instead of becoming what I believe professionals refer to as an “engine problem.” It’s actually really smart design. The birds fly in three channels in the sky, and because hitting them slows you down slightly while sliding them forward, the one you hit inevitably remains an obstacle that you still have to dodge. Sometimes, you can really screw a run you’re on by hitting a bird in a way where it lines up with the other two channels, creating a solid barrier. That’s fine if you’re about to dip out of the sky to fly through a barn, but if you’re over a section with several windmills in a row, your final time will hurt for it.

The world record for mode one in Barnstorming is 32.64. So honestly this ain’t bad. I’m not entirely sure what I could have done to do better. My dad and I were usually finishing in the 34 second range, but we did post time of 33.75 (Dad), 33.55 (Dad), 33.54 (Me), 33.52 (Me), 33.99 (Dad), and the above score of 33.25 (Me). We both agreed to stick to pinball for record chasing.

Modes 1 – 3 are preset courses, and while the game is always limited to birds, windmills, and barns, it’s really no different than practicing up at a racing game like Mario Kart. Same concept, different form of racing. You can also play mode four, which completely randomizes the order of barns and windmills. This is one of the cases where having a randomized course doesn’t interest me as much, because I’d much rather play a fixed course and challenge my personal best times. Honestly, for such a small, confined idea, this is a dang good game. It’s ahead of its time too, because it feels tailor made for handheld gaming. I could seriously see Barnstorming becoming one of my go-to “five minutes to kill while waiting in a doctor’s office” games. It’s especially suitable for that, as it requires one of the lowest time commitments of any really good game I’ve played. One other thing stood out to me while playing this: it would make a pretty good LCD game, don’t you think? Well, it turns out that in the 2000s Burger King did put out an LCD of Barnstorming (along with Tennis, Kaboom, and Grand Prix). Some tell this to Itizso.
Verdict: YES!

Beamrider
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1984
Designed by David Rolfe
Published by Activision

The dots on the screen remain completely stationary, but the moving lines combine with them to successfully create the illusion of forward momentum. Clever.

What is with Activision and games that would work well in LCD format? In Beamrider, you move along five channels shooting enemies. The catch is there’s really only one enemy that matters: the white flying saucers that eventually become bashful about putting themselves in the line of fire. Every stage has fifteen of them. Almost everything else that falls on the playfield is indestructible without using one of your limited bombs. You’re incentivized to save those bombs until after you shoot down all fifteen saucers, because then a mothership slowly crosses the top of the screen that can only be blown up by the bombs. You only get one pass before going to the next stage. The mothership is more like an end of stage bonus round where you can still lose a life. Shooting down the mothership with one of your bombs earns you bonus points for every reserve life you have, which can be quite a lot. Also, mines come in and block your shots on it, and like pretty much everything but the saucers, your normal bullets don’t destroy the mines.

There’s a nice variety of obstacles too. There’s a lot game packed into this one.

Another twist is Beamrider is one of the most generous games with extra lives I’ve ever seen. The only catch is.. well, you have to catch them. Sometimes enemies make it impossible, and sometimes YOU make it impossible. If you shoot the extra life that drops, it turns into debris that you have to avoid. You’ll want to stock-up on lives, because as things progress, you encounter a lot more enemy fire, obstacles that shield the saucers from your shots, and even things that, if you miss shooting them, will linger at the bottom of the screen, preventing you from moving (unless you want to die) for a few seconds. Beamrider is actually a lot of fun and one of the best shooters on the Atari 2600. It’s certainly one of the better 2600 games in terms of handling difficulty scaling. It even has convincing 3D graphics, or at least as convincing as this era got. As a post-crash release, it stinks that it doesn’t get more attention as one of the better titles on the VCS.
Verdict: YES!

Beamrider
Platform: Atari 5200
Year: 1983
Designed by David Rolfe
Published by Activision

While the graphics are impressive, it can be hard to tell apart enemy bullets from the ultra-dangerous red mines you’re about to read about.

No surprise: Beamrider on the Atari 5200 is really good. It’s more or less the same experience, with two key differences. From level 14 onward, red colored mines start flying in from around the side of the screen. If you don’t shoot them before they reach the bottom of the screen, they can move one channel over. In a game where you only have five channels to move and there’s more than one obstacle that can clog up a channel, that’s a pretty tough enemy to deal with. Shooting them neutralizes the “move a channel over” part, but they’re still on the playfield, and since they enter the playfield at the midway point, you’re always cutting it close. Combine that with another mine type missing from the 2600 version that forces you to move in the opposite direction it’s moving in, and this should be a MUCH harder game, right?

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Well, no. Remember the whole “generous with extra lives?” bit from the 2600 game? The 5200 is even more generous. It wasn’t rare for the game to spit out two lives in a single level, and I think once it even did three. Unless I didn’t notice that I changed level because I completely zoned out while I was playing it. That’s possible. As expected, the Atari 5200 version plays a little slower than the 2600 version. This is especially true of the mothership moments. It’s really hard to shoot them down in the 2600 version, especially after ten levels. The timing is completely different in the Atari 5200 version, not just for how fast the missiles you fire at the mothership travel, but how long it takes for the mines to clear, giving you a clean shot at it. Slower speeds is a trademark of the 5200, but Beamrider is one of the few games better for it. Finally, I should note that I had my best rounds when I used a keyboard instead of a game controller. By far my most common death was overshooting my movement, something I didn’t do on a keyboard. Would THIS have been better with the floppo 5200 stick? So far, Beamrider is one of the best 5200 games I’ve played. Maybe the best. It’s in the discussion. I could see how someone might think it takes too long to build up if you play on the normal difficulty, but I’m fine with it. This scales perfectly, and the absurd amount of extra lives eventually feel just right.
Verdict: YES!

Beat ‘Em & Eat ‘Em (and various other X-rated VCS games)
Platform: Atari 2600
Year: 1982
Designed by Joel H. Martin
Published by Mystique

This isn’t adult entertainment. It’s satire. It’s a parody. Just, not a very good or funny parody. Also, sorry for the censorship, not that anything looks like it should. The actual game is a very poor version of Kaboom! Nobody ever bought these seeking quality games. A round of Beam ‘Em & Eat ‘Em lasts about ten seconds, and that’s how long it’s funny.

Alright, let’s get this over with. Have you ever heard of Rule 34? I found the exception to that, and it’s ironically the games that are seemingly designed with the intention of being erotic for the Atari 2600. Nobody has ever gotten off on these games. Ever. There’s a handful of these “adult” games that are neither sexy or arousing, and they’re not really fun either, meaning they fail at both as pornography and as a video game. But, there is kind of something they do succeed at, and I don’t even mean ironically. They succeed as novelties. I could totally imagine something like this being sold at a Spencer’s. Is it THAT far-fetched? The whole point of their adult novelty section is for people to buy joke or gag products you show off to friends, soak in the reaction, and then shelf until you’re visited by the next person who you feel comfortable showing that you have a somewhat depraved mind. That’s what these are. Jokes. More expensive jokes than, say, a pack of genitalia-shaped breath mints called “Peckermints” (yes, this is a real thing) but jokes nonetheless. So, actually, I get what they were REALLY aiming for with these, and had they gotten distribution in a place like Spencer’s instead of going the adult store route, they might have been successful. Oh, as games? No. They suck. But, I get it.
Verdict: NO!

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Planet of the Apes and The Alligator People (Atari 2600 Reviews)

April 14, 2024 by 2 Comments

The Alligator People
Platform: Atari 2600
Unreleased Complete (?) Prototype
Designed by John Russel
Non-Publisher: 20th Century Fox
NEVER BEEN RELEASED

Planet of the Apes
Platform: Atari 2600
Unreleased Nearly Completed Prototype
Designed by John Marvin
Non-Publisher: 20th Century Fox
NEVER BEEN RELEASED

This was originally going to be part of Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – The Definitive Review Part Three, but I have a lot to say about 20th Century Fox’s Atari output.

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I decided to lump these two games together because they’re spiritually married to each other for the most bizarre reason. Based on a low budget sci-fi film from 1959, Alligator People was discovered by a game collector in 2002. Apparently, this came as an incredible shock to the Atari community, because they thought they’d already had found Alligator People years earlier. It turned out, the game that everyone thought was Alligator People was really Planet of the Apes, another nearly completed but unreleased 20th Century Fox game. Having played the two games, I can’t believe anyone could confuse one for the other, but they did have a valid reason: the prototype cartridge that Planet of the Apes was housed in was labeled “Alligator People.” Even though nothing resembling an alligator is in Planet of the Apes, this is the Atari VCS we’re talking about, where everything is a little abstract. I imagine this situation was the gaming equivalent of a Rorschach test. “I see.. alligators? I guess?” The theory is that the designer grabbed the nearest EPROM cart handy, which happened to be a cart that previously housed a build of Alligator People. Who knew the confusion that would eventually cause?

It’s not much to look at, but this is actually a pretty good game. More importantly, the groundwork for a better game is laid here. I’d really like to see someone remake this “collect antidote, avoid moving walls and enemies, then cure people” action game concept. I’m not joking. With more elegant wall movement patterns and better enemies, this could be an all-time great action game. It feels like that potential is there.

Apparently, poor focus test results with children killed Alligator People before it was sent to manufacturing, possibly because it was too easy for them. Huh? If 20th Century Fox was using little kids for focus testing, they made a grave error in judgment. First off, the game isn’t easy. You can turn on infinite lives by toggling the switches, but as the game progresses, it does get a lot harder. I suspect the kids who played it weren’t interested in it because it was based on a movie they’d never heard of. Alligator People is one of the better unreleased 2600 prototypes I’ve played, but I doubt a preteen from that era would like it. It’s an arcade shooter where you have to cure six people who are slowly transforming into alligators. You have to run around and collect S icons which represent “serum” and little dots, which represent the antidote doses. The serum increases the potency of the antidote, though the effect seems subtle. There’s six people that are changing, and you have to shoot them with the antidote until the word CURED appears in their place. As you do this, alligators come out the sides of the screen. When you shoot these alligators, they die. Pretty basic stuff, right?

At the start of stages, where the humans are at the earliest stage of their transformation, you can probably clear an entire side out with minimal bullets and serum upgrades.

The big twist is that the walls move and are capable of crushing you. It doesn’t seem random as there’s a pattern to it, but even after an hour I had trouble predicting when would be a good time to make my moves or not. In later stages, you have to move fast if you lose a life. Otherwise, you will die almost immediately from getting squashed by the walls. The other twist is that, while serum icons constantly spawn, the antidote bullets don’t refresh unless you’ve collected every one of them. Sometimes, you’ll find yourself needing several rounds to cure a person, and might have to wait quite a while before you’re able to grab the last antidote on the screen and get ten more rounds to appear. As frustrating as it is, it actually does make for an intense action game. Wisely, only your shots fired on the six target humans will deplete your antidote stock. You can shoot the alligators that roam the level without draining your inventory. SMART. That’s something you wouldn’t expect from an Atari game, especially in a prototype.

Yep, I’m dead here.

There’s still some roughness that I imagine would still have made it into the final release, as I have no idea how they would be able to polish it out. More than once, I got stuck on the corner of a wall, unable to move despite having a wide open space all around me. It’s also really hard to keep track of where the enemy alligators are. Finally, there’s no fail condition for transforming humans. If they make it all the way to the alligator form, that just means you need more bullets to turn them back. It could have been a spinning plate element, but given the fact that sometimes you have to wait a LONG time for a clearing, both for grabbing the last doses of the antidote and for a clear shot to cure the humans, maybe they were especially wise to not have the humans act as a ticking clock. If you wish, you can partially cure a human, but if left alone, they’ll keep right on with the transformation. Overall, this is a VERY good action game. Maybe not quite up to the level of greatness, but a solid, enjoyable and highly original arcade experience. It sucks that it never came out. It has cult hit written all over it, and to a higher degree of many would-be cult Atari VCS releases that didn’t pan out like Halloween or Journey: Escape.

This is supposed to be the famous “DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL” scene from Planet of the Apes. It just doesn’t work, does it?

Planet of the Apes is a completely different beast. It feels sort of like a more action-oriented version of the Lost Woods sequence from the original Legend of Zelda. Or, it would if it was actually hard to find your way around. Playing the role of Charlton Heston, you have to mostly move south while shooting, or avoiding, two of the three types of enemies as you make your way to the Statue of Liberty. And yes, I said two of the three. The smallest of the three can’t capture you, damage you, or impede your progress in any way. Whether or not that was intended to carry-over into the final release, I don’t know. I suspect the enemies weren’t entirely finalized, and I base that hunch on the ridiculous scoring system.

Top to bottom: medium ape, medium ape, small ape, big ape, medium ape. Oh, and me-ape. Apparently they’re supposed to be chimpanzees (small), orangutans (medium) and gorillas (large).

Shooting the smallest ape gives you 3 points. The medium sized ones give 200 points, while the biggest ones, which also shoot at you and drain two of your health points, score only 42 points. Why would the most dangerous apes be worth a little over 20% of the value of the non-projectile-firing medium apes? There’s no way this was intended to be the final scoring system. It’s complete nonsense that eliminates the thrill of high scores from the game because the scoring isn’t based on the challenge. But it gets even worse than that, too. The large apes only shoot up and down, and while in theory that means they make shooting the other enemies more challenging since you have to dodge bullets, that requires the shooters to be on the screen to create the danger element. They often aren’t. Even on higher difficulty settings, the enemies have no attack patterns besides running across the screen in a straight line. It’s too easy to just park in one spot and pick them off as they spawn for easy points. They tend to spawn in the same spots, so not only is the points system broken, but it’s fish in a barrel, or apes as it were. This could have been fixed in so many ways, from limiting YOUR ammo to having your life drain if you stay on any screen too long. Maybe it’s unfinished, or maybe the design is just bad. That’s the rub with reviewing a prototype: you can’t know. In the case of Planet of the Apes, my gut tells me it was never going to get that complex.

L = your life remaining and E = escapes, which is how many times you’re allowed to fall into a pit (there’s pits, though thankfully they’re nothing like those from E.T.) or be caught by the apes but escape from the cage. Unlike Alligator People, Planet of the Apes couldn’t have been released in the state it’s in. Now, how close it was to being ready is up for debate, but there was enough here for me to render a verdict on.

I can only play the version that I have, and because of the poor scoring balance and shoddy action, the game has to stand on its adventure elements, and it can’t. The majority of the game is just about moving from the top of the screen to the bottom. Sometimes you have to walk around trees. Sometimes you have to cross a river. But it’s mostly just walking down. If you get caught by one of the medium/large apes, you get taken to a village where you have to use one of your limited escapes (you just press the action button) to get out of the cage. From there, you have to.. let me check my notes.. oh right, move down several screens. In fact, it’s only when you reach the caves that you have to move in a direction other than down. Your health slowly drains while in the caves, but since you’re passing into the “forbidden zone” from the film, there’s no apes to fight.

Also your character is tripping balls on acid in the caves. That explains the health depletion. Actually, it’s funny I joked about the Rorschach test because that kind of looks like one, doesn’t it? I see.. a string bikini with love handles and sagging boobs. Oh don’t look at me like that. YOU SEE IT TOO, DAMNIT!

What happens next is supposed to depend on if you ever got caught and sent to the village. If you were never caught, you have to move down a screen, left a screen, and down a screen. If you are caught, it’s down a screen, left a screen, then down two screens. But actually, I found that I usually had to move down, left, and then down twice no matter what. When you reach the Statue of Liberty, the screen flashes dramatically as you realize it was Earth all along, then you start over from the beginning and just repeat the same sequence of navigation. So, it’s not exactly a maze game. It’s completely possible that there were bigger plans, but this prototype is pretty far along and the gameplay is really underwhelming. Unless they added a compass and randomized the pathway to the Statue of Liberty, this never had potential to be a good game. No matter how many laps you do, the path to the ending is the same every time. Lame.

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Planet of the Apes was cancelled after designer John Marvin left 20th Century Fox’s game development wing shortly before they exited the market. So, we’ll never really know if this could have been a good game, right? Nah, we know. This was dead on arrival whether or not it was released. It doesn’t do anything right except kind of, sort of mimic the set-pieces from the film. While I still believe that gamers today should have legal access to it, it’s hardly a tragedy that Planet of the Apes was cancelled. But Alligator People not releasing is a crying shame. It’s a fresh take on a tired genre, and that was a rarity in the follow-the-leader world of Atari 2600 games. Now, the real question is who is the genius that thought it would be a good idea to base an early 80s Atari game on an obscure 1959 movie that was a throw-in double feature with Return of the Fly? At least Planet of the Apes is a famous, and timeless, motion picture with set pieces that lend themselves to gaming. But Alligator People? Really? That’s just the tip of the iceberg of 20th Century Fox’s head-scratching Atari lineup. In Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include – The Definitive Review Part Three, I’ll be looking at games based on M*A*S*H*, Fantastic Voyage, and even the teen sex comedy Porky’s. Yes, really.

Fun for all ages.

So, why do these games exist at all?

During the 80s and 90s, media execs tended to believe that video games were lowbrow entertainment that required no talent to produce. It was easy money. Just tell the suit in charge of your media conglomeration’s game division to make a cartridge based on whatever media property springs to mind. The nerds being paid slave wages who work under the suit push a few buttons on a computer, and out pops a multi-million-dollar profit that your board of directors doesn’t understand the appeal in at all, but golly do they sure love the money it makes. I mean, that’s really not far from the truth of what their attitude was. They didn’t comprehend that actual artistry was involved, especially at the start of the home gaming era. It was hogwash to them. A children’s fad made by sloven computer nerds. Not real entertainers like recording artists or film makers. Dweebs sitting at a keyboard writing computer code. Nothing more, and certainly not art. That’d be like saying Scrabble or Monopoly is art, and we know they ain’t, therefore video games aren’t either. But they sure made a lot of money and they were fine with that aspect. That’s why all the big Hollywood players bailed on gaming at the first sign of market trouble. Warner Bros. Fox. Universal. All of them. They didn’t think twice about a possible rebound. They couldn’t have even if they wanted to, because they didn’t have a clue what they had with their game divisions. They never did to begin with.

Never mind the test of time for just a moment. Spare a thought for gamers of the Atari era. For the most part, they were at the mercy of management who just didn’t f’n get it. Who would look at something like this screenshot and, no matter how much money it made for them, roll their eyes and say “whatever.” While it was inevitable quality games would make their way to the market, it also assured an environment where players would be bombarded with low quality games from media companies trying to strike while the iron was hot, a metaphor that only works if you expect that iron to eventually cool. While the business was cynical, the results weren’t always. The company who made the Veg-o-Matic published games under the Xonox label, and those games felt ambitious, like Robin Hood, pictured above. Their games weren’t actually good, but the effort was there.

Think about it. After the Atari 2600 blew up, Warner Bros. had earnings and profits that were almost entirely Atari-based in 1982, but their executives still promised a five-week turnaround on E.T. because they had no clue how much effort a good game requires. Hell, they didn’t even know what a good game was and wouldn’t have been able to tell apart good ones from bad ones, even if they played them. As far as they were concerned, kids were idiots and would buy anything if it had the right branding on it. They even had evidence of that. Warner Bros. had pre-sold between three to four million copies of Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 on name recognition alone, before the first piece of code had been written. The sales proved to them it didn’t matter that the actual game had only a passing resemblance to the arcade hit. This reinforced everything the executives believed. They got the rights to Pac-Man, they told their game people to make a cart of it, and that cart went triple platinum. At that moment, it must have felt like they had a license to print money. That the actual Pac-Man 2600 game was so badly done that it was like unleashing a wrecking ball on Atari’s reputation was beyond their scope of comprehension. It was a cartridge that said Pac-Man and played a video game with ghosts and dots. What more do you people want?

Did kids actually watch M*A*S*H*? The film or the TV show? Doesn’t aiming a game at grown-ups like M*A*S*H* or Porky’s contradict using children in focus testing on games like Alligator People? Did anyone in charge at 20th Century Fox ever pause for one goddamned moment to think about their circular logic?

And mind you, Warner Bros. did better than most, likely on account of having more skin in the game. Atari made the hardware that played the games, while everyone else was riding their coattails. 20th Century Fox had a lot less limitations to work with. I have a hunch that some exec at Fox said “we’re in the game business now!” and went down their film and television catalog identifying what properties they owned that they could sprinkle fairy dust on and turn into one of them newfangled electronic games the kids were raving about. “I saw Alligator People with the girl I was going steady with 23 years ago! I got to second base, therefore I loved that movie, and therefore kids today will love it!” What a coincidence that, of the hundreds of B movies made over the years, they just so happened to pick one that would appear early in an alphabetical list. I’m sure this type of thing happened constantly. That’s what happens when old, out of touch people who mostly make films for grown-ups are tasked with green lighting video games designed mostly for younger people. Gottlieb made a Three Stooges arcade game. Nintendo made Popeye. Famous, recognizable properties, yes, and the games turned out pretty good. But, were they properties that were popular with kids of the 1980s? Not from what I’ve heard. Knowing about something and being INTO something are totally different.

Can you even guess what famous media property this is supposed to be? It’s Flash Gordon, which I will review in Part Three of the Games They Couldn’t Include. This is the one 20th Century Fox adaptation that DOES make a little sense, since a Flash Gordon film had come out in 1980. Of course, while it made a global profit, it bombed badly in America and again leads to the “out of touch” vibe I get from most licensed games from this era.

So, I have a theory: executives who had no interest in games were still ordering games for themselves. Never to be played or anything like that. God no. Games are for kids. But, they could then brag to their chums at the country club “you know them Atari doohickeys the kids play on the TV? I just greenlit a M*A*S*H* game for them!” A media executive in 1983 couldn’t crow to his golfing foursome that he greenlit a game based on Inspector Gadget. His friends wouldn’t have any clue what that was. But, do you know what they’d all heard of? Fantastic Voyage! They’d seen it when they were young. Then they’d have a laugh, exchange slaps on the back and go back to their putting. Who gives a crap if there’s no audience for a game based on Fantastic Voyage? Games are hot and kids will buy anything, right? Besides, if the kids don’t recognize it, do you know who will? Their parents, who will gravitate towards their familiarity, their children’s interests be damned. Did it work? Obviously not, as that mentality crashed the game industry. The shame is, sometimes it left really good games in a smoldering crater. I can’t imagine a child in 1983, or even their parents, would have cared at all about a game based on a terrible B movie like Alligator People. But, at the end of the day, we’ll never know, will we? A really good game never got released, and nobody is better off for that.
Planet of the Apes Verdict: NO!
The Alligator People Verdict: YES!

Special Thanks to AtariProtos.com. Honestly, without their incredible library, I wouldn’t be able to do reviews of prototypes. They are such a wealth of information and everyone should check it out, even if it’s heartbreaking to see so many games that were finished but never got a release.

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