Categories
...at home 1 Button 2006 5 quarters (5 stars) Action Strategy Homebrews Joystick M Odyssey2 PackratVG.com Shooting At Enemies with Voice

Mr. Roboto!

Mr. Roboto!Buy this gameThe Game: Robots, commanded by the CPU which is in turn commanded by you, take up positions on a battlefield grid. The two opposing armies converge, and if two robots lae square, the action zooms in on that portion of the battlefield so the two can fight it out. When one robot’s energy is exhausted by the other’s attacks or by coming into contact with energy pulses bouncing around the arena, that robot is forfeited and the action returns to the grid. The CPUs can transmit viruses to any enemy robot on the grid, stealing half of that robot’s speed or hit points, or halting it altogether. Robots can attack the enemy CPU, but the CPU has a more robust defensive mechanism at its disposal than the average robot… (Ted Sczcypiorski [published by Packrat Video Games], 2006)

Memories: Yet another Odyssey2 homebrew is charting impressive new territory for a classic console that many consider to be underpowered. And yet, what we have here in Mr. Roboto! is essentially Archon – a classic computer game that didn’t appear on a console until the NES. And yet here it is running on one of the 8-bit era’s underdogs, and running quite nicely, thank you very much. [read more]

Categories
1 Button 2007 5 quarters (5 stars) Action Strategy Homebrews Joystick Odyssey2 P PackratVG.com

Puzzle Piece Panic

Puzzle Piece Panic!The Game: Interconnecting puzzle pieces are spewed out of the sky by the Tetrad Ejection Device (T.E.D.) and drift down the screen in a pre-defined area. You can rotate them for better placement (or at least rotate them to achieve the least worst effect); filling an Buy this gameentire horizontal line clears that line and lowers the amount of clutter left on the screen. As more lines are cleared, the pieces fall faster – and it doesn’t get any easier for you to catch up. (Ted Szczypiorski / PackratVG.com, 2007)

Memories: It doesn’t take a master’s degree to see that this game is clearly a version of Tetris for the almost 30-year-old Odyssey2 console, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. Puzzle Piece Panic is a combination of a great game with a fond tribute to the finest Magnavox/Philips tradition of changing the name and some minor details to create a “near-beer” version of a popular title. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit to having had a hand in some of these homages to the hyperbolic Magnavox marketing style, including the game’s name.) [read more]

Categories
1 Button 2008 5 quarters (5 stars) Atari 2600 VCS AtariAge.com Game Systems Homebrews Joystick L Shooting At Enemies Slide & Shoot (i.e. Space Invaders) Special Vertical Scrolling

Lead (Atari 2600)

Order this gameThe Game: Players pilot a ship barrelling relentlessly down an enclosed tunnel. Turning around simply isn’t an option, and through various stages the player has to blast away at everything in sight, avoid everything in sight, and catch objects without blasting them. This all probably sounds easy, but the tunnels are rather twisty, and the ship is picking up speed constantly.

Memories: Bearing some resemblance to certain stages of games like Vanguard, Lead may not be the most original shoot-’em-up, but it’s one of the most addictive. With the Vanguard-inspired ability to keep exploring once the game has ended (at, naturally, the cost of zeroing out your score), Lead certainly has depth. But, strange as it may sound, the game’s audio makes it a whole different beast. An organically evolving techno beat pulses in the background, its rhythm and melody influenced by the player’s actions and performance. [read more]

Categories
...on computers 2010 5 quarters (5 stars) Action Adventure BBC Collecting Objects D European Import First-Person Home Computer System IBM PC Keyboard Mouse

Doctor Who: The Adventure Games, Episode 1 – City Of The Daleks

The Game: Promising to take his time-traveling sidekick Amy Pond to London in 1963, the Doctor is shocked when the TARDIS actually gets there – and London, and the rest of Earth, is in ruins. The human race is extinct and the Daleks have taken over. Completely unarmed (except for the Doctor’s trusty sonic screwdriver), the Doctor and Amy have to avoid the unstoppable Dalek patrols, make their way back to the TARDIS, and do whatever it takes – no matter the risk – to defeat the Daleks and set history back on its proper course. This means setting the TARDIS on a course for the heart of Dalek power: Kaalann, the capitol city of the Dalek planet Skaro. (BBC, 2010)

Buy this gameMemories: Offered for free in the UK and Wales (and for a fee everywhere else), Doctor Who: The Adventure Games not only sets out to bring an interactive component to the spectacularly revived long-running British science fiction series, but it also aims to make the games an official part of the show’s ongoing story, and tries to stick to the underlying premise of the series – namely, that the Doctor employs wits and words in lieu of weapons. And for the first time in the history of the franchise, we have, in City Of The Daleks, a game that succeeds spectacularly on all of these fronts. [read more]

Categories
1 Button 2011 5 quarters (5 stars) Atari 7800 AtariAge.com Controller Game Systems Homebrews Joystick M Publisher / Manufacturer Rating Shooting At Enemies Slide & Shoot (i.e. Space Invaders) Special Style Title Begins With Year

Moon Cresta

1 min read

Moon CrestaThe Game: As commander of the three-stage fighter rocket Moon Cresta, your job is to ward off endless varieties of evasively weaving space attackers. Every time you knock out two consecutive screens of assailants, you’ll have an opportunity to dock your ship to another one of Moon Cresta’s three stages, until all three portions of the ship are combined to create one bad-ass weapons platform. But you can also lose stages very quickly, ending your game – a bigger ship makes a bigger and easier target. (AtariAge.com, 2011)

Memories: Quite simply one of the most superb arcade-to-console ports ever made on an Atari platform, whether cranked out professionally or as a homebrew, Moon Cresta is a knockout on the Atari 7800. [read more]

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2015 5 quarters (5 stars) Atari 7800 AtariAge.com Controller Game Systems Homebrews Joystick K Maze Publisher / Manufacturer Rating Retro Remakes Special Style Title Begins With Year

K.C. Munchkin

1 min read

K.C. MunchkinThe Game: As a small blue spherical creature whose sole sensory organs consist of two eyes, two antennae and an enormous mouth, you are on a mission to eat twelve dots which are floating around a small maze. Pursuing you are three multicolored jellyfish-like horrors who will gobble you up on contact. (AtariAge.com, 2015)

Memories: The Atari 7800 was the Rip Van Winkle of the classic console world. Put into deep freeze by the incoming Tramiel administration, the 7800 was awoken by that same management regime when the whole “Atari does computers now, not video games” strategy didn’t work out; when the 7800 – developed and market tested in 1984 – was revived, it was thrust into a late-‘80s world where it had the more powerful Nintendo Entertainment System for competition. [read more]

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1 Button 2015 5 quarters (5 stars) Atari 2600 VCS AtariAge.com Controller Game Systems Homebrews Joystick Maze Publisher / Manufacturer R Racing Rating Special Sports Style Title Begins With Year

Rally

RallyThe Game: As the driver of a high-powered race car, you rocket around corners and down straightaways, trying to pick up every yellow flag in the maze-like course and avoiding deadly collisions with pursuing red cars. Watch out for rocks and oil spills, and use your smokescreen only when necessary to distance yourself from the red cars. (AtariAge.com, 2015)

Memories: Now that there’s a homebrew version of Rally-X, I find myself wondering why this didn’t happen back in the day? Especially if Atari and Namco had “an arrangement” (one which, famously, landed the home console rights to Pac-Man in Atari’s lap). [read more]

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2 Buttons 2017 5 quarters (5 stars) Action Strategy Atari 5200 Controller Game Systems Homebrews Joystick Keypad Maze Rating Shooting At Enemies Special Style Title Begins With V Year

Venture

VentureThe Game: Trapped in a maze full of HallMonsters, you are adventurer Winky, on a mission to snatch incredible treasures from hazardous underground rooms inhabited by lesser beasts such as re-animated skeletons, goblins, serpents, and so on. Sometimes even the walls move, threatening to squish Winky or trap him, helpless to run from the HallMonsters. The deeper into the dungeons you go, the more treacherous the danger – and the greater the rewards. Just remember two things – the decomposing corpses of the smaller enemies are just as deadly as the live creatures. And there is no defense – and almost never any means of escape – from the HallMonsters. (unreleased prototype, 2017)

Memories: There may be nothing quite as bittersweet as an unreleased prototype that turns out to be awesome, we gladly would’ve paid full retail for it back in the day had it ever gone to market. It’s not that it was hard to find a good port of Venture back in the day – there was an excellent port on Colecovision and a more than passable version for the Atari 2600. [read more]