I love me some Qix, and it’s a game I developed quite an early fondness for thanks to the Atari 8-bit version I grew up with.
There’s an Atari 5200 version that is almost arcade-perfect available, but the Atari 8-bit edition went in a slightly different direction, making itself more distinctive and unique to the 8-bit platform in the process.
Enjoy my rusty Qix skills in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!
It’s arcade classic time today on Atari ST A to Z, with the game that supposedly popularised the idea of two-player cooperative gameplay.
Joust, originally developed by Williams for the arcade in 1982, was a well-regarded and influential game, and found itself ported to a wide variety of platforms over the years — including numerous Atari systems.
The Atari ST version showed up in 1986 — better late than never — and provided a solid adaptation of the arcade original for those who fancied some classic cooperative action on their 16-bit home computer. Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!
A fair few titles in the early days of gaming were shameless clones of other companies’ work.
Atari’s Frog Pond, a game that ended up not being released because Atari wasn’t willing to spring for a monster 8K cartridge for a “children’s game”, was a clone of Mattel’s Frog Bog for Intellivision (which ended up being ported to 2600 as Frogs and Flies), which in turn was a clone of Sega’s arcade title Frogs.
And they say originality is dead. Well, yes. It appears to have been dead for a very long time indeed! Don’t let that stop you checking out this video, though — and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.
The early days of polygonal 3D gaming were gleefully experimental, even though the technology of the time wasn’t quite up to realising the grand vision of many creators.
Infestation from Psygnosis is a particularly interesting example, as it provides a level of interactivity that we don’t tend to see even in a lot of modern games. It was certainly ambitious — though perhaps a little too obtuse for its own good at times.
Get an idea of what it’s all about from my own attempts to stumble about (and get lost in a ventilation system) in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more.
FOOTBALL! It’s time to play some FOOTBALL! YEAH!
Those of you who have been following this series for a while will be all to familiar with my general lack of experience with sports games — particularly those focusing on American sports. Despite my wife once referring to American football on camera as “shit rugby”, I hope I have at least given the impression that I am giving these games a chance!
If anything, I find the simpler, vaguer digital interpretations of sports — such as seen here in this very early American football game for Atari 2600 — a lot more palatable and understandable than the more realistic simulations we’ve had since the 16-bit era or so. So you know what? I didn’t have a terrible time playing this.
You ever play a game that you really want to like, but almost everything about it just makes it nigh-impossible to do so?
That was me with The Assembly Line’s Helter Skelter, an unusual platform game in which you control a bouncy ball and attempt to squish enemies in a preset order. Sounds simple, right?
It is very much Not Simple.
Dot-eating maze games were a staple of both early ’80s arcades and home computers from the same era, as we’ve seen a fair few times on this series already.
Nibbler, originally released into arcades by Rock-Ola, became somewhat notorious for being the first game to allow players to score more than a billion points. There’s even a documentary about various attempts to pursue this milestone over the years.
The Atari 8-bit version was actually a pretty solid conversion of the arcade game. I have no idea if you can score over a billion points in it because I’m not that good… but at least we can have a look at the basics!
Something something don’t feed them after midnight, get them wet or whatever.
Yep, Gremlins was a big ol’ thing back in the 8- and 16-bit days, and there were a fair few video game adaptations across different platforms. I think my personal favourite is the Atari 8-bit game, but that’s one of the few remaining games out there that doesn’t seem to play nice with emulation, so I’ve held off making a video on it for now.
Elite’s adaptation of Gremlins 2: The New Batch for Atari ST, meanwhile was… well, it’s not bad, but it is monstrously difficult, so good luck seeing any more than the first few screens, as I discovered while filming this!
Yep, it’s Final Legacy again — this time for the very final time, I promise!
Final Legacy’s unreleased Atari 5200 conversion forms part of the Atari Flashback Classics compilation, and thus it wouldn’t be right and proper to pass it by without appropriate acknowledgement, now, would it?
Thankfully, it’s pretty much identical to the excellent Atari 8-bit version, as opposed to Paradox Software’s dodgy, janky port for Atari ST. Once again we cast ourselves into hostile waters in an attempt to save the surviving human race from nuclear catastrophe.
Ah, golf. A good way to ruin a perfectly good walk, or something. Unless you’re playing it on your Atari 8-bit home computer, of course, in which case you don’t even have to get out of your chair!
Leader Board from Access Software wasn’t the first computerised golf game, nor was it the inventor of the power and accuracy meter system that many golf games continue to use to this day. But it did help to popularise the genre among home computer users, as well as cement a lot of conventions that have very much stood the test of time.
If you can play Everybody’s Golf, you can play Leader Board… in theory, at least. I can definitely do the former, so let’s see if the latter is true, shall we?
