Category Archives: Atari A to Z

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Fatal Run

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Wouldn’t you know it? A comet has hit the Earth, bathing the entire planet in deadly radiation that, apparently, we will have developed a “vaccine” against by the late 21st century.

Naturally, rather than attempting to organise some sort of large-scale relief effort to distribute this life-saving vaccine to the world’s population, the only possible solution to this disastrous situation is to send one dude in a machine gun-equipped car across the world and hope he knows how to assemble a rocket at the far end of his journey.

Oh, did I not mention the rocket? There’s a rocket to assemble, too. And launch codes to discover. But mostly a lot of driving and blasting anything unfortunate enough to get in your way on the road…

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Enduro Racer

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Back in the early days of home computing, you couldn’t rely on arcade game companies to provide official ports of their own games.

Nope; they tended to be farmed out to other publishers and developers who had more experience with working on the 8- and 16-bit platforms of the era. One such example of this was the relationship between Sega and Activision; this resulted in a number of Sega arcade classics getting ported to systems like the Atari ST.

Here’s Enduro Racer, one of several products of this partnership. Can the humble ST stand up to the might of this Super Scaler classic?

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Knicker Bockers

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You probably have no idea what to expect from a game with a title like “Knicker Bockers”. I didn’t really know either.

What we actually get is a surprisingly fun, if challenging, maze game that combines elements of Lock ‘n’ Chase, Pengo and a teeny tiny bit of Drelbs. It’s a good time!

Well, okay, the narrative setup for the game — which features a guy named Knick playing in a door factory while being pursued by the local toughs — perhaps needs some work… but it was the 8-bit era and no-one cared about narrative if the game was enjoyable!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Double Dunk

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I don’t “get” sports games at the best of times, but throw in the need to select “plays” before you can do anything and my comprehension of what is going on goes right out the window.

Enter Double Dunk, then; one of the latest games to be officially released for the Atari 2600, and a game which takes the “playbook” approach to two-on-two basketball.

I do not fare well with this game. I do not fare well at all. But I try, very hard!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Donald Duck’s Playground

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Growing up, I always had a certain resistance to explicitly educational games; I would much rather have been blasting aliens than doing maths problems.

However, if you were to cunningly disguise those educational components as a Sierra adventure game I would, of course, be well and truly on board. The folly of youth.

Enter Donald Duck’s Playground, then, second of the Disney/Sierra crossovers to be put together by Al “Leisure Suit Larry” Lowe, and proof if proof were needed that Sierra’s AGI engine wasn’t quite suitable for every type of game…

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Jawbreaker

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Pac-Man didn’t make it to Atari 8-bit computers until 1982, but that doesn’t mean that people were short of some dot-eating maze-based funtimes until then.

Nope; we had John Harris’ Jawbreaker, an excellent Pac-Man clone that was extremely well-received at the time of its 1981 release — and which was so uncomfortably close to Pac-Man that Atari ended up suing publisher On-Line Systems.

Atari’s suit was ultimately unsuccessful, but Harris chose to play it safe and follow up the original Jawbreaker with a successor that was less obviously based on the Namco classic. But that’s a story for another day!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Dodge ‘Em

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The dot-eating maze game formula is most readily associated with Namco’s Pac-Man — but the genre had actually been around for a while already by the time our hungry hero had made his first appearance!

Atari’s Dodge ‘Em released for Atari 2600 in 1980, providing a peculiar combination of racing, dodging and dot-eating — but this wasn’t the first one, either! Dodge ‘Em was actually a clone of a 1979 Sega arcade title called Head On.

The reasons for the Sega game’s title will become apparent very, very quickly…

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari ST A to Z: Casino Roulette

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Casino games, played solo on your home computer or console, may seem largely pointless… but they can be a good way of learning the rules or experimenting with “techniques”.

Of course, it’s a fool’s game to assume that any betting methods “work”, particularly in a game as inherently random as roulette — but if you’re playing in the comfort of your own home on your Atari ST, there’s no harm in trying a few systems for yourself, is there? Particularly when the manual is good enough to spell them out for you.

If nothing else, Casino Roulette for Atari ST allows us to appreciate quite how far speech synthesis has come in the last 30 years or so!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Interval

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Ever since the early days of computing, programmers have been finding ways to develop educational software for a variety of purposes.

One such programmer was Douglas Crockford, who was a particular fan of experimenting with the Atari 8-bit’s sound capabilities. One such experiment led to the creation of Interval, a piece of software designed to help you train your aural skills — whether you’re a musician, a teacher or simply someone with an interest in musical theory.

This is actually a really solid program that can still be of use to music teachers in the 21st Century — though quite how many still have an Atari 8-bit in their teaching space I have no idea…

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Desert Falcon

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Today’s game hails from the latter days of the 2600, and was actually an Atari 7800 launch title.

For one reason or another, Atari 7800 games rarely make it onto these compilations of old Atari stuff — though the Evercade, coming later this year, corrects this oversight somewhat — so we tend to be stuck with the technically inferior Atari 2600 versions.

That said, even the 2600 version of Desert Falcon is an unusual, interesting shoot ’em up with some peculiar mechanics — so it’s well worth checking out.

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