And you thought we were done with sports games! Nope, there’s a few more… only a few more though, including a couple from Mattel’s “M Network” label, where they ported Intellivision classics to Atari 2600.
Super Challenge Baseball for Atari 2600 is a port of the Intellivision’s Major League Baseball, a game which paid up for the MLB license and then didn’t use any player names, likenesses or team names. You can understand why they dropped the licensing for subsequent rereleases. It’s a two-player only game, so I recruit my long-suffering wife to suffer some more with me.
Screaming Wings for Atari 8-bit was an excellent clone of Capcom’s arcade classic 1942, complete with loop-the-loops, a Lockheed Lightning under the player’s control and some satisfying gameplay.
Screaming Wings for Atari ST, meanwhile, is probably one of the worst shoot ’em ups on the system, since it abandoned almost everything that made the 8-bit version good and instead produced a steaming pile of pap whose only real redeeming feature is its use of digitised sound effects.
Zenji for Atari 8-bit is an early Activision game I’d never heard of — I’m surprised, since I thought I’d stumbled across all of their work from the early days of video gaming at one point or another.
I’m doubly surprised, since Zenji is a really good game! It’s a fun puzzler where certain elements will feel familiar to fans of Pipe Mania and its numerous imitators, but with its own distinctive twist that makes it stand out as something truly original.
Yep, here we are again with Super Breakout, this time for Atari 5200. This was the pack-in game for the system for quite some time, and left a fair few people rather underwhelmed — the system was certainly capable of better.
That said, it’s still a competent enough version of Super Breakout, and comes complete with all the different ways to play you’d expect from that game. There are certainly far worse ways to spend your time with your Atari 5200!
Sometimes, the concept of something is sound, but the execution is disastrous. Such is the case with Impressions’ Renaissance, ostensibly a collection of classic arcade games with “enhanced” contemporary versions.
Unfortunately, an absolute mass of broken promises set by both the packaging and the manual makes this an enormously disappointing package that, quite rightly, still makes people surprisingly but understandably furious to this day.
When contemplating video game history, an important side of things that often gets overlooked or ignored is the public domain sector.
Here, programmers would put together often very good pieces of software, release them into the wild for free and be perfectly happy for people to distribute them as they saw fit. Such is the case with this week’s game XPoker, which was originally released via a bulletin board system, and subsequently found itself getting into the hands of all sorts of people.
Super Breakout for Atari 2600 is one of the best adaptations of the classic block-breaker out there — and much more fun than the arcade version due to its far more reasonably sized paddles!
It also plays host to a spectacularly overblown and completely unnecessary narrative setup. Because when you’re knocking bricks out of a wall, what you really need is some sort of narrative motivation, right?
Time for something a bit different today! The Atari ST plays host to a variety of excellent applications as well as games, many of which are still well worth your time today. So let’s take a look at some of them every so often!
Quartet is a four-channel sample sequencer and synthesiser by Microdeal. It was well-regarded for its ease of use and flexibility, and was used by a wide variety of composers in both the commercial and demo scenes. It’s not hard to see why — a little effort can produce some surprisingly excellent results that are a far cry from the ST’s usual pitiful warblings!
The Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics may be going on at the time of writing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy some winter sports action from 33 years ago!
Tynesoft’s Winter Olympiad ’88 was a well-regarded release for Atari 8-bit despite its relatively limited number of playable events. Despite releasing Summer Games on the Atari 8-bit, Epyx had decided to eschew the platform for its follow-up Winter Games, so many critics and consumers alike saw Winter Olympiad ’88 as a more than acceptable substitute.
People complain these days when a sequel is too similar to its predecessor.
Count yourself lucky you didn’t fall for Atari’s 1988 release of Super Baseball, then, which is actually just a very slightly tweaked version of RealSports Baseball from the early ’80s. Complete with all the flaws of that original version, plus a pretty much impenetrable difficulty wall in single-player mode.
