A late one today, as I’ve been busy recording videos for most of the weekend!
I like to try and get stuff done “ahead of time” with regard to video, as it takes time to edit, render and upload, so with a free weekend I thought I’d try and “pre-record” as many Atari A to Z and MoeGamerTV videos as I possibly could. I didn’t quite achieve everything I wanted to, but I did pretty well.
Anyway. That aside, you might have missed all sorts of goodness this week. Let’s check out what that included!
Not every retro game has stood the test of time quite as well as others. But one I think we can all agree remains just as fresh today as it was back in the day is Centipede.
Developed as a specific attempt to appeal to a broader audience than just the stereotype of young male gamers, Centipede’s bright colours, energetic gameplay, trackball controller and relatable concept made it a big hit with male and female players, both young and old.
This game was a favourite of my whole family growing up… and my mother was nigh-unbeatable at both this and its sequel Millipede!
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
Next time you get bacteria in your ilium, call me up and I’ll come blast your balls for you.
Vaxine from The Assembly Line is one of the most technically impressive games on the Atari ST, featuring gorgeous and colourful ray-traced graphics, convincing sprite scaling routines and an interesting blend of physics puzzle and first-person shoot ’em up.
Developed as a sequel to the team’s previous game E-Motion, which marketed itself as “the first New Age computer game”, Vaxine is a simple but enjoyable time that shows what Atari’s 16-bit computers were really capable of when in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing.
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
That’s a title and a half, isn’t it? Even thirty-five years after its original launch, “Attack of the Mutant Camels” is still a delightful piece of titling prowess that just rolls off the tongue.
Attack of the Mutant Camels is one of the most well-known games put out in the 8-bit era by the hairiest man in games, Jeff Minter. Based quite obviously on the Atari 2600 adaptation of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, it’s a real showcase game for what the humble Atari 8-bit was really capable of when in the hands of someone who very much knew what he was doing.
Combining Minter’s love of underappreciated animals, sci-fi, prog rock and psychedelia, Attack of the Mutant Camels may be simplistic in structure and mechanics, but it remains a beloved part of many Atari 8-bit collections with very good reason.
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
Time after time in gaming, we’ve seen that the simplest concepts can be some of the most effective and addictive.
Atari’s Canyon Bomber, originally released to arcades in 1977, is a prime example of this. You only need one button to play, and that button drops bombs. The concept is so simple anyone — even someone not at all familiar with video games — can understand and enjoy it. Drop bombs, hit things, score points. Whoever scores most points, wins.
And one of the best things about this game when compared to some of its contemporaries is that the simplistic concept means that it was very straightforward to implement a “computer-controlled” opponent to compete against if you didn’t happen to have a friend handy. So even those of us with no friends can still enjoy this game… and end up playing it a lot longer than you might expect!
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve done it! Well, we’ve done it once, anyway.
Yes, indeed, with this week’s Atari A to Z video, we finally make it all the way to Z, with Cathryn (formerly William, as seen on the title screen) Mataga’s Zeppelin, an interesting multi-directional adventure shoot ’em up in which the challenge is not just from shooting bad guys and avoiding environmental hazards, but also from navigation and item manipulation.
This is a great example of the sort of quality software publisher Synapse became well-known for, although that quality tended to come at a price — Zeppelin was a whopping $34.95 when it came out in 1983, or nearly $90 in today’s money, taking inflation into account! And if Mataga’s name is familiar, you may have come across another Synapse-published title called Shamus that I’m sure will feature on this series at some point in the near future! But that’s a story for another day…
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
Hello! How are you? The weather seems to be on the turn here and the evenings are getting a bit lighter, so the general mood seems to be lifting a bit. January sure sucks, huh.
Well, a low mood for the last month and a bit hasn’t stopped me from hammering out a whole bunch of cool stuff for you to hopefully enjoy! We’ve kicked off a new Cover Game feature, for starters, as well as several ongoing series.
Hit the jump to see what you might have missed this week.
I don’t like spiders. I do, however, absolutely LOVE Black Widow, a delightful vector-based twin-stick shooter.
In Black Widow, you play a spider trying to defend their web from all manner of incoming creepy crawlies. And, unfortunately, it seems that they are sick and tired of you doing your spidery thing, and as such are more than capable of taking you out with a single, fatal touch.
Fortunately, you aren’t just any spider. You are the Black Widow, a laser-spitting spider of doom, the kind of thing that you really wouldn’t want to find under your toilet seat when you wake up in the middle of the night to go for a dump…
Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.
Hello! It is cold. It even snowed this week, though sadly not enough to get off work. Boo and indeed hiss.
Plenty to talk about this week, however, and from next week we’ll be starting a brand new Cover Game feature on the subject of Spike Chunsoft’s sound novel 428: Shibuya Scramble. Please look forward to it!
In the meantime, hit the jump to see what you might have missed this week.
Basketball is another sport I know next to nothing about, but I know more about it than I do baseball, in that I understand how to win and what the players on the court are actually supposed to do. Therefore, I am much better equipped to comment on Atari Basketball than I was for Atari Baseball.
Atari Basketball is a simple one-on-one affair in which you and another player or the computer square off against one another and try to score more baskets than the other. That’s… pretty much it, really, but there’s something about this game that makes it surprisingly addictive.
I think it’s the controls — the original arcade machine made use of a trackball controller, which translates quite well to modern analogue devices. I can imagine a game against another human opponent getting rather frantic when standing up against the original machine — but it’s still fun here when played on the sofa with a wireless controller, or even on the go with the Switch in handheld mode.
