Tag Archives: Atari A to Z

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It’s been a fun, busy and productive week around the MoeGamer network!

We kicked off the week with a bizarre PS2 driving game and a new episode of The MoeGamer Podcast, continued with a collaborative post in conjunction with Luminous Mongoose of Otaku Essays and Analyses, and wrapped things up with the next installment of the current Cover Game feature: the Project Zero series. And in the lands of Atari, we stormed a Nazi fortress and punched some bad dudes in the fa– wait, that’s something else, isn’t it?

Hit the jump to see what you might have missed this week!

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Atari A to Z: Into the Eagle’s Nest

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Let’s shoot some Nazis!

Pandora’s Into the Eagle’s Nest, first released in 1987, is an early example of the “stealth” subgenre of action adventure, with elements of survival horror, such as resource management. Interestingly, its Atari 8-bit port followed a year after its initial release — which included 16-bit platforms such as the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga — when Atari decided it would make an excellent game for their last-ditch effort at pushing the 8-bit range, the hybrid computer-console XE Games System or XEGS.

It’s an interesting game with some cool twists on the usual top-down action-adventure formula… and hordes of Nazis just waiting for you to mow them down. Just make sure you aim properly.

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Hello everyone! It’s the weekend again, so hurrah for that.

Chris and I have spent the afternoon recording a new episode of the MoeGamer Podcast, so watch out for that on Monday, all being well. This episode’s subject is classic Konami — we had great fun recording this one, so we hope you enjoy listening!

As always, there’s been a bunch of happening on the site and around my other projects this week, so hit the jump and catch up on anything you might have missed.

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Atari ST A to Z: Chase

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Deep in the seventh galaxy of the Nebulus system, a lone warrior has been selected from thousands to perform an unenviable task: to save the beautiful Princess Chardonnay from the clutches of the evil Disgusmatrons.

Thus begins the rather overblown story to Mastertronic’s Chase, an Atari ST title shamelessly attempting to ride the coat-tails of the popular Star Wars arcade game with its transparent vector graphics and arcade-style thrills.

As with most titles from the era, the story was completely and utterly irrelevant… but that didn’t mean that the game experience itself was lacking. On the contrary, despite the game’s simplicity and its rather bare-bones presentation, Chase is an oddly addictive little affair I still enjoy booting up for the occasional blast-and-dodge session even today!

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Atari A to Z: Henri

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Today’s Atari 8-Bit game shows us that even back in the 1980s, programmers weren’t above churning out something just to make a quick buck.

Enter Henri by one Adam Billyard, a developer who would later go on to produce great things for The English Software Company — specifically the technically stunning (but exceedingly irritating) racer Elektra Glide, and the well-animated one-on-one fighting game Chop Suey.

At the time he put out Henri, however, he was just trying to scrape together enough money for his air fare to get home. The result was a competent, if relatively unremarkable Mr. Do! clone. I hope you like the sound of Bach…

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Hello again everyone! Hope you’ve all had a pleasant weekend and are enjoying the cosiness that the onset of autumn brings.

I’ve been busting my ass trying to beat Evenicle and it’s taken a little longer than I anticipated, but as I write this, I’m on the final chapter and closing in on the actual ending, so we’ll wrap things up once and for all with one more article either later today or (more likely) tomorrow.

After that we’ll be moving on to spooky funtimes for October with the Project Zero series, also known as Fatal Frame. But what else went on this week? Well, hit the jump and let’s review.

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Atari ST A to Z: Beyond the Ice Palace

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I never played this game back in the day, but it was one of those titles you saw all over the place in the early days of the ST.

Throughout the ST’s lifespan, it played host to a variety of different bundle packages, many of which were extremely generous in terms of the number of games and applications they included. Beyond the Ice Palace was a regular inclusion in such bundles, and as such became reasonably well-known.

Loosely inspired by action platformers such as Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Beyond the Ice Palace sees your green-booted, gender-ambiguous hero(ine?) battling their way through hordes of enemies and admiring how the ST’s lack of sound channels meant that a single sound effect could mess up an entire musical composition.

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Atari A to Z: Gorf

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When is a Space Invaders rip-off not a Space Invaders rip-off? When it also rips off Galaxian and Gyruss!

No, that’s unfair to poor old Gorf, an arcade game by Bally Midway that was ported to Atari 8-Bit by Roklan Software. Gorf is an entertaining and enjoyable game in its own right that most certainly has its own identity — albeit perhaps not what was originally intended.

This began life as an adaptation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, of all things, but was presumably adapted into what it eventually became after someone at Bally Midway figured that a game involving a 20-minute sequence slowly panning around a spaceship with nothing happening probably wouldn’t be that much fun. The end product was rather good… and bastard hard.

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Happy Saturday everyone! Hope your week has been good and that you’re now enjoying a nice relaxing weekend.

It’s been a busy week as always around here. Chris and I spent this afternoon recording a new podcast that should be caressing your earholes by Monday, all being well, and in the meantime there’s been lots of stuff happening both here on MoeGamer and on the other sites in my “network” of sorts.

Hit the jump for a summary of what’s been going on!

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Atari ST A to Z: Atomino

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First released in 1985, Atari’s ST range of 16-bit computers were the official follow-ups to the 8-Bit range.

Over their eight years on the market, they saw a variety of weird and wonderful games, as developers were provided with greater graphical fidelity and faster processing speeds… even if the ST’s Yamaha YM2149 PSG sound chip was technically inferior to the POKEY chip of the 8-bit range!

Let’s kick off our exploration of the ST’s extensive and varied library with Atomino, a 1990 release developed by Blue Byte and published by Psygnosis. This is a science-themed puzzle game in which you build molecules from atoms in increasingly complicated circumstances!

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