Tag Archives: Atari

Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Yars’ Return

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For the various Atari Flashback consoles over the years, Atari included a number of “hacks” of its classic games that were decent enough to be considered full sequels.

One such example is Yars’ Return, a follow-up to Howard Scott Warshaw’s classic Yars’ Revenge. This first appeared on an Atari Flashback console in 2005 and has continued to be distributed on Flashback consoles and in compilations like Atari Flashback Classics — complete with a bug that developer Dennis Debro fixed about a decade ago — ever since. You can even buy a cart copy from Atari’s “Atari XP” initiative now, too.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Xari Arena

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Old games consoles are, as a rule, pretty good at making your ears bleed, but Xari Arena for Atari 5200 takes things to a whole other level by being one of the noisiest games you’ll ever come across.

Don’t let that put you off, though, because what we have here is a highly creative and unusual game that, sadly, never saw an official release back in the day. And that’s a real shame, because as a genuine Atari 5200 exclusive, Xari Arena stands out as an enjoyable and original game that is highly enjoyable for both solo players and pairs.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Warlords

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Sibling rivalry is a terrible thing, particularly when the siblings in question have access to a fire-breathing dragon and flame-reflecting shields. You better hope those builders you hired did a good job on the walls this time around, otherwise you’re in for a fiery evening.

Warlords is a classic four-player take on the Pong and Breakout formula that challenges players to bat a ball back and forth between four corners of a play area, knock one another’s walls down and eventually be the last one standing. It’s a beloved classic in both its arcade and 2600 incarnations — and supposedly the 2600 version was actually developed first, despite releasing later.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Moon Patrol Redux

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One of the fun things about the modern retro community is its willingness to take on common criticisms of past classics and work on those things to make them better.

Such is the case with Moon Patrol Redux, a project which takes the already pretty good version of Irem’s classic Moon Patrol for Atari 8-bit and enhances it with a better player sprite, a colour palette that’s truer to the arcade original and a few other tweaks here and there. The result is the best version of Moon Patrol you can play on the good ol’ Atari!

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Tempest

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One of the nice things about the Atari Flashback Classics collection is how it includes a bunch of previously unreleased prototypes — some of which are really great.

Tempest for Atari 2600 is unfortunately not exactly one of the great ones — but it’s an interesting one, nonetheless, largely because no-one seems to know who was responsible for it! Originally assumed to be the work of Carla Meninsky, it seems that it was actually produced by someone else after Meninsky left Atari — but no-one knows who! And no-one is in a hurry to come forward and take responsibility, either…

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: SwordQuest FireWorld

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Just… don’t. I don’t want to talk about it. I can’t. I just… please. Help me.

SwordQuest FireWorld is one of the most miserable video games I have ever played. And, as anyone who knows me well will attest, this is not something I say lightly. Forget E.T., forget Pac-Man, this is the true festering dog turd of the Atari 2600’s library.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Dark Chambers

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It’s a Dandy dungeon out there, for sure it is — and Dark Chambers marks the conclusion to one of the earliest and most notorious legal disputes in gaming.

John Palevich’s Dandy begat Ed Logg’s Gauntlet, though the former wasn’t too thrilled with the fact that the latter didn’t credit him. Then Gauntlet begat Dark Chambers, which did credit Palevich — who had also settled out of court with Atari by this point, too. And we were left with several versions of a rather entertaining Gauntlet-alike that ditched some of the annoyances of the arcade game!

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Super Baseball

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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.

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z: Vegas Jackpot

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I’ve never really seen the point of slot machine games. You don’t win anything, you don’t risk anything and the level of interaction between you and the game is minimal at best.

That didn’t stop lots of developers from putting them out in the early days of home computing, though — and in the grand scheme of things, Mastertronic and Sculptured Software’s Vegas Jackpot for Atari 8-bit is probably one of the better ones. There’s still very little reason to spend your time on this today though!

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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Atari A to Z, Videos

Atari A to Z Flashback: Sprint Master

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The term “racing game” these days is usually applied to games that unfold from a three-dimensional (or at least quasi-3D) perspective. But back in the ’80s, there were a bunch of fun top-down racers.

Sprint Master for Atari 2600 was a solid adaptation of the format that may or may not have been a conversion of Atari Games’ Super Sprint. The reason why this isn’t quite clear is because Atari Corporation (who released 2600 games) and Atari Games (who released Super Sprint) were, at this point, two separate entities with loose connections rather than simply two divisions of the same company!

Check it out in the video below, and don’t forget to subscribe on YouTube for more!

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