We’ve got another of Mattel’s “M Network” releases today, in which the company ported some of its successful Intellivision games to Atari 2600, usually in slightly simplified form.
Space Attack is a port of a game simply called Space Battle on the Intellivision, and it’s an interesting little game that incorporates very lightweight real-time strategy elements with arcade-style blasting action. It’s woefully limited in terms of longevity and replay value, sadly, but it’s worth a blast or two at least if you’ve never tried it!
The time has come once again for adventure! AtariVenture, to be exact — the Atari ST ports of Icom Simulations’ MacVentures series.
Today we’re looking at Deja Vu, a hard-boiled detective thriller in which you play Theodore “Ace” Harding, who has just woken up in a toilet with a sore arm and no memory of who he is. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
You’re asking for trouble with a name like “Quality Software” — the stuff you put out better be top-notch otherwise you’ll be at the absolute mercy of press and public alike.
Thankfully Jeepers Creepers, probably the aforementioned software house’s most well-known release, is a good game — albeit one that takes heavy cues from Konami’s Amidar. It offers speedy, enjoyable arcade action with some nice graphics and sound — and that magical addictive quality that keeps you coming back for just one more try.
Slot Racers is a game for Atari 2600 that has nothing to do with either slot cars or racing.
Instead, it’s a top-down, maze-based, vehicle-centric deathmatch game with some interesting mechanics and the bendiest cars you ever did see. It’s a fun time, though some might argue it drags on a little longer than it is welcome to.
There’s been a murder! And only you (or perhaps one of the other players) can solve it.
Yes, it’s a digital adaptation of the popular board game Cluedo, with the twist that this version is based on the Master Detective edition. It features a larger map, more characters, more possible weapons and a few tweaks to the mechanics. It also supports up to 10 players — even on Atari ST!
Type-in listings were commonplace for the 8-bit home computers, thanks to the fact that most of them booted into some variant of BASIC. And the Atari 8-bit was no exception.
More ambitious programmers would compose games in machine code or assembly language, then convert their programs into DATA statements that could be read by a BASIC program to generate an executable file on a cassette or floppy disk. Into Deep is probably one of the most ambitious examples I’ve ever seen in this regard, and it shows in the final quality.
Game developer David Crane is best-known today for his highly influential work Pitfall!, which helped define the concept of the platform game.
That’s not all he worked on back in the early days of video games, however; he also brought us Slot Machine, one of the most pointless wastes of time that the Atari 2600 had to offer — although it does at least have some nice smooth scrolling!
One of the first games I played on the Atari ST is also one of my all time favourites — it’s Elite’s excellent conversion of Tatsumi’s arcade racing game Buggy Boy, also known as Speed Buggy.
Buggy Boy is interesting in that it’s less about driving at high speed and more about negotiating ridiculous amounts of obstacles as efficiently as possible — and scoring points, of course. It still holds up very well today, and the ST version is one of the best ports.
Often, simple ideas are all you need to make a fun game work. Such is the case with Hot Lips, a straightforward but enjoyable maze game for Atari 8-bit.
In Hot Lips, all you have to do is make sure the titular giant mouth eats all the enemies and not you. Easy, right? Perhaps initially, but the longer you play, the tougher it gets!
Atelier Shallie: Alchemists of the Dusk Sea draws a number of cues from past Atelier games in terms of its overall game structure and execution — and indeed the way it does things can also be traced forward to some of Gust’s other games such as Blue Reflection.
For those who have played the previous games in the Atelier series, Atelier Shallie most closely resembles Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasmin terms of structure — though with a few twists here and there. While Gust aren’t afraid to return to what worked previously, it’s very rare that they will simply recreate it wholesale without any changes.
It’s that game structure we’ll be taking a look at in this part of our exploration of the series as a whole.
