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.
Ah, the Spectrum. Legend of the 1980s gaming scene in the UK — and the mortal enemy of Atari fans like myself. Unfortunately, the fact that fanboyism goes all the way back to the earliest days of gaming means that I missed out on a lot of interesting games back in the day — that changes now!
The first of an occasional dalliance in the ZX Spectrum’s library on Retro Select is Mad Nurse, a simple but enjoyable arcade-style game released on Firebird’s £1.99 budget label. It was described as “one of the sickest games ever released” by Computer & Video Games, and involves dead babies. So that’s fun!
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!
The Simple 2000 series for PlayStation 2 remains a continual source of fascination for me — particular as a surprising number of these odd games made it west via 505 GameStreet.
Deep Water, also known as The Daikaijuu, is an open-world game about pootling around in your boat blasting sharks and cannon-toting pirates. Supposedly there are also sea monsters, too, but I couldn’t figure out how to find them…
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?
It’s the Olympics! Given that the Tokyo 2020 Olympics are… somewhat lacking in atmosphere due to understandable circumstances, let’s take a look back at an Olympic games where there were actually people watching.
Eurocom’s Beijing 2008, published by Sega, is an excellent multisports game with a surprisingly substantial offering for the solo player. There’s a ton of variety, there’s character progression and there’s some solid TV-style presentation. If you’re after a fun Olympics game for an older platform, this is well worth your time.
