#with the most difficult to find rare items and the most poweful level

[neorukixart]

Here have my 2022 Art Summary while I remind you that even when I'm a pair of glasses, is thanks to the human that I wear that I am able to draw with her own hands. She spent over 15 years crafting her skills and she actually knows how to draw hands ;3

My art might not be perfect, but at least I draw it myself (the human I wear) so, your so called "AI art" can go to hell uwu

Hire real people guys, they will be more understanding than those. Don’t want to hire real people? Well great news for, you can do it yourself if you know how to pick up a pen/pencil! ;3

[antiques-for-geeks]

Atari 8-bit lucky dip (Part 2!)

If you missed part one, you can find it here.

Back once again with a selection of games that will work on my stock 16k Atari 600xl. As before, there’s a mixture of the good, the bad and...

Carnival Massacre

Thorn EMI / 1983

On no! Someone is shooting at people on fairground rides! When shot, the unfortunate victims fall to their certain death, but you can save them (from the fall if not the sucking chest wounds) by running across the bottom of the screen and catching them. Miss too many and it's game over. Despite the sicko premise, I found this one really boring. For a better example of this genre you'd be better trying Kaboom - ideally with paddles rather than with a joystick.

Castle Hassle

Roklan / 1983

Now this is an odd little game. You travel round different castle rooms as ...what looks like... a ghost. What tells me this ghost inhabits a castle? Why the title of the game of course! The rooms are fairly spartan, with simple coloured outlines as their borders. Each room contains a simple puzzle to be solved in order to collect an object. The rooms are named to give you a hint at how to solve them. By holding the fire button, aiming and releasing the ghost can fire a magic projectile which can be used to kill enemies, move things or knock holes in barriers. Once all the rooms' treasures have been collected the next level with a new set of rooms begins. If I had played this game back in the early 80's I'm sure I would have enjoyed its simple blend of puzzles and exploration, but it's a bit slow paced and basic to want to spend too much time on now.

Castles and Keys

Romox / 1983

Played out on a colourful grid, you wander around a single screen picking up keys, avoiding certain coloured tiles that will kill you instantly and avoiding arrows shot from the sides of the screen. The keys allow entry into doors to the next screen / layout. Maybe I'm missing something, but I just found this one dull.

Caverns of Mars

APX / 1981, Atari / 1982

At last, we’ve come to one of the genuine classics of the early days of the Atari 8 bit. You fly your ship down through twisting caverns to retrieve a bomb at the bottom, then fly back out before the detonation timer runs out. On the way you have to keep your fuel reserves topped up by blasting fuel silos; run out of fuel and you lose a life. The whole thing plays like a twist on Scramble with the screen orientation flipped. The graphics are simple, but appealingly chunky and colourful. Game-play is tough and addictive, though there's section where you're required to weave through a barrage of meteors (again, just like Scramble) which I found really pushed my long-untested reflexes. As well as being tough and fun, this game has an interesting history; it was written by a high school student and sent in to the Atari Program Exchange (APX), a service run by Atari themselves to allow users to distribute their home grown games. It became so popular that it was later granted a cartridge release - I remember seeing it demonstrated in a computer shop at some point in the 80's. Jeff Minter's Llamasoft published a souped-up tribute to the game called 'Caverns of Minos'*, with added game-play features, psychedelic effects and ungulates! 

* originally for IOS, sadly now only available as donation-ware for android devices.

Centipede

Atari / 1981

Blast the centipede as it makes its way through a field of mushrooms down to your 'magic wand' at the bottom of the screen. Hitting the titular insect mid body will cause it to split into multiple sections. When all sections are destroyed a new level begins with a new centipede to zap. Fleas drop from the top of the screen and leave behind new mushrooms. Spiders hop around the bottom of the screen near your wand. Scorpions travel horizontally across the screen, poisoning the mushrooms they touch; a centipede will fall directly to the bottom of the screen upon touching a poisoned mushroom. All home versions suffer slightly when playing with a joystick rather than the track-ball of the arcade version. They often replicate this by giving the wand some momentum, which I find takes some getting used to. This version *can* be played with an Atari 2600 track ball, if you're lucky enough to have one of those (sadly I'm not!). This is a good, if slightly plain looking and flickery version of the game, and well worth a play.

Chicken

Synapse Software / 1982

Another Kaboom style game where you catch eggs. It's technically OK, but I found it (egg) crushingly dull.

Choplifter

Brøderbund Software / 1982

In this conversion of a highly popular Apple 2 horizontal scroller, you blast down prison walls in your helicopter to release POW's. Once released, you can land to collect and ferry them back to home base. Collect enough to advance to the next level. Jets, tanks and missile launchers hamper your progress. As a kid I only knew of this title as a colourful SEGA arcade game, so I was most surprised to find it had been a conversion of a venerable Apple computer game all along. It's one of the rare examples of an arcade game starting life as a home effort. This version is perfectly playable but doesn't look much better than the original version, which is a shame on a machine as capable as the Atari 8-bit. There is a later (and more colourful looking) XE release, but that version requires more RAM than my humble 600xl currently sports.

Claim Jumper

Synapse Software / 1982

Playing like a more advanced version of the arcade game Boot Hill, this is two player (only?) game where each player has to collect various items from the play-field and take them to different buildings to score points. The players can blast away at each other, but cannot fire when carrying a score item. There are also hazards to be avoided such as snakes. This looks like it would be a lot of fun if I had someone to play it against!

Cloudburst

DANA / 1982

Another eccentric looking and simplistic shooter where a smiling sun turns to frowning rain clouds which drop bombs on the player. Sorry to say I gave up on this one quickly.

Computer War

Thorn EMI / 1983

This game takes a lot of its style from the 80's nuclear disaster film Wargames (still worth a watch!), and seems to be some kind of semi-official tie-in. You highlight missiles on a map with your cursor, and begin a simplistic first person sequence to shoot them down before they reach U.S. cities. The controls in the shooter section have a lot of simulated momentum, so it's difficult to draw a bead on the missiles. The atmosphere is really good here, but there doesn't seem to be enough variety to the game-play to make it compelling. Besides, surely we wanted to play Atari in 80's to take our minds off the impending nuclear holocaust?

Congo Bongo

SEGA / 1983

Messy looking conversion of SEGA's isometric Donkey Kong inspired arcade game. This is just ugly and frustrating. It’s hard to tell where the obstacles and landscape features are in relation to your explorer. I never saw the arcade machine in the wild, but I really can't imagine the idea of pseudo 3D Donkey Kong being that playable. Not worth the time.

Cosmic Life

Spinakker Software / 1983

A strange game where you control a flying saucer that can drop drop a pattern of cells on to the screen. These then start growing according to the rules that seem to be based on the game 'life'*.

The original game is an interesting toy to play with, but the mix here with more traditional game elements doesn't seem to gel at all, leaving something less than the sum of its parts.

* see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life

Cosmic Tunnels

Datamost / 1983

A multi-level game where you launch a spaceship into a warp tunnel warp, thrusting against the effects of gravity with the fire button. 

After that you get to zoom down the warp in a behind the ship view, blasting and avoiding enemy ships. 

Next up is a planet-fall stage, where you have to navigate to a landing pad, dropping bombs on defence turrets along the way. 

Once landed, you exit your ship and control your spaceman to collect some glowing treasures from the bottom of the screen. You can only collect 1 treasure at a time and have to ferry each back to the ship. There are alien / dinosaur things to be avoided, and there are a limited number of spacemen available to achieve the task. This screen was a total pig until I discovered 

1) pressing the fire button makes the spaceman move faster for a short time and 

2) there are helicopter pads around the outside of the screen that make you briefly fly over the heads of the dinos.

Once all the treasures are collected you take off again, but have to destroy all remaining defence turrets before you can re-enter the warp tunnel. 

Complete the tunnel, land on your starting pad and you can begin it all again with a different warp. The whole journey has a limited fuel allocation, consumed by by applying the ships thrusters or taking hits. Run out of fuel and THE WHOLE GAME IS OVER! 

Phew... this is actually not bad at all! The graphics are appealingly chunky and colourful, and the take-off / landing levels are like a heavily simplified take on Gravitar or Thrust.

Crossfire

Sierra On-Line / 1981

This is a single screen shooter set in a simple grid, a derivative of the 1980 arcade game ‘Targ’ by Exidy. Enemies fire at you from all sides, moving in an out of cover. It the difficulty comes in keeping track of so many potential attackers. It's certainly not boring! I felt it lacked subtlety, but this one seems to be well regarded on Atari 8-bit forums, so I may have to give it another chance.

Crystal Castles

Atari / 1984 (unreleased)

This is an unreleased prototype conversion of the 1983 Atari isometric 3D arcade game. You move around blocky looking levels collecting crystals and avoiding various enemy types. Some of the enemies can eat the crystals themselves, and you earn bonus points if you complete each level as the one to pick up the last crystal. The levels have varied layouts and there are lifts and hidden passages. 

This version feels fairly complete to me. The sprites are a bit chunky and indistinct, but the levels themselves are really nicely drawn and very solid looking. The controls feel a little jerky, which seems to be something common to other home conversions I've played. The arcade version was played with a trackball, and you can feel that it was designed for analogue control. That said, this is a good conversion of a fun game.

There was a more polished official XE cartridge release of this game made several years after the prototype which requires a 64k machine for some reason. Atari cut quite a few complete or nearly complete games (and even a whole game system - the 7800) loose in '84 when the company changed hands. The lucky few got a release to pad out the cartridge line-up for the XE game system a few years later. That story is worth an article in itself...

Crystal Raider

Mastertronic / 1986

This is a fairly basic platformer where you collect crystals from each screen before moving on to the next. There are enemies and environmental hazards to avoid, but luckily the game but has good jumping controls which allow you to control the height and direction of your jump through its duration. If only all classic platform games were as forgiving! My main issue is that the screens don't have much variety to them, so I wasn't compelled to keep playing this one to see what happened next.