Tag Archives: Atari 2600

Atari 2600 – Pac-Kong, Crystal Castles, Star Wars and more!

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I recently purchased some Atari 2600 games. I haven’t gotten anything new for that console in a while so finding these made me really happy ^_^
I looked up some gameplay videos of them before buying, and I only bought games I thought looked enjoyable. The games I got were Pac-Kong, Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back, Crystal Castles, Solaris, Kangaroo, Reactor, Gangster Alley and Smurfs. I also took the games out for a little photo shoot today since they are all so pretty that they deserve it! :D

Star Wars the Empire Strikes Back I already had for the C64, but it loads way faster on the Atari ;D The gameplay is basically about taking out the AT-AT Walkers. When you’ve shot them a few times they change color until they eventually vanish.

Crystal Castles is a really fun game. I’ve played the Arcade version a lot on the Game Room Arcade simulation on Xbox 360. The Atari 2600 version has of course much more simple graphics, but the concept is the same and the gameplay is fun! You are a little bear who has to collect all the dots while avoiding enemies to get to the next stage ^_^



Solaris looked like a fun game. You’re flying through space and the effects are kinda cool for being Atari 2600. I didn’t quite get what you were supposed to do though.. You can shoot stuff, and you travel through hyper-space or warps or something.. and sometimes there’s a map o_O

Kangaro is kind of like Donkey Kong, make it to the top of the platforms while avoiding enemies or obstacles. Except you are a Kangaroo, and you can jump and punch stuff ^_^

Reactor I bought mainly because I saw this ad from when the game came out in 1982. The actual game made no sense though. I just kept getting blown up.. I think?

Pac-Kong I bought without hesitation just because of the name! Pac-man and Donkey Kong in one game??? With a picture of a Transformer on the cartridge?!? Well, it was definitely similar to Donkey Kong, the main character looks a LOT like Super Mario, and there were also similarities to Pac-Man if the enemies were supposed to look like ghosts, which I believe. It was hard to avoid them though..

In Gangster Alley you have a cross and you’re supposed to shoot the gangsters in the windows. It lacks sound though, except for a tiny effect when you shot, it made it kind of dull.



The Smurf’s had nice animation for being Atari 2600. The sprite actually looked like a Smurf! :D But, I couldn’t make it passed the first obstacle, a STUPID FENCE! I kept trying to jump over it but no matter how close or how far away I was from it I couldn’t get past it >_<


Stupid fence…

Retro console photo shoot part II

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Here’s the rest of the consoles and their accessories that got the opportunity to take a little walk with me and my camera ^_^













MOVIE GAMES

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Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES) had it’s glory days in the 80’s. Back then game developers sometimes had trouble coming up with new exciting game ideas, so they started making games from popular movies! You would think that this sounds like a great idea, if it’s a great movie with a great story why wouldn’t people wanna buy it and play it to relive those special moments they remember so dearly from the movie screen? Well a lot of people did buy them, and probably got disappointed seeing their favorite actors pixelated in a little blurry dot on the screen with horrible controls, sloppy programming and generally poor reenactments of the original plot/story or scenes. These games were made as a way for the movie and game companies to milk a few extra bucks out of a successful blockbuster film.

This doesn’t mean that all movie themed games are bad, there’s also a lot of examples of games based on movies that are in fact quite brilliant, sometimes even more enjoyable than the movie itself! Like Aladin for Sega Mega Drive (or Genesis), or most of the Batman games across all platforms.

But from my experience, the majority of games based on movies are horrendous experiences. Even back in the Atari age some movies made it into the gaming scene..  such as E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.. there are no words of describing how BAD this game is. I might try to show you sometime in another post. Some other really bad movie themed games have been reviewed amazingly by AVGN (Angry Video Game Nerd) such as Independence Day, Rambo, Terminator and all the Spielberg games. Visit the links to watch his movies.

Still today most big movies get turned into a game, and there are more shitty ones than good ones in my opinion.. Like the Golden Compass.. horrible >_< The control’s are worthless, and it’s frustrating. Even though it was super cheap (I guess they figured out quite quickly how shitty this game was) it still wasn’t worth the money..

I was surfing around and found some youtube movies and forum talk about a NES game that was based on the old 80’s series Full House, they called the game Full House Tournament Fighter, and it took some surfing around before I realized it was a spoof, the game never existed. Though it wouldn’t have surprised me if it did! This made me think about some big 80’s movies and what they would have looked like if they were made into NES games. Here’s my ideas:

Imagine if they would have made The Shining into a NES title, wouldn’t that have been awesome?? That’s a movie themed game I would definitely have gotten. You would start off playing as the Kid, avoiding ghosts like the twins and other supernatural things trying to survive and at the end change to play as Jack and try to hunt down your family with an axe through the maze. That would have been amazing and original!!

 

 

Another awesome NES game would have been the Poltergeist! They could have made a supernatural-looking environment where the game plays out in the world where they have taken the little girl, and the goal would be to have the girl find her way back to the light and her family in a platforming adventure kind of style. Just imagine! =D That would have been a scary and different game! With references to the movie, a great soundtrack and some cutscenes it would have been awesome!! “They’re here..”

 

Now here’s some examples of games that would have been awful if they ever would have been  converted to the NES!

Thank god they never made this, however so many other shitty games were made based on movies that one more wouldn’t really have made a difference..

Awful…

Or this:

Yikes!

Now I’m off to edit some gaming clips of my next review. Feel free to comment if you have any other fun ideas of games based of movies never made, or opinions about some movie games I didn’t mention ^_^

Xmas holiday activities!

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Here’s a little recap of what I was up to this Xmas..

Mom wanted me to make ginger bread cookies with her, and I got tired of making hearts and tiny people.. so I started cutting out Space Invaders! They turned out real pretty ^_^

I stayed on the theme of videogames throughout the christmas season, and on the second ginger bread baking occasion I made Pacman! Loads and loads of little Pacmen and ghosts ;D