Once again, two loves comes together. This time, it is the Atari 2600 and Hot Wheels cars.
Granted, I didn’t love Hot Wheels as much as some kids did (though I was very found of the Cobra Stunt Set), but I loved the Atari 2600 and all its games & colors & logos, so when I saw these Atari 2600 Hot Wheels cars, I was immediately smitten.
I’m no expert in this area, but it looks like there were six cars total: one generic 2600 vehicle, and five game vehicles (Tempest, Centipede, Pong, Missile Command, and Breakout). Of the six, Centipede is definitely my favorite.
I spent a little of my birthday yesterday playing my Atari 2600. It was the first time I had touched it in a long while, and one thing I noticed was just how difficult it is to use the controllers. Something that would have helped yesterday (as well as back in the day) is this item that popped up on my Ebay feed this morning; that Atari 2600 Grip A Grabber.
The Grip A Grabber looks to me to be a third party device, and a fairly simple one at that. It’s just a ball that is stuck on top of the controller. It is dressed up a little with some Pac-Man-esque sticker that runs around the equator of the ball, but it is still just a ball. I can’t help thinking, though, that this would really help me with 2600 Berzerk.
Atari posted on Facebook today that their Flashback 4 has been released.
Since I have an old 2600 and prefer to play on that, I won’t be buying one. Still, if you’re the modern retro type (and I kind of am; I like emulating the old school games on the computer), then the Flashback might be for you. It has 75 games, including:
3D Tic-Tac-Toe
Adventure
Adventure II
Air·Sea Battle
Aquaventure
Asteroids
Backgammon
Basketball
Battlezone
Black Jack
Bowling
Breakout
Canyon Bomber
Centipede
Championship Soccer
Circus Atari
Combat Two
Combat
Crystal Castles
Demons to Diamonds
Desert Falcon
Dodge ‘Em
Double Dunk
Fatal Run
Flag Capture
Football
Frog Pond
Front Line
Fun with Numbers
Golf
Grand Prix
Gravitar
Hangman
Haunted House
Home Run
Human Cannonball
Jungle Hunt
Maze Craze
Miniature Golf
Missile Command
Night Driver
Off The Wall
Outlaw
Polaris
Realsports Baseball
Realsports Basketball
Realsports Soccer
Realsports Volleyball
Return to Haunted House
Saboteur
Save Mary
Sky Diver
Slot Machine
Slot Racers
Solaris
Space Invaders
Space War
Sprintmaster
Star Ship
Steeplechase
Stellar Track
Street Racer
Submarine Commander
Super Baseball
Super Breakout
Super Football
Surround
Tempest
Video Checkers
Video Chess
Video Olympics
Video Pinball
Warlords
Wizard
Yars’ Revenge
I have the cartridges of lots of these, and I have lots of others on the Atari Android app, but if you don’t have them, Flashback 4 is a good way to pick them up. You can get it at Amazon.com, but I’ve also heard it is at retail stores as well.
Well, I complained that there were no Activision games on the Atari Greatest Hits Android App, but I didn’t have to wait that long to get them. I just found out about and bought the Activision Anthology Android App. Here’s some thoughts about it.
Millipede has the same problem Centipede has. The avatar is indescript. Just what is this thing supposed to be?
Fortunately, we have a lot more help with Millipede than Centipede. According to the arcade game flyers (the authoritative source), the avatar is a human archer, as described in this lengthy story.
Usually, the avatar is depicted just as he is described.
The big question is how this affects Centipede. Does the fact that the Millipede avatar is a human fighting giant insects mean that the Centipede avatar is, too? Only Atari knows for sure.
I knew there were a few other interpretations of the Centipede avatar that I left out.
In the Atari 400/800 version, the avatar was an old man named Lord Motley Bugnut who was armed with a “bug blaster”.
And in the DC Centipede comic book, the avatar was a little elf boy named Oliver.
I thought there was another version with the avatar as a magician in a top hat. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find that one.
In any case, the mystery of the Centipede avatar deepens. Why is this important? Well, it establishes exactly what the centipede and other insects are and what the setting of the game is. Is it earth or an alien planet? Are the insects normal size (as they might be if the avatar is another insect or elf) or are they giant (as they would be if the avatar is a full sized human). These are questions that need to be answered, and I think only the avatar can answer them.
In Arcadian, I talked about my confusion about what the avatar/player character/hero of Centipede was supposed to be.
To me, it looks like another insect. It has what seems like a head with eyes and a stinger coming out it’s front. Maybe a probiscus? If not that, then it is a ship. It has a ship shape with a back end that might be a thruster, two windshields, and a forward gun.
Other people had other ideas, though. The Atari 2600 version depicted him as a little gnome or elf with a magic wand.
The game didn’t, of course. It just depicted it as a rectangle.
The new Centipede Origins depicts him as a gnome as well, albeit a much different one from the 2600 version.
The Playstation version had him as a little guy in little ship.
I figure the best source for this quandry, though, is the original arcade flyers. After all, the arcade version is the official version. All the others are ports. So what the arcade version says goes. And what the arcade version says is…nothing.
I know that’s a little small, but if you blow up one section, it refers to the avatar as a “gun”.
That’s about the only reference to the identity of the avatar I could find in the flyer. So I guess we have to go with that. And I also guess that isn’t so bad.
Still rocking the Android apps. Here’s the Atari Greatest Hits app. I’ve had this installed for a while, but just got around to fooling with it. When I saw you could get all the games (99 total) for $10, I pulled the trigger. Another example of my portable nostalgia, and a pretty good one at that.
Asteroids was one of the titles that I knew only from the Atari 2600. I don’t think I was ever aware that the 2600 version was a port of an arcade game.
Arcade version
There are two things I do know, though. 1) I and all my friends held Asteroids in awe for some unknown reason. It was reverenced back in my day as one of the greats. 2) The Asteroids ship looks a lot like the Apple Logo Turtle.
Remember Logo? We had it on our school library’s Apple IIe (I think), and one day the librarian allowed me to play with it. I quickly mastered making squares and thought the world really had entered a high tech age.
Today, Logo doesn’t seem so technologically advanced. But the “turtle” (which is what the Logo cursor was called) stills seems very similar to the Asteroids ship. Don’t you think?
