I think I mentioned the first part of this idea in ANESthetized. The fact that old video games couldn’t be won and never ended was what made The Legend of Zelda such a surprise. But Atari’s recent Facebook post puts a much more pessimistic turn on this fact.
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.
When does an Atari 2600 arcade port have better graphics than the original? Is such a thing even possible? It was with Space Invaders. If you’ve read Arcadian, you know that I wasn’t happy with the Space Invaders laser base. I thought it looked like a bracket put on its side. I still think that today.
Well, when Atari ported the game to the 2600, they refined the laser base a little. Here’s how it came out on the Atari.
Is that better? I think it is. And so it is a time, perhaps the only and only time, when the Atari 2600 had better graphics than an arcade game.
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.
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.
After playing around some more with the Atari Greatest Hits Android app, I discovered some interesting and really cool things. Here are a few of them.
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.
I didn’t log hour after hour on Valve’s Left 4 Dead just because I love shooting zombies. I also did it for the achievements. Earning something for playing a video game was even more motivation to keep playing that game.
Valve didn’t invent achievements, however. Activision, one of the leading makers of Atari 2600 games, did. They offered patches for players who could get a high score in their games. Not software patches. Fabric patches, patches you could sew on your jean jacket and proudly display in school. Here are a few of them:
You can find several more, as well as the points required to get them, here.
Which one was my favorite? This one:
This was the patch for SeaQuest (which had nothing to do with the NBC action series of the same name). This one was my favorite because I earned enough points to get it. I also had Dad take a picture of the TV screen showing my qualifying score. Unfortunatley, i never sent that picture in and so never got my patch. I earned it, though!
I was mostly looking to play games from Arcadian at last week’s California Extreme Arcade and Pinball Show (yes, I’m still thinking about that!), and I did. Throughout my time there I got my hands on Dragon’s Lair, Centipede and Millipede, and Crystal Castles. But there were a couple of others I wanted to play as well. One was Joust, which enjoyed a brief time of great popularity in my school. Another was Tempest.
I was familiar with Tempest in the original arcade days. But I wasn’t that interested in it for some reason. Maybe it was the story, maybe it was the vector graphics, maybe it was the spinner control. I don’t know. I just wasn’t interested even though it was featured on one of my favorite movies of all time, Night of the Comet.
(Jump to 2:30 to see Tempest)
I’ve become more interested in it recently. Again, I don’t know why. It might be nostalgia, or it might be that I’ve learned the game was inspired by a game designer who dreamed about standing at the top of a hole in the ground and shooting demons as they tried to climb out. In any case, I wanted to play it and I got to. I got to play both a regular upright Tempest and a cabaret version. I did equally well on both, getting to the stages where you have to avoid the spikes. I still didn’t understand it very well. The action moves so fast and the enemies are so bizarre that I never figured out what I was shooting or what would happen if I didn’t shoot it. Still, I thought it was fun. While vector graphics aren’t my favorite, they are bright and crisp and neat to look at. The spinner was a unique controller (though I found it harder to finesse than a trackball). And the action was really great. I’m glad I got to try this one, and I hope to give it a few more tries in the future.
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