There's a third volume which I am probably not going to get, since the arcade cabinets in that one are mostly sports games that are not interesting to me, and the home console cartridges get into Atari 5200 games, which I am not nostalgic about. Some of those were straight adaptations of Atari 400/800 games that I did have, but the only one I really have strong feelings about is Star Raiders, and that's probably not worth $20 all by itself. The 2600 port of Star Raiders is in Volume I, and the XBox controller has enough buttons to perform all of the functions that they needed a special keypad controller for in the original game.
Other highlights of the 2600 shovelware: Volume I has Bowling, the only Atari 2600 game ever to actually get my daughter hooked on it; Combat, the two-player-only tanks/planes game that was the original VCS pack-in cartridge, and that my mother was utterly lethal at around 1980; and Yar's Revenge, a bizarre, fugly game that looks like a programming accident, but is inexplicably actually really fun to play and was probably Atari's last big hit for the 2600.
Volume II, besides the 2600 conversions of most of its arcade games, also has Adventure, the game that taught a generation (and StrongBad) that dragons look like freaking ducks; Starship, a first-person space shooter in a 2K ROM from 1977 that is really quite terrible but impresses me for its pure audacity in existing; and the aforementioned 2600 Video Pinball.
Probably the single oddest thing on Volume II is Stellar Track, an attempt to adapt the text-based, unlicensed "Star Trek" games that were originally written for 1970s mainframes. That's weird in itself, but the other weird thing about it was that it was a Sears exclusive, sold as a game for their Sears-branded version of the 2600, the "Sears Video Arcade." It's pretty much unplayable but the sheer WTF factor makes it kind of interesting. Star Raiders was itself a much better attempt at adapting those Star Trek games, by making them real-time and grafting on a "3D" action game.
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Date: 2019-04-20 04:13 am (UTC)Other highlights of the 2600 shovelware: Volume I has Bowling, the only Atari 2600 game ever to actually get my daughter hooked on it; Combat, the two-player-only tanks/planes game that was the original VCS pack-in cartridge, and that my mother was utterly lethal at around 1980; and Yar's Revenge, a bizarre, fugly game that looks like a programming accident, but is inexplicably actually really fun to play and was probably Atari's last big hit for the 2600.
Volume II, besides the 2600 conversions of most of its arcade games, also has Adventure, the game that taught a generation (and StrongBad) that dragons look like freaking ducks; Starship, a first-person space shooter in a 2K ROM from 1977 that is really quite terrible but impresses me for its pure audacity in existing; and the aforementioned 2600 Video Pinball.
Probably the single oddest thing on Volume II is Stellar Track, an attempt to adapt the text-based, unlicensed "Star Trek" games that were originally written for 1970s mainframes. That's weird in itself, but the other weird thing about it was that it was a Sears exclusive, sold as a game for their Sears-branded version of the 2600, the "Sears Video Arcade." It's pretty much unplayable but the sheer WTF factor makes it kind of interesting. Star Raiders was itself a much better attempt at adapting those Star Trek games, by making them real-time and grafting on a "3D" action game.