Tag Archives: Review

Frogger for the Atari 2600

Frogger is one of those classic video games, up there with space invaders and pac-man having broken out of the arcade entered popular culture. The premise is simple – get your frog across the busy road, over the crocodile infested river, and home to his lily pad. The gamaplay was all about timing, when to cross the road, when to jump on a fast flowing log, and when to jump from a submerging turtle.

Frogger Atari 2600
Frogger Atari 2600
It’s no suprise then that this classic game from Konami has been replicated on any number of platforms from the Spectrum through to the Playstation (I’m particularly fond of Hopper on the BBC Micro, back when they could get away with straight rip offs of other peoples intellectual property).

Atari 2600 Frogger Box Art
Atari 2600 Frogger Box Art

The Atari 2600 version of Frogger was the first opportunity that most people had to play the arcade game at home, being released a year after the arcade game in 1982, and for a change the experience was a good one (Pac-Man on the 2600 anyone?).

Everything was there, from the multiple lanes of traffic to the fast moving logs, providing an authentic challenge to your seemingly suidcidal frog as he tries to make his way home. You could even jump on the back of a crocodile, as long as you avoid the snapping jaws. Take too long and your frog dies, adding an extra element of challenge to the game. Fill all 5 “home” slots on the far side of the screen and the game cycle starts again.

The graphics featured in this version of Frogger may have been a bit rudimentary, and there was a certain amount of flicker on the screen, particularly when the frog jumps across a lane of traffic or onto a log, which is most of the time, but this can be forgiven.  For anyone who knows anything about programming for the Atari 2600, getting the game to run at all was a significant achievement.

A simple game but very addictive, Frogger is a must for any Atari 2600 collection.

Asteroids on the Atari 2600

Atari released Asteroids in the arcades in 1979 and it became their biggest selling game of all time, up there with Space Invaders as one of the most recognised video games in history.

Asteroids arcade screenshot
Original Asteroids Screenshot

It was only natural that Atari’s #1 property was ported to their new home system, the 2600. Featuring solid raster graphics rather than crisp vectors, the game somehow retained the spirit of the original if not the look. This feeling was enhanced by the sound, which retained the menacing 2 notes which, Jaws-like, sped up as the pace of the game increased.

The arcade game felt like you were stranded in a cold and empty space, but the Atari 2600 version, with its bright colours was altogether more jolly.

Asteroids Atari 2600

To add a bit of longevity (if this were needed, when all you had to have was a strong forearm and a love of button mashing) there were 66 variations of the game, including various combinations of warps and shields and enemy ships.

Difficult to find the words to describe such a seminal game on a ground breaking platform, so how about some facts I found on the internet so they must be true:

* Asteroids was the first 2600 game to use “bank switching” (whatever that means) to double it’s Rom space from 4k to 8k

* In 1999 a homebrew version was brought out with wire-frame “vector” graphics, basically the asteroids were the same but hollow

* Universal Studios have just announced (July 2009) that they are planning to release a film based on the Asteroids game

* Asteroids was released on every Atari home system and computer except the 5200, which only made it to prototype stage

Still playable today, a great gaming memory from my early teens, and the first game I bought when I got hold of an old 2600 on ebay last year.

Snapper retro game review for the BBC Micro

Acornsoft’s Classic PacMan Clone

Snapper was one of the many quality arcade conversions that Acornsoft created for the BBC Micro, being a very faithful example of Pac Man. Anyone who remembers the early 80’s will have experience of Pac Man clones on every platform, many of them pitifully poor (yes Atari 2600 I’m talking about you).

Snapper BBC Micro
Snapper on the BBC Micro, or is it Pac Man?
Most consoles or home computers of the time did not have the graphical capability, and just couldn’t to replicate the complex maze structure. So the results were often a compromised mess that whilst playable, did not give you that “arcade at home” feel that gamers at the time craved.

Arcade Clones on the BBC Micro

This is where the BBC Micro shone due to its graphical capability being much closer to dedicated arcade boards of the time. Strange in that the BBC was an experiment in education, to teach IT in schools, and not designed as a games device. And yet the rendition of Pac Man was so faithful in Snapper that Namco took offence, and later versions of the game replaced Pac Man with a sort of grapefruit, and the ghosts with generic monsters.

Snapper's revised graphics in later versionsAll other aspects of the arcade game are retained in Snapper, including the power pills and bonus items (with the Acorn bonus item a nod to BBC owners), and even the ghosts eyes escaping back to the central area after being eaten.

Rather than the ghosts in the BBC version having set patterns, they patrol their own corners of the maze, before breaking out to home in on the Pac Man. As the game progresses the ghosts become more aggressive, breaking out of the pattern earlier to chase you.

Snapper was a great PacMan conversion due to the graphical capability of the Beeb and a world away from the famously rubbish attempt on the Atari 2600.

Snapper gameplay on the BBC Micro

Frak! retro review for the BBC Micro

Back before the word Frak! became a swear word on the most recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, or a controversial form of mining, it was a 1986 platform game on the BBC Micro. My friend had a BBC Model B and a Sony colour monitor, and we would play Frak! for hours, as well as the excellent Mr Ee! (a clone of the arcade game Mr Do!).  The game was written by Nick Pelling under the Aardvark Software brand, although he preferred to be known by the name Orlando M. Pilchard.

Frak! on the BBC micro

Frak! game for BBC Micro
Frak! Screenshot for the BBC Micro
You control a caveman called Trogg, who had to traverse various platforms and defeat monsters armed with only a yo-yo. Timing had to be pixel perfect, and Trogg could only fall a short distance without dying – with no floor, falling from the edge of a platform often meant instant death. The game itself was not exactly Chuckie Egg in terms of speed, with progress more of a puzzle than a rush through the levels. Trial and error was often the way to progress, plodding your way through the various obstacles to collect the keys to the exit and complete each of Frak’s 3 basic levels.

Along the way you would meet one of three stationary monsters, whose touch was deadly, so you had to work your way around them or destroy them your yo-yo. In addition to the monsters, balloons would rise from the bottom of the screen, and daggers would fall diagonally down the screen, and colliding with either would also end in death. Fortunately you could also destroy them with a well timed yo-yo strike.

To score extra points you could collect light bulbs and jewels that are dotted around the platforms, often in out of the way places that made your journey longer and more treacherous.

 

After completing 3 levels the game screen turned itself upside down and you would play again, a novel way of extending the life of the game by re-using graphics, important when you only have 32k of memory to play with. Most toasters these days have more than this.

Most memorable for the fact that the caveman would cry “FRAK!” in a speech bubble whenever he died, clearly a way of swearing without swearing, ultimately influencing the writers of Battlestar Galactica (possibly). The back story for the game was never really clear to me though. Why was he a caveman? Why did he have a yo-yo? Why monsters, if he was a caveman why not sabre-toothed tigers or mammoths? Perhaps we will never know.

Frak! was also released on the Electron (I had a copy of this and it was monochrome and very disappointing) as well as the Commodore 64, but the BBC Micro version was the original and best.

For and interview with the developer head on over to the BBC Games Archive.

Gorf Arcade retro cabinet review

Gorf arcade machine
Gorf arcade with bezel

“I’LL GET YOU SPACE CADET!”

My first introduction to this classic arcade shooter was on a school trip in 1981. As we piled out of the coach and into the service station on the M1, I could hear a robotic voice calling from the arcade….

The voice was the alien from the Gorf cabinet, mocking the player to put in another 10p and attempt to defeat the GORF empire.

Like Phoenix before it, GORF game was a shooter made up of 5 distinct levels, some “borrowed” from existing shooters such as Galaxians and Space Invader. In addition to the robotic voice, GORF had other novel features such as the ability to buy up to seven lives depending on how many coins were deposited at the start of the game. Another feature was the ability to cancel your current shot (you only got one at a time) by pressing fire again so you could make the most of the limited number of missiles.

final screen in gorf arcade
Final screen in Gorf

But the stand-out feature for me was the synthetic voice, which mocked the player depending on their rank, as well as a backlit panel beside the screen which showed your current level – more like a pinball machine than a shooter. Not helpful for reuse of the cabinet, which was a priority for early arcade owners, so not repeated elsewhere on other games as far as I am aware.

GORF itself was relatively easy to complete, but quite unfair with some very dodgy collision detection seeing bullets which missed you by a mile destroying your ship.  For this reason I suspect GORF was not as popular as it could have been, as it became a major frustration the more you played the game.

Home conversions were released on Atari and Colecovision consoles, but interestingly they omitted the Galaxians level, most likely for copyright reasons.  GORF was also released for VIC20 and C64.

 

Pengo Arcade Game by Sega – Retro review

Pengo was an arcade game released by Sega in 1982. Kind of a cross between Pac Man and Space Panic, Pengo was a maze game with a twist. Rather than being constrained by the maze, you could use the blocks of the maze walls to flatten the chasing monsters. Your hero Pengo was pitted against the evil Sno-Bees in this game, strange blobby characters that would wobble around the maze in a hunt for Penguins.

Pengo ArcadeThe maze was made of ice blocks which could be pushed by Pengo, squashing any of the chasing Sno-Bees in the process, before smashing against the next ice block. The blocks would slide and collide in a very satisfying way, as you reformed the path of the maze on the fly.  This allowed for a large amount of strategy, as not only could you crush your enemies you could carve new routes through the game maze to avoid being caught.  The Sno-Bees could also destroy blocks by punching them, so you had to move fast to avoid being caught.

Crushing your enemies with ice blocks wasn’t the only way to defeat them however, you could also stun the sno-bees by pushing the outside walls of the maze, which would cause the wall to shake, and run over them whilst stunned. Some ice blocks contained diamonds, and bonuses were earned by lining up all the diamond blocks in a row.

Another similarity with Pac Man was the “between screen” show, which involved dancing penguins instead of ghosts. Early machines featured the popular synth tune “Popcorn”, which really got stuck in your head, but this was removed from later machines due to conflicts with the composer.

Pengo Home Conversions

The game made it onto some 80’s home computers including the classic Pengi clone for the BBC Micro, which was a reasonably faithful conversion. More recently, well in 1992, I found a cabinet entitled 3 Wonders, a multi-game which included a title called “Don’t Pull”. This was an updated version of Pengo, but with cute bunnies, that played almost identically to the arcade original.

A great game with some very good character animation, I spent a lot of money on this in my teens trying to get through all 16 rounds of the game.