A few years ago I was given an Atari Flashback unit for my birthday. It was a cute little device that resembled an Atari 7800. I enjoyed it, but how many of us actually had an Atari 7800 in the 80’s? By the time the 7800 was released, everyone had already moved on either to the Commodore 64 platform or Apple IIC or Atari Home Computers. The AF1 however was a hit in sales however, selling over 500,000 units.

Overall, Atari fans were not happy, the console was overly tiny, used poor 7800 styled sticks, and used an “NES-on-a-chip” for the actual hardware with the original 2600 games ported over. The games suffered, and were hard pressed to truly represent the original 2600 experience let alone the 7800.

Atari Flashback 1

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The Atari 2600, revolutionary, ahead of its time and most importantly loads of fun. No longer did we ask mom and dad for chutes and ladders, parcheesi or hungry hungry hippo. Now we had an interactive experience in the palm of our hands, literally!

#5. River Raid – Activision – 1982

This game was very addicting. You controlled an airplane in a top-down view over a river and gets points for shooting down enemy planes, helicopters, ships and balloons.

The really cool factor was that the player could refuel by flying over fuel stations while shooting down enemies and avoiding obstacles. The graphics were excellent for its time as well as the game play.  The long river gave us non-repeating levels with increasing challenge and zero load times.  Can this ve released on VC please???

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Throughout the history of gaming, there have always been games that reshape the landscape. I would like to point them out with a weekly column touching upon these games and sharing their success to the new gaming community. We should always know where we came from, if we expect to have an idea of where we are going.

Everyone is into these 3rd person shooters these days, (I’m not) but wouldn’t it be curious to see how the genre started? What were the early games that began this (annoying) phenomena? Well I would like to introduce G. I. Joe Cobra Strike!

G.I. Joe: Cobra Strike

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Well we didn’t mean bad gun ports, we meant bad game ports…
Anyhow, just because the title of a game is the same it doesn’t mean that the game will be the same. Developers have had the daunting task of porting games to run on various platforms throughout time.

In the early 80’s programmers had to write a number of different versions since no platform was pre-eminent. There were Atari 800, C64, Apple, Mac and IBM PC versions of games, but because of the specific constraints of each systems, the games were not all the same. Some games were horrific excuses of a translation. One can argue that all of the games on older systems, Atari 2600 being the main culprit, made horrendous version of the arcade original. Ok, I can entertain that argument, but some were so disappointing that they deserve special mention here.

Admittedly, Atari 2600 games were never quite the same as their arcade counterparts. However some games like Missile Command, Space Invaders, Asteroids, and Defender still captured some of the magic of those machines, and were also fun as games all on their own.

Throughout the years the home console versions have caught up in quality, up to the point that arcades have all but vanished.

This article speaks about my most disappointing experiences with home versions after playing the arcade version. (With exception to #2 which is a recent disappointing version of Alone in the Dark on xbox360.)

5.  Donkey Kong (2600 – arcade)

I had three points of reference points during the 80’s:

- The high powered arcade version
- The Atari 400/800 versions (also Commodore 64) {Our family owned the Atari 400, then later the Atari 130 XE}
- The Atari 2600 versions {our cousins had the 2600}

What in the H… E…  (double hockey sticks) is this about? Donkey Kong looks like the result of someone’s stomach ache! I could not believe how poor the translation was when I first played it on the 2600. Was this rushed out to meet a deadline? Was this effort the best that could be done with the resources that the 2600 provided? Thank you Coleco Vision, no wonder your not around anymore.  They should have said, based on the arcade version of Donkey Kong.

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