Sunday, October 2, 2011

Atari Emulator -> Preppie v. Snokie

As usual, I'm not getting anywhere in my life. But I did manage to clean up some of the cat's vomit! One of the perks of being up so late. Also, I managed to trace the Lempeurer lineage of games. Time Runner, Snokie ... all the way up to Flak, the Xevious-clone masterpiece. Why, I bet you could find BOTH FunSoft and Adventure International on Google Earth! Why do I have to do all the work?  See, they give you the addresses and... ah, skip it.  They're probably strip malls now.  I hate to say it, but I think Snokie's like the screamapillar on The Simpsons... Maybe God wants Snokie to die! He sure makes a big dramatic exit off this mortal coil, you gotta give 'im that. The Grim Reaper treasures every Snokie that bites the big one.
As for the Preppies, well, they're a dime a dozen. Preppie II sucks. I mean, clearly not as fun as Preppie I. Preppie I's about the thrill of retrieving golf balls. Preppie II glorifies manual labor. The labor of painting. I've had enough of the real thing this summer.

As long as I'm about to go to bed anyway, lemme tell you about my latest quest. Ever have one of those things nagging at you? You try to remember what it is, even though it's not worth it? Well, mine is this Atari maze game... I think the maze is purple, and your avatar is an 8-ball looking thing. The game itself was kinda boring to me when I first played it... but for some reason, I gotta get back to it. I think it's on one of the 266. You know the 266?... CRAP! There's 387 now? So much to do, so little time...

1/15/'18 - Man, I must've been in a bad mood when I blogged about Preppie 1.  Why, I didn't even talk about how the game used to frustrate me, especially the much hated level 6.  These were the days of ... wait for it... CASSETTE TAPE DRIVES!  Wow.  Wonder if there's any Atari programmer out there who made half a million dollars off of games on a cassette tape.  But hey!  Can't argue with resluts results!  Sure, it took about five minutes to load a game.  Didn't always work, but games were about 8K or 16K... apparently, just enough for a cassette tape to handle.  I did work briefly for a company that had tape backups, but those were on douche-y DAT tapes, and they didn't want to pay royalties or user fees for the specialty software needed to retrieve files from them.  Cheapskates.  Well, that's private industry for ya!  If there's a way out of paying for something, it will be found.  God bless the inventive Thomas Edison, he just couldn't keep other people in the world from paying him for the privilege of using motion picture film, or the cameras or the projectors.  But I did spend a lot of my ill-spent youth on Preppie 1.  Preppie 2, not as much.  Besides, Preppie 2 has a glitch in the emulator version.  I mean, basing a whole game on avoiding getting run over by a lawn mower can be fun, but Preppie 2 makes it into a long dull chore somehow.  Guess I'll just have to go back to watching Dead Alive for the real deal.  Of course, the guy in that kind of wears the lawn mower on his chest, so it's not quite the same.

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