Atari Emulator -> Caterpiggle

Hey kids! How about Pac-Man, but the dots move? Yeah, the dots are in some sort of "caterpillar" type formation. Also, there's three bad guys chasing you, and they kill you only about half of the time. I guess the way it works is: once they escape their individual "ghost box"es, you can kill them the first go-round. After that, they kill you right back! I stopped at about level 15 or so. Well, it gets too loud and too sluggish. Worse than ms. Pac-Man, frankly. That's the trouble with female avatars: they get bloated much faster than the male ones, apparently. I know, I know, it's the way they're programmed. Fuhgeddaboutit...

Atari Emulator -> Bruce Lee

Up past my new bedtime. Damn winter! I'm moving South, damn it... oh, right. Every place on earth will be summertime year round soon enough as it is. Enjoy the snow while it lasts. Until then, there's always Ron J. Fortier's BRUCE LEE. His one mistake: going with Datasoft. That was a big dead end right there.
Now, you might not know it from my score, or even my number of "falls", but there's this little trick. If both the ninja and the sumo guy are standing together, and you fall on top of them both... you get extra points for that! Well, you know gamers. They'll do anything for an unfair advantage. That's what was good about Ultima IV: that game at least tried to get people to act properly. Unfortunately I was never able to figure it out, and now in the emulator it doesn't work. The lowliest orc is somehow impossible to kill. I gotta stop listening to this George Carlin thing. He talks about Mallomars, and now I want to buy some. Shame on me.

Atari Emulator -> K-Razy Shootout

Well, I've been on a bit of a tear lately. This FarmVille is getting increasingly time-intensive. I'm going to have to hire an intern to play for me! My 9 o'clocks haven't been mine lately. I'm on the West coast, so the big change-over happens for me at nine, and I can start leeching off other peoples' bushels again. Oh! And I just upgraded my silo from 150 to 300, so I can finally take advantage of all the damn trees I got... sad, isn't it? And now it's spreading to something called "Words with Friends." Gotta get that out of my system now. But I am addicted to waiting for the next word to appear. Gotta learn to go for the triple word or triple letter scores, of course. If I were the Scrabble people, I'd sue!
Anyway, enough of these so-called "modern" games. Let's put another footstep into the past. I'm back to "Spiele 36" which features Activision's upgrade of Enduro called The Great American Road Race... something like that. Well, I do need my racing game fix. Fuel, cops, crashes... it's got it all. Enduro with a few more bells and whistles.
And then, of course, the game of the week. I might have blogged about this one before, but it's worth blogging about again. A more structured version of Berzerk called K-Razy Shootout, and there's something faintly Christian about it. Well, for starters, you get punished if you leave a level early, which also includes not waiting for the last robot to completely explode. And then, you have to do the whole level all over again and NOT SCORE ANY POINTS for it!!! Smacks of Sunday school, somehow. At one point, I distinctly remember taking advantage of the Atari emulator, and saving my position in K-Razy Shootout. All the way up to level 7, when things thankfully slow down again! But I do have some faint, fond memories of actually getting to level 6 on my Atari 1200 XL, and freaking out at the extreme speed of those damn robots! Love that game. I think I might have to rebuild my collection of saved states. Don't know what I did with the previous ones.

Sunday - GEEZ! FINALLY!!!! Finally beat level 7... I'm sorry, I mean "Sector 7." Finally entered Sector 8. Somehow, Sector 8's worse. The robots aren't as fast, but they shoot as fast. And frankly, I'm totally lost when it comes to dodging crossfire. I guess I wouldn't make a good infantry in war. I'd run right into a bullet, for God's sake! Ever do that when you're playing? Oh, I forgot to mention that K-Razy Shootout's probably the only machine language game in Graphics 5 mode. Crockford's Galahad and the Holy Grail is in Graphics 3... that's all I can think of off the top. Most use redefined characters of one stripe or another, generally.
In general, Sector 7 of K-razy Shootout is not a good game to play at 1:30 in the morning. It gets one too amped up. How are you supposed to sleep after that? Egg-xactly.
Damn. Waiting on Words with Friends again... this'll take forever, damn it!

Atari Emulator -> Kissin' Kousins

This may be the craziest game I've ever played. I'm of course just lucky I've got the version with unlimited lives. I lost about 500 my first try. Not a lot of kissin'! A lot of jumpin' and bitin' the bullet. There's worms, crabs, springy things, and they're ALL DEADLY! There's the bat from Pitfall II. You've got the avatar from Montezuma's Revenge but without the Mexican hat. Personally, I don't want to play a game where you have to shoot the bad kangaroo. Not many of those games. In Flip and Flop, you ARE the kangaroo. Well, just in the odd-numbered levels. In the even ones, you're the monkey. Anyway, if all that stuff on the ground wasn't enough... they got planes flying by dropping bombs on you! I don't think I got a chance to get killed by one of those, though. The stuff on the ground was plenty. Plenty of obstacles standing still that kill you too! Shrubs, brick walls, garbage cans with self-lifting lids. Love it. May I never play it again. I kept trying with Blue Max again... doesn't work. If you bomb one of the final three things, it breaks the computer. Sorry, Blue Max, but I'll just have to remember your finale. A lot of these Synapse games are real smart-asses with their various ranks. Runway sweeper, kamikaze trainee... Of course, if you don't make it off the runway, what kind of kamikaze training is that?

Atari Emulator -> Star Raiders II

Of course, as I've said at least once before, I am an old-fashioned guy, and I prefer the gameplay of "The Last Starfighter." Better scrolling, not as beep-y... something like that. Oh, and the biggie! You can stay on the star's surface a couple extra seconds as you recharge. Take your time! Solar power, baby. The only way to go. Ah, the tedium of shooting at the big ships, how I missed it. Yes, unfortunately for the galaxy, the enemy's acquired deadly circle-drawing technology. It's a never-ending geometry-based arms race. Will the good guys triumph? It seems they never do for long...

Atari Emulator -> Seafox

I love these kind of old games like this where the more ships you add, the slower EVERYTHING gets. Another of the kind of games they'd have at school, and they're more fun when you're not playing them. As for me, I still haven't figured out how to stay away from that giant sub-eating fish! That one always gets me, because it always comes after the fuel fish that gets released, and if you don't catch it, the big fish comes and eats you. Is this the stuff of serial gameplay? Nah, on to the next thing. More Boulder Dash! Is it too late to find Blue Max 1? Probably. It's 3 AM, for Pete's sake!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Atari Emulator -> Blue Max 2001

IT'S THE SAME GAME!!!!!!!!!!

Atari Emulator -> more like Dinky Don't!

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood, but I'm starting to feel like Maddox! The game play's retarded, the music sounds like a farting robot, and there's only nine game boards. What kind of game wraps around after nine game boards! A retarded game! Snokie's a genius compared to this thing. The only reason it's not an Atari Basic game is because the things move so fast... compared to Basic, anyway. They're both pretty unforgiving in their own ways, but at least in Snokie you stay on level ground. Dinky-Do can't seem to handle precarious ledges. Now, some might say that level 3's pointless, but there needs to be SOME kind of a cakewalk in this thing. Too ridiculous. And for those of you PC police out there who don't appreciate my use of the word "retarded," well, all I can say is I'm sorry, but at least I didn't call it a "retard." "Retard" is bad. "Retarded" is acceptable. Kevin Smith says "re-re." That should be unacceptable.
Just double-checked. Dinky-Do is indeed hyphenated.

Atari Emulator -> Monster Maze

Another classic from Epyx. This is about as good as 3D gets on the Atari. I feel strangely underwhelmed, though... but that's what you get for 16K of program. For the first time ever I finally cleared a whole Monster Maze maze torte... no payoff? All those points and nowhere to spend them on powerups? Am I just doomed to wander the maze forever? ..oh, crap. Did I have to engulf all the monsters, Pac-Man style? Guess I'm not THAT interested... gotta get back to my other lot in life

Atari Emulator -> Smasher

For all those times when you've felt like you had to smash a whole bunch of critters... this one's for you. Of course, there's always a price to pay: there's three glowing baddies that you CAN'T smash. Small price to pay, though. Great game play. This is one of those that I read about a long time ago, but I didn't have a modem to download an illegal copy. In some ways, I still don't... nah, that doesn't make sense.