Sunday, May 17, 2020

Atari Emulator -> The Electroids

Mushca Disk 123 - The Electroids... you have to look under 'T' alphabetically, BTW

The Electroids at Atarimania


Another ANALOG type-in game.  I guess that makes sense.  Again, a six-digit score.  That's confidence, innit?  Well, I'm an old man now and probably couldn't flip the score like I could at 13.  But this is the closest I'll ever get to playing an Atari game that features a poop emoji.  So basically... this is like a game of Pong?  You are Nerdstrom, green manager of the one room girder factory.  Your job is to keep the poop emojis away from the portals.  Not easy, because they seem to want to go.  If you do manage to lose one... and don't worry, because you will... you will lose five energy points.  Hmm!  This is strangely similar to Pack Man, another game of energy points.  But at least "The Electroids" is a little bit more lively.
There are many girders in the one room girder factory, and you start just south of the middle, but you quickly find your way to the bottom, with little to no chance for advancement.  At least, none that I can divine with my limited game vocabulary.  And there seems to be no manual to help me.  You can try to jump by pushing the up button, but no dice.  You're too overweight for that.  If you're used to playing Joust, well... I mean, you're just going to find this downright frustrating, there's no two ways about it.
Now, you keep the poop emojis afloat by having them bounce off your head.  If they bump into you left to right, you quickly lose lots of energy points, as any advocate of Atari player/missiles can tell you.  About 60 per second, so try to keep those meetings short.  There's advancement to other "levels," even though I hardly see the point of that.  I mean, God bless James Hague and all that, but I think this one is his Daikatana.  Yeah, that's right... I went there.

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Atari Emulator ---> Collapse

Ah, God bless the new lack of functionality of Blogger!  They're trying to make it simpler, I guess.  More sleek, less "text"y... or is that more sexy, less text-y?  Everything's a button now.  Trouble is, I don't know what Hieroglyph to use for things like "Publish" and "Save."  Probably a floppy disk for that one... gather 'round, grandchildren and let me tell you why floppy disks are still used for icons instead of the old thumb drives we all use now.  Tradition!
...where was I?  Oh, right.  Whelp, because you can't just play Rainbow Walker and Pharaoh's Curse all the time, I ventured out into that great big virtual world to play "Collapse" on Mushca Disk 10... ugh.  Okay, a little Pitfall 1 first.  Boy, those were the days.  Three treasures, and I'll stop. 
Okay, back to Collapse.  Unfortunately, I couldn't figure it out.  A lot.  So it was time for that dreaded Plan B: actually reading the manual.  See, the game is ... well, since it's so late, the closest thing I can think of is Quadromania XL, except that here, in Collapse, you're bound by gravity, much like Mario in the original Donkey Kong.  However, falling from the greatest of heights is allowed here, as it is in all the truly great video games.  So, you're supposed to navigate your way around this puzzle, change the color of all the walls, and then activate the walls, as the manual informs us.  But beware!  There's two baddies who haunt your every waking moment.  But you do have a secret weapon: magic pixie dust that acts like a net to catch them.  All you have to do is hit the "trigger" ('0' key on the numpad for me... does anyone else miss joysticks?) and you turn red.  Then, you push down on the joystick, or '2' on the numpad, and boom!  Cloud of pixie dust.  The baddies get stuck in it, you touch them, and boom.  Gone, and bonus points.  Alas, they rather instantly re-appear in one of the upper hand corners.
And so the mighty struggle continues, as you try to adapt to these strange laws of the land.  You try to re-color the walls, and then try to pick the right one so that they "collapse" like a weird set of dominoes, if dominoes could topple over upside down and what not... hmm!  Didn't I see that once?  Didn't someone build a track of dominoes, with the dominoes attached to the track with little pins?  In any event, a more enterprising soul than I can have that idea for free.  Go and do something viral with that.  Anyway, I did feel a sense of accomplishment after passing the first few levels.  The sounds are kind of like that Atari version of "Porky's" and the graphics strangely reminiscent of "Chuckie Egg."  Must be the weird-ass numerals.  So, all in all, I would say that "Collapse" is good... just, maybe not all 96 levels good.  Also, you might not want to try and flip the score, seeing as how it's got EIGHT digits instead of the usual six.  The game's okay, just not eight-digit-score okay.

Collapse - Mushca Disk 10

Collapse at Atarimania

Firebird in general at Atarimania ... don't laugh!  They were once a wing of Activision.  Heard of them lately?