Atari Emulator ---> Ollie's Follies

Hah! ...dinner time... Okay, I'm back. Sometimes you have to go home again, if only because you forgot to lock the front door. And all this time I thought I beat Ollie's Follies! Shame on me. I never made it past that hiccup on Level 14. That laser thingie doesn't make it easy on you, but if you throw enough Ollies against it, enough dead Ollie flesh will clog it up and you can get a guy through. Perseverance. Also, playing it in the Atari emulator and saving the state helps a lot. Talk about a first-class continuation! Or is it a Thue system? One of those. Anyway, this is the perfect game for me. You don the hats littered conveniently about the maze, turning you into Super Afro Ollie Man. No robot is safe from your destructive power! If you play your cards right, you can take out all three on Room #4 with the first hat! Oh, someone's going to post me about this one, I can tell. Maybe Fanda himself, telling me to stop violating the copyright.

Frank Cohen's Atarimania home

Atari Emulator ---> Rats' Revenge

Close enough. Great game unless you want to score more than 65,535 points, but I think you get the point by the time you get to the 2nd round. Another Action! game that thankfully I didn't have to type in to play. I question the game's title: who exactly is getting revenge with a boring maze game?

Atari Emulator ---> Frogger II: Three-Deep

Genius! Riddip, three-deep... Brilliance! Love this game. The swan. The dragon. The frog-eating fish. The sea turtle, the bubbles, and the treasure of getting home safely... come join the adventure! Welp, it's past my bedtime again, but seeing as how Castle Quest on Disk 306 isn't working yet, why not play Frogger 2 a little? I still got it. I don't even feel like I need to save the game or anything. Maybe that's a step in the right direction for me.

Atari Emulator ---> Cosmi's Stargate Courier

Well, I gotta hand it to Cosmi. The majority of their games suck, but even Atari wasn't ambitious enough to try and make Bosconian for their niche market. Cosmi combines Bosconian and River Raid with mixed success, but as always they've got an ear for catchy video game music. Like the starting and ending themes. The ships you're supposed to shoot are arguably less than well programmed, and there's no reason to visit the Earth-ish planet if you play the Bosconian part right. Still, there's something about this game that sticks in memory's craw and makes you want to revisit it. Okay, on to the next thing.

Atari Emulator ---> Diggerbonk

The big blue-green meanies. The purple H-shaped bad guys. The yellow blinkers (bad guys). The power pills. The fragile rectangles that are your treasure. Chunk and Sloth teaming up, and the endless scrolling magic that is Diggerbonk. No, it's not that place that Rick Perry used to go on vacation. Rather, it's another game by game maven Steve Robinson who only wanted to teach all of us the joys that was Atari programming back in the day. Now he's probably another drone slaving away in the Nokia cubicle farm.

Diskette 64

Diggerbonk's official Atarimania home

Steve Robinson... man! Some dudes only had two Atari games in them

ANTIC Interview 234 - Steve Robinson

Atari Emulator ---> Amazing

I can't remember now! Was this an Antic magazine game or a Compute Magazine game? I'm thinking Antic. Let's find out...Antic, of course! As we all know, Antic was exclusively devoted to the downfall of Atari, as opposed to Compute! which was all-inclusive, and featured Matt Giwer before he became an angry, racist a$$#ole. I'm assuming it's the same one. I won't even bother to link to his site. It's got over 200 hits by now, I'm sure! Anyway, it seems like only yesterday that I was typing in Amazing, playing it, and deciding that OSS's Action! was way more awesome than Basic XL. Not that Basic XL wasn't fast as well, and made player missiles more fun to manage. There's also that rat game, but I want to get to Diggerbonk before it's time for the Daily Colbert Wacky Fun Hour.  65,535 points be damned!

Atari Emulator ---> Jaw Breaker (II) by Chuckles

While I wait for my love potions and milk bottles to be created in FarmVille (6 hours), why not wallow in the mud of nostalgia? Up next: Jaw Breaker (II) by Chuckles. Hardly a reason to save the state in this one as it's just pure, unadulterated maze fun. Like the music, too. A simple pleasure for a simple mind. Of course, there's a way to hear the whole "power pill" music: I think you hit 'Option' (f2) or 'Select' (F3) after eating a power pill. After a while, the game gets too fast, and we all know that the Atari emulator can't handle going slower than 90% speed. At least, mine can't.

Atari Emulator ---> Oil's Well

Continuing with the anteater-esque theme, another digging game in which you act like an anteater's tongue tunneling underground, but vulnerable to baddies. You can eat them with the grabber thingie, just not with the pipes you leave behind you. There's no spilling oil in this oil well game, which makes it rather unrealistic at that. On top of it all, there's these two glowing cup thingies. The grail helps you by slowing down the action, and the test tube-looking thing... no, more like a beaker. Let's just call it a bong that glows the way Atari things tend to do. If it touches the mouth of the pipe it kills you. You only get one power pill per level, so make the most of it, friends! I used to play this one too much.

Atari Emulator ---> Ant Eater

In my case, the expression "simple pleasures for simple minds" is all too true. Take Eddy Fries' 1982 game Ant Eater by Romox, for example. Variation on Dig Dug, you actually play the ant that's doing the eating, not the anteaters that try to get you. The anteaters here aren't much bigger than you, maybe about twice or thrice as big. But you can outrun the anteaters on a clear stretch, not while digging. I probably didn't last that long, but for some reason I remember really getting into this game, trying to flip the score. Hope I didn't get THAT into it! Maybe it was the music... I'm assuming it's Bach, and on an Atari, the most memory-intensive part of the game.

Atari Emulator ---> Donkey Kong

Welp, looks like another losing downward oscillation in the ongoing battle that is Tetris Battle. I just clearly don't belong at Rank 28 at this time. Too many movers and shakers on the make. Guess I better shell out for the fresh "tuning" to make the game go faster. Does it actually make my computer faster, or just slow everyone else down? Kinda doesn't make sense to me. So, why not take a break from that and devote my valuable time to Donkey Kong mastery? Thanks to my handy Atari emulator, I'm able to get and save a perfect game every time. I'm up to level 12, round 1, with no Marios lost yet. Decided I should stop at 500,000 points... seemed like the perfect meaningless milestone to call it a day upon. I can't risk losing a single Mario, as they tend to go in pairs. After I lose the first one, the second one's not too far behind. Same as with Pac-Man. You score 100,000 points with your first Pac-Man, but then on your next life you eat three dots, the key appears, so in your fevered anxiety you go for it right away and immediately get clobbered by Clyde on the way up there. Okay, time to watch TV with mom.

 Okay, time to test the bounds of this whole Blogger thing.  Wordpress could handle it just fine!  Tee hee hee.  Just kidding; I never use Wordpress.  I don't care how easy it is to set up.  Anyway, nobody likes a slacker, so I took care of that thing that was nagging at me last night.  I got to a million points in Atari Donkey Kong!  And not a moment too soon.  As you can see, the system's not totally robust yet.  Why, look at that high score!  And look at my score! (on the right).  Back down to zero and I gots t'start all over?  Sad.  Very sad.  So nerdy.  But that was the Atari for you: any more than six digits and you get an Error 141 in Basic... something like that.
The only other brilliant observation I have is that... boy, that level with the pies is my least favourite.  At some point, I just tried to get through the damn thing.  It's not even as hard as the arcade version: the Atari doesn't have the retracting ladders at the top.  No, we must look to the Post Office level in Synapse's New York City: The Big Apple for that... I think that was the one.  KONY 2015!

Atari Emulator ---> Diamonds

And of course it's The English Software Company's version of Dig Dug. Oh, but Dig Dug's just not the same game in Graphics 1. Gotta be in Graphics 15, with full player missiles! A chance the program will crash. Now THAT'S the only way to play a game, especially one involving subterranean tunneling. But the score's low enough: four digits. Just the sort of thing to encourage prolonged playing in an attempt to roll the score. I don't know which came first, Diamonds or Dan Strikes Back, but they wisely dispensed with the character names in Dan Strikes Back, making it just a bunch of stuff you've got to avoid. And not all the Diamonds characters made the Dan Strikes Back cut. So much for more is better! And when you have a computer as limited as the Atari was, more was always better. Okay, back to my FarmVille bonsai trees.

Atari Emulator ---> Maniac Miner

While I'm waiting for FarmVille to load, why not profile another Atari game. This isn't one I had while I had an ACTUAL Atari computer, but it fits right in. The title's spot on: you'd HAVE to be a maniac to play this game. I love this kind of game where the screen is partitioned off into discrete separate sections. Any more than four on this one and it probably wouldn't work. I beat level 9 so I feel like I've already been to the mountain and what not. Okay, on to the next game.

Atari Emulator ---> H.E.R.O.

Wikipedia LITERALLY has everything. But a screen capture of rolling the score to a million points, you'll only get that here, and possibly YouTube. And you only have to play 44 rounds to do it! The fuel's far too valuable in my opinion.

H.E.R.O. at Atarimania - leave out the periods

Atari Emulator ---> Fire Chief

Okay! Let's try again... No, it's too weird for me. Can't deal w/it. It's a two-part game. The first part reminds me of the old Activision racing game for the 2600, Grand Prix, only less lenient. And then... you get to the burning building. The chief still has to do these menial tasks, for God's sake. It's a maze-type situation, where you have to get to the safe on the right side of the room, whereupon someone waves you back to the left side of the room. With each level, you gotta do it one more time than the last. Always a good dramatic progression in a video game. Okay, on to the next task.

... :(

Just thought I'd check in! I've been busy, you gotta gimme that. Zynga Poker, Tetris Battle, Farmville, Millipede (Atari 80 games)... reminds me! I gotta check on my FarmVille stuff. For some reason, I'm really into getting as many of those damn Craftshop stars as possible. Think I'm up to 125 now. Of course, the slow throughput of maple syrup will keep me from getting too close to 156, but for some reason I still gotta try.