More Atari Basic nostalgia

God bless you, Atarimania!  They got almost everything that Mushca doesn't.  Of course, Mushca DOES have Compute!'s Castle Quest.  Love that one... I guess.  Oh, and Mushca also has Uncle Henry's Nuclear Waste Dump.  Typed both of those in!  Not as exciting as Candy Crush, sure, but sort of a similar gaming principle. 
But what does Atarimania have?  Well, I looked up Q.T. by Brian McWilliams.  A rare type-in game that has its own opening theme music.  It has 3 levels.  The first one's like Pengo, but without most of that game's bells and whistles.  The second one's like... the last level of Kangaroo?  Well, it's the meanest level anyway.  Your tiny bird avatar has to catch all the falling things... except for the girders.  You skip those.  Otherwise, you get all killed up.  Also, there's sort of a time element.  If you miss something that you can catch, the Jaws of Death get closer and closer.  And the third one befits a bird avatar quite well.  You have to try and pop the balloons that carry things up at you.  And then, you start over and go to the next level.  Each level has a different object: a key is the first, a lunch box the second... like the opposite of Pac-Man, you get the idea.
Atarimania also has Arena Racer... not a fan.  I typed it in and all that, but... oh, and I couldn't get J. D. Casten's Rebound to work either.  Or Rebound Contest, unfortunately.  But thank God they have a version for Mac.  And then I finally got Floyd of the Jungle to work!  But I think I have a version of it not available at Atarimania.  Here's the trick: you have to attach the Basic cartridge, of course, then go to Atari->Settings.  You have to uncheck all four of the things: the SIO patch, regular disk access, etc.  Maybe it's just the principle of the thing.  Just love that dorky old game.  I forgot how to stun the pygmies, but I finally figured it out again!  You have to... you have to wait for the next installment to find out!  Nyaah nyaah.

James Hague's games at Atarimania

Atari Emulator -> (The) Crypts of Plumbous

You're flying around the Italian countryside in your spaceship... it'll be normal by the next century, don't worry.  Brought to you by either Tesla or Elon Musk, one of those two.  It's either a routine patrol or a mere joyride.  WHEN SUDDENLY... a rogue spaceship comes at you!  Fortunately, it's coming at you just low enough to enable you to blast it out of the sky.  Firing, the worst-sounding missile exeunts your ship, so to speak, and boom!  Out of the sky it goes.  This goes on for a while, WHEN SUDDENLY... a SECOND ship appears!  Can you feel the Atari's resources getting strained or what?  This one's slower, though... at least, for now.  Because these aliens didn't fly across the light years for nothing.  They're after your secret wine cellar, buried in seven distinct locations, in groups of two.  Oh, they've done their research.  If you die fighting off these baddies, you'll have several paragraphs with footnotes about you forever in the anals of history... annals of history.  However, if the pastel purple baddie makes off with ALL SEVEN of your proverbial casks of Amontillado, you shall be forever known in the Book of Cosmi as a ROTTEN PILOT.  I $#!t you not, my friends.
...have I blogged about this before?  Maybe, but that was eight years ago.  This is 2019 now, and I was just able to pull off my little trick again.  I erased the spaceship, so constantly dying is not a problem now.  I actually tried the really, really tough level.  You get 30 spaceships on that one!  The only problem is you move too fast, and your bullets move too fast.  And why is that a problem?  Well, on the Atari, in the laws of Player/Missiles, a missile usually actually has to touch the bad guy to destroy it.  And if it touches too quick, well... it can't keep track of that either.  Anyway, watch this space for everything you ever wanted to know about James Jengo's "Crypts of Plumbous," but were too sophisticated to ask.
Oh, and there's a fuel gauge, but so far there seems to be no way to re-fuel your craft.  Something tells me that the programmer cynically figured that the game would become too difficult too quickly to have to worry about refueling at all!  Very cynical.  But for those of you able to pull it off, the level known as REALLY TOUGH actually gives you a bit of a reprieve if you get past 50 points!  It then becomes not so tough, for the pastel purple ship slows down again to a more human speed.

Level: VERY EASY
Rank: Pseudorookie
Points: 0-5, 7, 9

Rank: Novice
Points: 6, 8, 10-13...

Level: REALLY TOUGH
Rank: Ace Pilot
Points: 84

Rank: Fighter Pilot
Points: 107

Crypts of Plumbous' official home at Atarimania

Atari Emulator -> Labyrinthe

Well?  I'm at the end!!  Now what? 

Muscha Disk 57 - ...not actually on there, so you gotta download it separate

Labyrinthe's Home at Atarimania

Atari Emulator -> Synapse Software's "Slime"

Mushca Disk 175 - I gotta say... hello?  Anybody out there?  Okay, got that out of the way.  Thought I was sleepy, but I just got my second wind... after getting the contraband out of the car!  Tee hee hee... wait, did I say that or just think it?
And second, I just recalled another long-buried memory, just under "Fred Garvin: Male Prostitute" and just over all my terrible faux-pases in middle school.  In the Atari era, you would sometimes need a disk called a "Translator" disk.  I would, because I primarily had a 1200XL.  (#1200XLrules400drools)  And I forget which games needed the translator disk, but some of them did, mostly because of poor planning on the machine engineers' part.  God bless PCs and Macs!  Fortunately, going through the Mushca disks just might remind me.  Alas, not in the case of Synapse Software's classic called "Slime."  That needs 800 OS-B for those of you using the world-renowned Atari emulator.  And it's not kidding!  It'll crash, but you can always go to ... whatever.  File -> Machine -> and select "800 OS-B."  When you do, it'll reboot and you're on your way to Missile Command-style gameplay!  It's like Missile Command meets Plinko / Pachinko.  Spoiler Alert: so what do you do?  Do you a) rebuild the big pyramid shape that doesn't quite meet?  Or do you b) just ad hoc try to protect your ship from getting, as the game's name implies, slimed?  Somehow I don't feel the need to try and flip the score on this one.

Synapse Software's official home at Atarimania