Atari Emulator -> Anthony Ku's Mr. M

Coulda sworn I did this one already! Guess not. Of course, it is kind of tricky to do a text search for a phrase like "Mr. M." Spoiler Alert: we never do find out what the "M" in "Mr. M" stands for, but judging from the "plot description" of the game... mastication? Munch? Munchies? Massive appetite? A brief search at thesaurus.com (bet THAT site name cost someone a pretty penny!) quickly reveals that a single word starting with "m" is just not enough to convey the madness behind this slight twist on that old gaming trope, Pac-Man. Things were so much simpler back then, until it briefly tried to join forces with pinball. But Mr. Ku's variation adds some fine complications to the Pac-Man legend. For instance: what if the game board isn't strictly a maze that fills each corner of the board? And what if it's not completely full of dots? Alas, there's no goodies to eat here, like cherries and metal keys. And why does Pac-Man never have to stop and... you know, take a shi... I mean, a Number Two? You would think... and why is there no facility where Pac-Man has to run to as fast as he can before making a mess in his pants? And why does Pac-Man not wear pants to begin with? ...what else? I must be forgetting something. Oh, right. Unlike most Atari games, Mr. M features a nice summary of your goal in the game on the title screen. There are no fancy options: no second player, no progressive levels of difficulty, just jump right into the deep end of this pool and get cracking. Also, Pac-Man doesn't have a "hunger" deadline to meet when getting those last few dots in the corner that you should've gotten a while ago. The programmers figured, and figured rightly, that struggling with the four ghosts would be challenge enough.
Speaking of which, on the plus side, you don't have four ghosts constantly following you(r ass) in "Mr. M." No, you get enemies that come flying in from the left and right sidelines. If you're lucky, and NOT FULL, having to make a beeline for the game's many toilets... sometimes you can even eat the bad guys that fly at you. But be careful! You have to line yourself up just right; if you've got baddies flying in from the left at your head, you'll soon have baddies flying in from the right at your feet, and they'll getcha! And like all of the great games, with each new level comes a new responsibility. Level 2, well... you have to learn to duck and walk at the same time. Alas, you can't do three things at once, so you have to unduck yourself to get at the food in a tight corner. Level 3 features one-way ramps and warps that take you from the right side of the screen to the left... I'll let you struggle with that one. Level 4 features radioactive walls; love those. Level 5 is kind of a bonus round, which is good, because Level 6 is pretty wicked in its design. I forgot how tough it was! Had to use Saved States to finally solve it, and just barely at that. Basically, Level 6 requires you to do some critical thinking and planning, timing your rapid hunger just right so that you don't starve so quickly to death. And like all the greats... the only other one I can think of off the top is Dark Star... you leave the fans hungering for more. In this case, we only get a brief glimpse of Level 7, and then it's right back to Level 1. It's an okay game; its strength is in its playability, but... I wouldn't try to flip the score on this one. What can I say?

Atarimania's home for Mr. M
Mushca (AKA Homesoft) Disk 30

Atari Emulator -> Astro Invaders

Oh boy. Another fine opportunity for me to put on my Professor Blogger cap, and pose for you the following hypothetical: have you ever wondered what it would be like if someone went and combined Space Invaders with Asteroids? Well, some brave soul went ahead without the big video game corporations' permissions and did that very thing. Look no further than Mushca Disk 466 for the following title: Astro Invaders... personally, I would've gone with Invader-oids, but whatever. That's why my day job isn't marketing! This Graphics 15 masterpiece isn't available at the slicker Atarimania.com, alas, so we may never know who did the hard work of programming this thing. They didn't skimp on details! The aliens look exactly... and I mean, exactly like the aliens in the official Atari (computer, not 2600) cartridge version of said Space Invaders. A different style from your, say, classical 2600 Space Invaders; the Atari 8-bit ones are more... octopus-ish, if you will.
So we've covered the Space Invader half of the affair. But what about the Asteroids part? Whelp, you've got a ship that spins 360 degrees... it goes all the way around, maybe misses more than a few of all the 360 degrees, and you fire slow pixel-sized bullets... that's another part of the problem. Somehow, the official Atari 8-bit translation of Atari (C) corporation's own Asteroids game leaves more than a little something to be desired. Perhaps this was an in-house job; you know, the guy or gal who worked on the Asteroids translation was feeling a little goofy, had some time on their hands, stripped down the Asteroids code, added just enough Space Invaders code to cobble together this semi-monstrous hybrid. Incidentally, both games feature the occasional managerial spaceship that comes floating by. Here, they cancelled each other out and there's nothing! No extra targets to attach... attack. So what's the verdict? Is it worth trying to flip the score? Probably not. No, I think we have to go back to that old, old quote from the Bhagavadgita... ah, just messing with you. No, I'll go with that old "Da Bears" sketch on Saturday Night Live... us old timers used to not abbreviate the name. It was a "Da Bears" game show, much like Jeopardy! The final question was "Bears vs. Bulls." For those of you who remember the correct answer, you can skip this part. Let's see if I remember it verbatim... damn. I don't. It was something like "Pitting these two forces of nature against each other would be a tragedy; not only for the teams involved... (flips over card) but for our planet. All nations must band together to ensure such a conflagration never takes place." Thankfully, the damage from this failed experiment has heretofore gone relatively contained......................

Mushca Disk 466 - the only home I know of for "Astro Invaders"

Atari Emulator -> Ozzy's Orchard

Well, HERE'S one I know I definitely haven't profiled yet... and I already know what you're thinking. No, there are no bats to de-head, and certainly no music that would even be considered light metal. In fact, demerits to the non-musical programmer who did do the music!  Worse than The Tail of Beta Lyrae.  That second melody that comes in later just has no pizazz to it.

As for the game play itself, well... there's just something to it, you know?  It's quite similar to Crossfire, if only for the game board.  Not quite as violent.  But as the game title suggests, there's a more long-term goal than just trying to flip the score... and you really shouldn't try to here.  Spoiler Alert: there are four rounds for each... unnatural-colored fruit you're supposed to harvest.  You are Ozzy, gentleman farmer extraordinaire, forever trapped in your beekeeper / Hazmat garb.  You must protect your evenly-spaced grid of trees from the man-sized bugs that are constantly lining up to plague you and your crop.  There are two colors of man-sized bugs: brown and white.  The brown ones are relatively harmless; you can walk through them.  Your only weapon: a 'gun' that shoots slow, brown bullets that will knock the bugs out.  The white bugs?  A little deadlier!  I already forget if you can walk through them... I don't think you can.  Hey, where's your sense of adventure?  Don't you like just jumping into the deep end of the pool on these things?  Figuring it out on your damn own for a change?  To make matters worse, the white bugs shoot their own bullets at you; mostly just to show off, but I tend to run into these things anyway.  And so, if you can survive three levels of this bedlam in paradise, the fourth level is the big payoff.  As you may notice, the levels... rather, the four rounds that constitute a level, correspond to a given season.  The fourth level is the fall, when the trees start giving forth their bounty of fruits!  But you gotta pick 'em up quick, because the giant bugs like 'em too!  They're not worth a whole lot of points, so I more or less just keep shooting at the bugs, and hope to run across one fruit or two in my travels and travails.

Yes, Ozzy is but a mere pawn in the game of the Agro-Industrial complex.  All hail the giant ruthless seed company whose Name Need Not Be Written Or Spoken!  And the game company responsible for this minor masterpiece is called TG Software.  I do like that logo!  I'm just a sucker for a great logo.  Also like that ZiMAG one.  If I had to pick one... and it seems like I do... I'm going to have to go with Abracadabra! as TG's best title.  A fast-paced orgy of magic and moving maze walls you'd be hard pressed to find; on the other side of that spectrum, you have Brøderbund's Labyrinth, where the maze walls move too slowly, and usually not in your favor, either.  So, to recap: slow maze walls, not enough magic.  Night Strike! is pretty good too.  (AKA Der Blitz!)  It doesn't lend itself well to hour upon hour of game play, but that's all right now; if you had to spend $34.95 for a diskette to play it, that's another story.  As for Droids, well... the '20s style font and the theme song are probably the best parts of this sleeping pill of a game.  It makes the similar game play of, well, Ozzy's Orchard, seem suave and sophisticated in comparison!  A shame that no forward-thinking game developer ever thought to get those proverbial country and city mice together in the same game.

Ozzy's Orchard's home in particular at Atarimania.com

TG Software's home in general at Atarimania.com

Mushca Disk 83

Atari Emulator -> Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

Most likely for the best. Didn't I want to do something else with my life? I almost finished this game some 35 years ago on my Atari 1200XL, but this was before you could go online and look up cheat codes... I mean, helpful advice. You start out with only one player. You don't have enough gold or enough torches for the dungeons. I keep "barely wounding" orcs and rogues with my pitiful weaponry... hmm! Nah, I should try to get some sleep right now. Okay, what the hell. Get busy gaming, or get busy dying. 

(a few minutes later) Nope. Still not working.

 
Atarimania home of Ultima IV