Atari 2600 #17: Challenge

Developer: Funvision

Publisher: Zellers

Release Date: No idea

Challenge is a simple game with a boring name, so of course we’re going to talk about that box art. What are the Ghostbusters doing on some random Canadian game about a duck moving through a maze? I wish there was some funny story behind it, but the truth is probably much more boring. Likely it was because Zellers didn’t care, and they were dealing with an unscrupulous Taiwanese bootleg game company.  Back home Funvision made fairly generic covers that were frequently reused. The skull mountain image from Inca Gold is probably on dozens of games. For Zellers every game had its own artwork even if it didn’t match the game. Maybe Funvision had run out of their stock images and this was the only one they had lying around. It could’ve also been a simple case of trying to sell a generic game by connecting it with a popular movie. It’s impossible to say for sure, but it’s a bit funny considering Zellers was already getting in trouble with Atari. Did they really want to bring Columbia Pictures into it as well? I know you guys were all the way up in Candada, but half the cast of Ghostbusters was Canadian. What if Rick Moranis saw this while he was visiting his family for Christmas? I suppose it had little impact in the long run though considering no one’s heard of the game or the company. It does make dating these games a little more interesting. I thought Zellers’ scheme was done by 1983, but Challenge couldn’t have been released until the summer of 1984 at the earliest. That was pretty late in the game to be releasing new 2600 games. Most of the 3^rd parties had already closed up shop by then. Since this fits into the “Atari 2600 games released after my birth” category I am interested to talk about it. Let’s get started already.

As I previously stated, in Challenge you play as a duck moving through a grid. You follow a path which leads up, left, and down while avoiding a duck’s mortal enemy, the mouse. I know much has been written about the rivalry between these animals, but it can never be said enough. Ducks and mice hate each other. Okay so only the first of the game’s four levels has mice, but the other three creatures aren’t listed in the instructions and I can’t tell what they are. That usually isn’t a good thing, but I’m not going to knock any points off of this game for having unclear graphics. This really could be all squares without hurting the gameplay any, so it’s nice that they even tried. Basically this is a game where you move vertically while avoiding the enemies moving horizontally. It’s all about timing as the different rows will move at different speeds, and you can’t get by purely on memorization. Your goal is to reach the end of the path where you will collect points based on how much time is left on the clock. The game gives you a whole six minutes which is far more than enough so it’s really no hurry. As you move across the screen a positive message will slowly reveal itself which is a nice touch. I like being told that I am very good.

 

So Challenge is a simple, leisurely paced game that feels more like a car trip toy than a fully fleshed out video game. In spite of this I still had a decent time playing it. The game turns out to have an accurate title, and I always appreciate a good challenge. There’s something satisfying about speeding from lane to lane narrowly avoiding catastrophe. Even waiting for lanes to clear up was interesting because I constantly had to stay on the move. I haven’t been able to get past the second level yet, but I liked the game enough to consider going back and trying again.

I still can’t quite put it in the good section, however. I think it’s too repetitive for it to leave much of an impact on the average person. The game boasts having four different levels, but the only thing that changes between them is the amount of enemies on the screen. It’s the same path with the same goal every time. It’s amusing for a time, but the options are so limited that it gets tedious after a while. Still, it exceeded my modest expectations so that’s a win. It probably helps that I played Inca Gold first. That game would make just about anything look good by comparison.

 

Challenge actually ended up going farther down on my list than I expected. It’s hard for a simply okay Atari game to get above many other okay games. So it’s all the way down at 99. Hey it made the top 100, which these days isn’t too bad a place to end up. I have rated more games than I expected, so even games down that low are worth a look. It’s number 12 on the Atari list, but there are a lot of good Atari games, so it won’t stay that high for long. Challenge was pretty good for an obscure foreign release and that gives me hope for playing more games that no one has ever heard of. There really are more games than you think. 

Ranking List

Atari 2600 #16: Inca Gold

Developer: Funvision (probably)

Publisher: Zellers

Release Date: 1983?

 

You know when I was in Canada a decade ago I had to go to a Zellers. They’re fairly legendary in Atari circles for releasing pirated games with weird cover art. Of course they quit selling them in the early 80s, but I still had to see one of the stores for myself, and I did see some Zellers carts at a local used game store. I also went to Niagra Falls, but who wants to hear about that when I also went to a local department store? For the most part Zellers games are re-releases of more common games with mostly different titles. Keystone Kapers was renamed Busy Police for example. So why am I talking about a group of pirated re-releases on here? Well, there are a few games that weren’t sourced from already released U.S. games. Two of them, Challenge and Time Warp, never received any other NTSC release while a couple others were released elsewhere, but either arrived in the US much later or appear on much rarer carts. Inca Gold is one from the last group. It’s one of the four original games made by Funvision which was an infamous Taiwanese game pirating company. It’s probably where Zellers, and a whole bunch of other obscure companies, sourced their games from. They were certainly prolific, and Inca Gold was released by numerous publishers under many different names. I have no idea what the game was originally supposed to be called, but you’ll also find it under names like Pac-Kong and Spider Kong. You can probably tell by these names that it is a Donkey Kong Clone. It also appeared under the name Spider Maze by the equally dubious Canadian company K-Tel Vision. So this is a game that has gotten around. If you are trying to get a complete NTSC set of unique carts than Inca Gold is the better choice even though it’s still quite expensive. So while not cared about by 99.9% of the world, this game is important for that certain type of collector. Of course it’s one of those games where tracking it down and adding it to you collection is the fun part. I doubt very many people actually want to play it. At least it’s an interesting story.

 When I first powered up Inca Gold I thought it was broken, or perhaps a PAL game mistakenly mis-labeled as NTSC. All those blinking objects on the screen couldn’t be right. However, that’s just what the game is supposed to look like. In still photos all seems normal. It looks like your run of the mill Donkey Kong rip-off. There were a ton of those by 1983, and some of them are very good. The main character looks like Mario but more generic while the monster at the top is easily recognized as a Donkey Kong stand-in despite being a giant spider. The gameplay involves jumping and climbing ladders just like the real game. If made well this could be a decent game. Too bad Inca Gold was so poorly put together. I’ve already mentioned the blinking rocks, but it’s the game’s most distinctive feature, and also the most annoying. The blinking rocks are almost nauseating. Atari Pac-Man gets critizism for having flickering ghosts, but in that game they follow predictable paths and cycle through fast enough that it doesn’t distract from the gameplay. In Inca Gold the objects are so large, bright, and spaced out that it’s hard to even tell what’s going on. It looks like a 3D Sega Master System game without the glasses. That’s how disorientating it is. You don’t play Inca Gold for points. You play it to see how long you can go without getting a headache. They also move around seemingly at random and take up so much space that you can usually tell if a level is going to be winnable in the first few seconds. Sometimes they leave big gaps to jump through and sometimes they come right for you. This would still be bad if they were solid. The flickering just emphasizes the low quality.

 

The problems don’t end there either. For one thing movement is slow and gameplay is tedious. With only three random objects in the sky and one that moves back and forth on the top row there is nothing to do besides climb ladders and jump. It shows off just how brilliant Donkey Kong is. In Donkey Kong the action never lets up. The first level has the famous barrels which constantly come at you following different paths. Because they can come down any ladder and don’t all follow the same path it requires fast reflexes and constant attention. On top of that there is a fireball slowly working its way up to you so you have to hurry. In Inca Gold there is very little action. You’re either going to get hit by a rock or you’re not. Sometimes you have to time your jumps a little, but for the most part the action stays away from you. The jumping is also bad which is unfortunate since there is so much of it. You have to jump right at the edge of a platform to make it safely to the next one, and this can be tricky even after playing for a while. At least you get consolation points if you fall down and die on the higher levels. Scoring brings up another sign of the carelessness that went into Inca Gold. Even though points are only scored on reaching the top or dying they still accumulate fairly quickly. In spite of this the score only has three digits. It only takes a few rounds to roll the score over which is just odd. I know it’s not difficult to keep up with thousands on your own, but it’s just not as satisfying if the score shows 47 instead of 2047. You can’t take a picture of the first score and show it to your friends. I doubt Inca Gold comes up too often in high score challenges, but the three-digit scoring would ruin the experience anyway. Of course playing Inca Gold is hardly an experience worth ruining in the fist place.

 This is definitely one of those “worse than ET” games. That seems to always be the metric that bad Atari 2600 games are measured by. Of course Inca Gold had no cultural impact whatsoever, so we’re still waiting for a worse Atari 2600 game that actually mattered. There may be some 60-year-old Canadians out there who played it back in the day, but as far as NTSC games go this one is low down on the list of well-remembered Atari games. On the Atari list it is next-to-last at #15. On the overall list it is all the way down at #119 which is just a little above the complete train wreck section. It’s too minor of a game to be quite that bad so at least it’s saved from the bottom ten. That’s some kind of silver lining, I guess. 

Atari 2600 Quality Percentage: 9/16 or 56.25%

Ranking List

Atari 2600 #15: Wall-Defender

Developer: Bomb/Onbase

Publisher: Bomb/Onbase

Release Date: 1983

 

There’s not enough written about all the 3^rd party companies that sprung up during Atari’s boom years of 1981-1983. It was over these three years that the majority of all 2600 games came out. Activision came up with the concept and Apollo showed that you could make games even without much experience, so everybody thought there was money to be made. By 1984 they were almost all gone. Even big companies like Parker Bros. and 20^th Century Fox couldn’t weather the storm. What hope was there for the smaller companies? Bomb was certainly one of the smallest and most obscure of the 3^rd party publishers. There is very little information about them online, but they appear to be an Asian company that was trying to branch out in the the US market. That makes sense why they decided to name their US division something synonymous with failure. They had probably never heard the term before. They managed to release four games in America in very small quantities sometime near the fall of 1983. There are no exact release dates or reasons for their rarity. And these are some rare games too. All four are about as rare as it gets for game actually released in stores. Usually there’s an interesting story behind extreme rarity, but if there is one behind the Bomb games it has been lost to time. Another quality of ultra rare 3^rd party game is low quality. Happily, Wall-Defender breaks the trend. It’s actually a decent game. Thankfully it is now 2023 and we can play all the rare 2600 games without much effort. Although this game is good, I’m glad I didn’t have to pay $100 to review it.

 Wall-Defender is a tense and claustrophobic shooter. The play field is small and only gets smaller. That can be a detriment in some games, but in Wall-Defender it works. You play as a typical Atari spaceship hopelessly trying to keep your walls from being destroyed. You will eventually lose of course, but why not try to stave of the inevitable as long as you can? You defend yourself by moving around a rectangular set of walls while shooting at aliens who come in from certain spots on all four sides of the screen. The middle is the most common place, but they can spawn closer to the sides as well. You don’t take damage yourself in this game, but instead your walls get damaged as the aliens crash into them. Every layer can take ten hits. The walls will get darker as they get closer to destruction and start blinking after seven hits If you are on the outer layer when it is destroyed than you are destroyed too. You then get to watch your character sadly float away into the dark vacuum of space. It’s a nice touch. There are also big aliens who take out your wall in a single hit. There is less distance to travel when the walls get smaller so in a way it gets easier as it goes on, but of course this puts you closer to a game over. Walls will regenerate after successful rounds, so it’s not hopeless if you do something stupid early in the game and start losing walls too soon.

 

For such a simple premise this game is full of tension and strategy. The aliens can pop up anywhere at any time and they only get faster as the game goes along. There is always that decision you have to make when one spawns on the complete opposite side of your rectangle. Do you try to go get it even though chances are low that you will make it over there, or do you stay closer to where you are and hope something spawns closer? Sometimes you have to sacrifice a couple of hits to make it through a round. It’s a game as much about decision making as it is about accuracy. It also gets very fast after a few rounds. Your walls get smaller, the aliens become more frequent, and it gets to be very exciting. The graphics are sparse, but there are several different aliens and they do look not of this Earth. I appreciate it that they took the time to make some actual aliens instead of just using generic shapes. I just wish I knew who actually made this game. It’s strange how anonymous older games can be. This one takes it a step further. Not only do I now know who made it, I don’t even know what country it’s from. I barely have it narrowed it down to a continent.

 So, Wall-Defender is a fun game that was released forty years ago and went virtually unplayed. It came out in small quantities by a practically unknown publisher right as the US market was collapsing. This is one of the reasons I love living in the internet era. Today I can type the name into Google and within seconds be playing. I’d still love to have a physical copy of course, but playing Atari games on the computer doesn’t alter the experience all that much. In some respects, we live in a golden age. At least that’s how having access to rare Atari games makes me feel.

 

So Wall-Defender definitely makes it up into the good section of games. I know it has a reputation for low quality shovelware, but the Atari 2600 has a lot more good games than you think it has. Now it’s not going up particularly high in the good column, but most of the 2600 games are going to be stuck in that section by virtue of their age and simplicity. It’s just hard to compete with games that got a ten- or twenty-year head start. It’s at #66 on my list which is just below the even rarer Red Sea Crossing and just above the kooky Bible Buffet. I’m going to play some more bad ones of course, but I’m excited to uncover even more hidden Atari 2600 gems.

 

Atari 2600 Quality Percentage: 9/15 or 60%

Ranking List

Sega Master System #7 - Ys: The Vanished Omens

Developer: Nihon Falcom

Publisher: Sega

Release Date: March 1989

 Ys feels like the perfect RPG series for the Sega Master System. I’m not sure how it happened, but the Master System has the pause button on the console itself instead of on the controller where it belongs. It was an extremely annoying feature that made playing any game that needed something like a menu screen somewhat of a pain to play. You either have to be constantly bending over to push that button or use your feet. I’ve always referred to more complex SMS games as big toe games for this reason. Thankfully, Ys is not a big toe game. It is just about the most button-lite RPG ever made. You don’t even need a button to attack. You just crash into monsters with the control pad. You play through about 98% of the game while using only one button. The other button is only used for occasional action items. So in that way it is perfect. Sadly, however, the SMS just isn’t quite up to the task of handling Ys. I know this port has always gotten good reviews, and it was for many years the easiest way to play Ys in North America, but to me it feels like a bad port. Let’s investigate a bit further.

 I can see why people want Ys to be good. There are only three RPGs on the Master System in the US, so it stands out just by being different. However, this game is just too slow. It really only plays like an RPG for the first half, and during that time it’s one of the slowest and most boring grinds in the history of gaming. The nature of the combat means that there is no strategy at all. You just run into enemies until you slowly earn enough money to buy better equipment or gain a level. The overworld is very small so there’s not even that much to explore. You also move painfully slow in general. It feels like about half the speed of the excellent TurboGrafx-16 version. Health regenerates in the field, so there’s a lot of standing still. This becomes especially painful in the later part of the game with a full health bar. You can find a heal ring which regenerates health in dungeons, but it regenerates much slower than it does in the field. Standing still is no fun and there’s no reason it has to be so slow. I can only imagine what it must’ve been like playing this game before smartphones. I’d just have to stare at the wall while I waited for my health to refill. Hydlyde has always been criticized for doing the same thing. Why does Ys get a pass?

 

In general there’s not that much equipment to buy or many levels to gain. After all is bought and leveled it becomes an action game taking place in a huge tower. This section of the game is much more fun. There are plenty of of puzzles to solve and challenging bosses to fight. The bosses are all strategy which is a refreshing change of pace after all the mindless bashing. There are still too many annoyances for it to save the game, however. This is where the slow health regeneration really started to take its toll on my sanity. The monsters just get harder and with no way to get stronger they never get any easier. It gets to the point where I have to fight one enemy, stand still for a minute to regenerate health, and then save just to make a little progress. I also hate that I can’t use my potion during boss fights. I know it makes the game more challenging, but why even let me have one if I can’t use it when I need it? Sometimes I feel like this game is just messing with me.

 Ys is a tough one for me because I really want to finish it. Master System games are typically difficult, so I haven’t finished that many of them. I would also love to have a classic console on which I beat all the RPGs. For now, however, I just can’t stomach it. It’s hard to give a good score to a game that I actively want to stop playing. It’s not even that long of a game. So I’m sorry everyone who has reviewed this game and raved about it. It’s just not fun to play. I suppose if you enjoy a game where you move for five seconds and then stand still for a minute than this is the game for you. I sure hope you aren’t that person.

 Sometimes I look at my list and wonder what I was thinking. There are often big gaps between when I play certain games, so some of my choice surprise me. Is Beethoven really better than Galaxian? I guess so! Ys is ending up higher than I expected because the just okay games are hard to rank. It makes some kind of sense because they are the most forgettable neither standing out for their quality or badness. I remember Demon Crest though, and I can positively say that I liked Demon Crest more than Ys. So that’s where it’s going. Congratulations Ys you are now #70. You may not be that much fun, but at least you are memorable.

 

SMS quality percentage: 3/7 or 42.85%