The Tower of Retro-Babble Floor 2: Atari

Yep, I'm back on my crap again. In this installment, I'm looking at all the Atari arcade games I installed on my Namco Museum cabinet, which turns out to be quite a few! Luckily, most of the games on tap range from "that's okay, I guess" to "hey, this kicks booty!," so at least by the time I've ascended to the third floor of the tower, I'll be both exhausted and entertained.

ATARI

Asteroids Deluxe

Like Pac-Man Plus, this is Atari's attempt to keep the embers of a hit arcade game burning for just a little while longer. It's not really a sequel so much as an patch of Asteroids, turning up the challenge and foiling strategies which had previously led to high scores and hundreds of lives.

While Pac-Man Plus was made more difficult with dirty tricks designed to catch the player off guard, Asteroids Deluxe comes by its challenge more honestly. Killer satellites are sent after the player once most of the asteroids are destroyed, which means that parking in the corner of the screen and picking off whatever floats past is no longer going to cut it as a battle plan. You'll need to be more mobile to survive, but sharpened control and a handy shield button (better than a "vanish and explode in another location" button...) leaves you prepared for the extra challenge. If this were designed the way Pac-Man Plus was, you'd probably have to worry about black holes opening directly under your ship every time you shot a meteor.

Black Widow

Amusingly, the black widow in the title is
a Valley Girl... although hip 1980s slang and
shopping at the mall is probably not going to
help her survive this onslaught of bugs.

Like Cloak and Dagger- which I'll get to in just a minute, I swear!- Black Widow is a dual stick shooter that tries to differentiate itself from Robotron: 2084, but doesn't quite stick the landing. As the titular spider, you must clear your web of insects, ranging from swirling formations of Thunderbugs to explosive Grenade Bugs. Blast a mosquito and it leaves behind money, but these "grubsteaks" can be attacked by parasitic wasps, turning them into eggs which must be pushed off the web before they hatch. For added irritation, impenetrable red lines are set on the web in later stages, turning it into a maze and restricting your movement.

There's a lot going on here, and it feels like Black Widow goes in too many different directions to work as a tightly focused game. Shooting bugs while dragging their eggs off the web feels like rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time... it's possible, but counter-intuitive and a little confusing. Black Widow is playable, bordering on amusing, but it's not likely to be anyone's favorite in this genre. Heck, it's not even as good as the recklessly ambitious Cloak and Dagger... but like I said, I'll get to that one later.

Blasteroids

Blasteroids takes the basic boulder blasting action of 1979's Asteroids and adds all the amenities of late 1980s arcade games. There are power ups this time! And three different ships you can select on the fly, ranging from a nearly immobile tank to a speedy little mosquito of a fighter that's almost as easy to squish as one! And a boss, Mukor, who looks like Sinistar if he recently competed on Double Dare and didn't have time to take a shower afterwards!

Blasteroids forged a path for the series that would be followed by sequels and knock-offs for years to come, including the Macintosh shareware favorite Maelstrom and Super Stardust for the Amiga. In the grand tradition of Atari games released in the latter half of the 1980s, it's a little quarter hungry, with a quickly depleted fuel meter, but it's plenty of fun if you can accept it on those terms. You may also want to take a friend along on your trip to the stars, as your two ships can dock, coupling the durability of the space tank with the swift aim of the mosquito.

Centipede

When an arcade game became an arcade hit, cheap imitations were inevitable, as Space Invaders demonstrated when it inspired countless knock-offs. However, the more daring game developers of the time would go beyond copying a popular game, taking the original concept and pushing it to its limits. That's Centipede... it's Space Invaders, but harder, better, faster, and stronger.

It's like Space Invaders, but
fast, noisy, and colorful! So not
that much like Space Invaders.

In contrast to the politely restrained Space Invaders, Centipede is colorful and chaotic. There are no perfectly arranged lines of alien troops marching in lockstep... instead, you get a serpentine bug that wildly races across the screen, weaving through the mushrooms in its path. Shooting the head of the centipede shrinks it, but shooting the body splits it apart, with the second half moving in the opposite direction. Fire carelessly and you'll be juggling a half dozen tiny centipedes, all as fast and deadly as their mother and all determined to crash into your ship.

Joining the festivities are frantically bouncing spiders, fleas on a kamikaze run, and scorpions which poison any mushrooms they touch. The mushrooms won't hurt you, but the centipede that gets high off the funky fungus and immediately plunges to the bottom of the screen will! Centipede is non-stop excitement from the moment you hit start, which is something gamers probably weren't saying about Space Invaders two years after its debut.

Cloak and Dagger

Cloak and Dagger was originally conceived as a fictional video game inside the film of the same name, where the weepy kid from E.T. teams up with secret agent Dabney Coleman to foil a terrorist plot. The Cloak and Dagger movie is a pass; a limp spy flick with tons of hammer to the face subtle product placement for Atari. However, the game it spawned makes an admirable if not entirely successful swing for the fences, and warrants further investigation.

I don't know what the hell that thing
is on the top left of the screen, and
I'm not getting close enough to it
to find out.

This Cloak and Dagger stars Dabney Coleman as Agent X, who infiltrates a bomb manufacturing factory in pursuit of the maniacal Doctor Boom. Boom's underground headquarters is thirty two floors deep and teeming with robots, mutants, and of course, bombs. However, Agent X is incredibly well armed for a spy, firing lethal arrows in all directions. Don't stop to pick off every robot you see, though! Just scoop up the blueprint you'll need to reveal the mines in a later stage, and make a mad dash for the elevator before the bomb in the center of the screen explodes!

Basically, Cloak and Dagger is Robotron: 2084 with higher aspirations. Rather than a black void littered with androids, each stage is markedly different from the last, with conveyor belts and jagged cavern walls thwarting your progress. Also, Agent X's mission extends beyond killing everything that moves. You'll need the blueprints in each stage to make it safely through the minefield in every fourth stage, and if you're feeling saucy, you can light the bomb in the center of the screen yourself for a big bonus.

You're probably not going to want to stick around for all thirty two stages, along with an equally long trip back to the exit, but Cloak and Dagger brings admirable depth to twin-stick shooters. It's also worth noting that the intermissions between stages are a delight. Make it out of a stage seconds before its bomb blows, and you're treated to a full screen caricature of Dabney Coleman, wiping the sweat off his brow as fire lights up the crack between the elevator doors.

Crystal Castles

Did you ever play a game that you absolutely, capital L loved as a child, but which lost most of its luster when you became a jaded adult? For me, that was Crystal Castles. It's hard to underestimate the hold this game had on me... its fuzzy hero helped inspire a love for bears that continued well into adulthood, and was a strong influence in the design of my own furry cartoon character, Byron. Say "hi" to the nice people, Byron.

A charming lad, that one. He's like Baby Tugs from the Care Bears, if he had a chip on his shoulder and chronic diaper rash.

Anyway! Crystal Castles tries to dethrone Pac-Man as the king of the dot munchers, and it does at least outclass it visually. Pac-Man's graphics are kind of simple and flat, while Crystal Castles has Bentley racing around towering structures with a grand sense of scale. Everything's seen from an isometric perspective, making the illusion of depth that much more convincing, and medieval creatures like walking trees, skeletons, and the dreaded Berthilda the witch are colorful and well animated, standing out against the mostly white playfield.

Trust me, it doesn't look like much
now, but in 1983, Crystal Castles
was incredible.

However, as beautiful as Crystal Castles looks, Pac-Man remains the better playing game. Bentley's movement with the trackball is a little too frantic (don't ask how the game plays without one), and the isometric viewpoint has a nasty habit of hiding pathways and even Bentley himself. Lifts to higher platforms are frustratingly tiny, giving Bentley just enough room to stand on them, and invulnerable enemies like the skeleton and bees love camping out in distant corners of the playfield, hovering over the last few gems you need to finish the stage. 

It's a valiant effort and one of the better games in its genre, but for all its visual splendor, Crystal Castles still comes up short next to the better Pac-Man titles. I can hardly blame my nine year old self for thinking otherwise, though... the game makes one hell of a first impression.

Food Fight

Macauley Culkin here unhinges his
jaw to eat the ice cream, a rather
unsettling sight.

Robotron: 2084 meets old episodes of The Three Stooges in this rare swing and a miss from Atari. Food Fight's bratty kid hero marches from right to left, scooping up piles of food and hurling them at chefs, who emerge from manholes scattered throughout the screen. Manholes? I imagine this is also where the chefs hide when the health inspector arrives. 

Anyway, the goal is to snag an ice cream cone at the left side of the screen before it melts... and that's it. Twists to the action and opportunities for bonus points are scarce... you just make a break for the ice cream the moment the stage starts, or loiter around tossing tomatoes at the chefs while dramatically increasing the risk of getting hit with a banana cream pie, along with everything else on the screen in a humiliating death animation. It's a hollow experience even for its 1983 vintage, and without the 49-way joystick from the arcade game, it's often a frustrating one in emulation... even with analog thumbsticks. You don't move Charley Chuck so much as steer him, making you wonder why the designers didn't just use twin sticks for tighter, more responsive control. They worked well enough for Cloak and Dagger and Black Widow!

Gauntlet

Take all the waiting out of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and you've got Gauntlet. Battles against orcs, ghosts, and other nasties happen in a fraction of a second, and spellcasting and healing are likewise "blink and you'll miss it" efficient. Tap the magic button and bam, everything on the screen but you and your fellow adventurers dies. Grab a chunk of ham and your hit points are instantly refreshed (as long as you don't shoot it first). Gauntlet is the most expedient role-playing game there's ever been or ever will be, and carving a path through small armies of wizards with your axe is an exhilarating experience. 

Well, it is for the first six stages. After cutting down a thousand or so ghosts and shoveling in about a dozen or so quarters, your attention starts to wander, and you're ready to do just about anything else. Playing with friends helps stretch out the lifespan of the game- you're not just going to leave them at the mercy of Death and his quarter-hungry hand of doom, are you?- but even they'll be done with this game long before it's actually finished.

I imagine seeing this in 1983 would
have been a "holy crap" moment for
most gamers of the time.

I Robot

Limited to a one thousand cabinet distribution and largely overlooked at the time, I Robot is an arcade release that dazzles with its polygonal graphics but struggles to find a game in all those colorful triangles. Half the time it's a bit like Pac-Man or Crystal Castles, with your robot leaping from one platform to the next and leaving behind a trail of color in its wake. Jump while the all-seeing eye at the top of the screen is watching and you'll be vaporized, but the eye itself can be blown to bits by leaping toward it once you've painted the entire playfield. Yes, even the sections you couldn't see because of the polygonal graphics. (Amusingly, you get more points by moving the camera closer to the playfield, suggesting that designer Dave Theurer knew finicky cameras were going to add unwanted challenge to 3D games long before Super Mario 64.)

The second half of the game is a shooter, hugely similar to the Catastroship segments in Atari's earlier Major Havoc. You fly through a simple maze, gunning down shapes enroute to the next encounter with the evil eye. It's functional, even playable, but nowhere near as inspired as the pioneering graphics would suggest. At least there's an option to ignore the game completely and play with the polygons yourself, messily smearing globes and explosions all over the screen like you were in robot kindergarten. 

Klax

Originally designed in BASIC (!) for the Amiga computer, Klax doubled as Atari's Plan B after it lost the rights to Tetris. Clearly, nothing is going to measure up to the game that started the whole puzzle craze in the first place, but Klax is a serviceable silver medal. It's a little too hung up on its trendy pop art aesthetics, and the gameplay isn't as satisfying or fair as it is in Tetris, but it's a solid effort that eclipses many of its competitors. I would rather play Tetris than Klax, but I'd much, much rather play Klax than Palmedes or Plotting.

Depending on the goal of the stage,
a single, well planned Klax could end the
level outright. Dare you try for the majestic
five by five X?

The game plays like a marriage of Connect Four to an especially hectic I Love Lucy episode, with the player sweeping across the bottom of a cosmic conveyor belt to catch colored tiles. Once caught, tiles can be dropped into a bin... make a line of like-colored tiles and they'll all vanish, scoring you points and getting you one Klax closer to meeting the quota for that stage. Vertical Klaxes are dead simple to make, but diagonal Klaxes award a much bigger point bonus.

The main issue with Klax is that most of the screen is covered by the conveyor belt, leaving little room for a bin at the bottom... and little room for mistakes by the player. A misplaced piece in Tetris is no big deal; you simply fill in the upper layers of blocks to remove them and dig down to those annoying gaps at the bottom. With Klax, there's room for just twenty five tiles in its bin, putting pressure on the player from the moment the game starts, and making elaborate patterns like the 5x5 X hair-pullingly hard to complete. This game was never going to be as good as Tetris, but an extra two rows of space in the bin would have made it a better Klax.

Millipede

New and improved? Or cluttered and chaotic? It's all in the eye of the beholder. Some players prefer the simplicity of Centipede, but personally, I quite like all the changes Atari made to Millipede. They've thrown in a garden's worth of new bugs, including the zig-zagging mosquito; the beetle, which acts as the methodical rook to the spider's chaotic bishop; and my personal favorite, the inchworm, which slows the rest of the creepy-crawlies to a crawl when it's shot. Beyond that, there are intense bonus stages and canisters of bug spray that really crank up your point potential. 

There's a lot more to juggle here than there was in Centipede, but the action is even more exciting and the rewards (and opportunities) for risky behavior are even greater. Since the new elements add to the overall excitement without clashing with each other or the play mechanics first introduced in Centipede, I'd say that makes Millipede the better game.

(By the way, yes, those canisters are marked DDT, the chemical that was later discovered to be an environmental and health hazard. Between this and the likely carcinogenic bug spray up Donkey Kong's butt in his third game, it's clear that the 1980s had a more casual attitude about pesticides than we do today.)

Missile Command

Bombs bursting in air. (Hopefully.)

Created at the peak of the cold war, Missile Command tasks you with protecting a country with six major cities from a nuclear attack. As the bombs streak downward, you'll fire missiles from one of three bases (Alpha, Beta, and Gamma) to intercept them. Time it right and the explosions from your missiles will consume any bombs that fall into them, along with any jets and satellites that float past. Time it wrong and you'll lose cities and even missile bases, leaving you helpless against the atomic onslaught. There's nothing like the desperation you'll feel when you hammer the fire button for an empty or destroyed missile base, only to hear apologetic chirps instead of bombs bursting in air. Nope, sorry, you're quite screwed. All you can do is wait for the biggest explosion you've ever seen in an early 1980s arcade game, along with the sweet release of death.

Missile Command isn't a personal favorite... the graphics are fairly simple, and your limited supply of missiles means that total precision and miserly resource management is necessary to survive the later stages. Nevertheless, it is a perfect snapshot of the zeitgeist of 1980. Americans of the time were obsessed with video games and fearful of nuclear annihilation, and Missile Command brings them together brilliantly. It's like peanut butter and chocolate, if you were deathly allergic to the peanut butter.

Peter Pack-Rat

He's not a household name, but Peter Pack-Rat was still important to video game history. After all, he did introduce the Atari 1 arcade hardware that signaled a bold new artistic direction for the company. Atari moved away from simple raster graphics and fluidly animated but stark vectors, and edged toward colorful and expressive cartoon artwork, like its competitor Midway had with the help of artists like Scott Morrison and Brian Colin. The characters in Peter Pack-Rat seem to jump off the screen with their vivid colors and sleek, professional animation. It's not Dragon's Lair quality, obviously, but the game's slinky Siamese cats, rat gangsters, and big-jowled bulldogs still have one hell of a confident swagger to their step. 

Pack-Rat, Pack-Rat, no one could!
Terrorize the neighborhood!

The only problem with Peter Pack-Rat is that, for all its stray cat style, there isn't much of a game here. Slick animation aside, it's a plain platformer that feels like an evolutionary link between Donkey Kong and the more advanced Super Mario Bros. The title character scurries through stages, scooping up junk that catches his eye and returning it to a ramshackle home base he must have stolen from Riff-Raff and the Catillac Cats. Some of the cartoon critters chasing Peter can be beaned with rocks, then ridden to spots on the screen that could normally only be reached with risky and/or tedious platforming. It's a nifty idea in theory, but since riding the animals carries its own risks, it's a play mechanic you'll think twice about using.

Rampart

You know what Tetris was missing? Nautical battles! So goes the logic behind Rampart, which uses familiar-looking puzzle pieces to construct a game that's surprisingly not much like Tetris. Rampart is split into three phases: the first has you setting cannons inside a kingdom on the coast, the second has you firing those cannons at approaching ships, and the third has you scrambling to fix any damage sustained by your walls. If your castle isn't fully surrounded by walls at the end of twenty seconds, you lose it, and the game is over. However, if you're incredibly fast and skilled, you can extend your kingdom's reach by capturing nearby castles. The more territory you claim, the more cannons you can set, and the more quickly you can wipe out the enemy's navy.

It's a refreshing re-invention of the puzzle genre, and there's nothing else like it (unless you count the home versions, which often strayed from the source material with new play mechanics). Having said that, Rampart is also infuriating to play without a trackball, and that's not an option on most game consoles. Setting the crosshair over invading ships is easy enough, but placing cannons and especially sections of wall is a twitchy and trying experience... especially when the computer opponent escalates its attack, leaving little gaps in your walls that somehow align perfectly with the coast and the edges of the screen. You know, the two places where you can't actually set walls. Rampart, you're a big jerk.

Roadblasters

This game exudes futuristic, thirteen year old approved style, and a little research reveals why... it was designed to promote a line of Matchbox cars! The game was a minor hit, even popping up many years later as a plot point in the film Wreck-It Ralph, but the toy line? No so much. At this point, even Matchbox probably doesn't know it had anything to do with Roadblasters.

Green orbs give you the power to rule the road!
(Sorry.)

No matter... the game is all anyone needs to remember. Roadblasters is a racing title, looking a bit plain next to its contemporary OutRun but with a greater emphasis on speed and firepower. Your car rolls off the showroom floor with a machine gun, but can catch more devastating weapons like the U.Z. Cannon (I get it!) and a nuclear bomb that turns the entire screen into an irradiated wasteland for a few seconds. With that much power and infinite lives, the only thing that can stop you is a steadily draining fuel tank. Floating orbs on the track offer a small refill, but once you're out of gas, you'd better hope you're not also out of quarters.

It's a great game... approachably simple, unrelentingly intense, and expertly ported to the Atari Lynx and Sega Genesis. Roadblasters the toy line wasn't anything special, but Roadblasters the game is an unforgettable experience.

Space Duel

You're shooting diamonds now. It doesn't
make much sense, but just go with it.

We don't talk about Bruno, and you never hear much about Space Duel, the third game in the Asteroids series. It's the black sheep in a family of arcade hits, like Gaplus or Return of the Invaders or Double Dragon III, or about a half-dozen Pac-Man games that took the franchise in ill-conceived new directions. Did anyone want to chase after a green puffball who steals all of Pac-Man's food? Not really. Did anyone want to spend real world money on new moves and weapons for their characters in a disconcertingly clunky beat 'em up? Absolutely not, and how dare you even suggest it! Did anyone want an Asteroids spin-off where the two players are joined at the hip and must coordinate their thrusting to keep from hopelessly spiraling into space junk?

Apparently no, there was little appetite for tethered rock blasting. Space Duel was given a lukewarm reception in arcades, and went without home console ports until Atari Anniversary Edition was released for the Playstation twenty years later. That doesn't mean Space Duel was a bad game... it's a perfectly competent take on Asteroids, this time in color and with mesmerizing animations for the onscreen chunks of space debris. It just doesn't add much to the core gameplay, aside from minor annoyances like tiny plus signs that take a billion shots to kill and the aforementioned docked two player mode. Fortunately, you don't HAVE to play with another ship stapled to your butt, so you probably won't... unless you and a friend are drunk and in desperate need of amusement.

Tempest

It's the original tube shooter, conceived in a nightmare by Dave Theurer and with enough manic intensity to make you wake up in a cold sweat. It's fast, it's demanding, and the challenge goes through the roof when new enemies like the Spikers and Pulsars enter the fray. The former tries to impale you with green spikes scattered at the end of the tube, while the latter electrifies segments of the tube, making it risky to cross its path. When you're overwhelmed by incoming flippers and all hope for survival seems lost, the super zapper provides screen-clearing salvation... but only once per stage! Maybe you can shake one more dead enemy out of it if you're desperate, but don't push your luck.

At a basic level, Tempest plays a lot like Space Invaders, but it's the dynamic viewpoint and speedy action that sets it apart. Rather than watching the action from a safe distance, you look into the playfield as monsters emerge from its center and head straight for your throat. Also, thanks to a special dial controller, the claw in Tempest runs circles around that pokey tank from Space Invaders. Or rectangles, or stars, or whatever crazy shape the tube happens to take next.

Tetris

From Russia, with a lot of rough edges.

This was one of the first attempts to bring the Soviet sensation Tetris to the United States, and let me tell you, comrade, it's got some pretty big issues. You can only turn the Tetrominos clockwise, and the control feels clumsy and imprecise. It's not a major problem in the earlier stages, but once you reach the later, faster ones, you won't get a chance to course correct when you move your piece one block away from where you really wanted it. This results in gaps in your carefully constructed lines, and oh yes, swearing... lots and lots of swearing.

Atari's Tetris isn't a total blunder. There are multiple play modes, including a very Dr. Mario-like challenge where the bin already has pieces inside it and you must fill the spaces between them to make lines. Also, the presentation is on point, with Cossacks celebrating your victories in the center of the screen and a suitably Russian soundtrack. You can even play with a friend if you'd like, but your friend deserves to play a better version of Tetris than this.

Xybots

Four out of five gaming historians agree! The missing link between the frantic robot-icide of Berzerk and the first person demon blasting of Doom is Atari's Xybots. Glaringly dated yet weirdly prescient, Xybots has you and a friend battling androids in a maze, from within the maze. The labyrinth animates only slightly better than the first-person dungeons in Wizardry, and movement beyond strafing is restricted to awkward ninety degree turns, but it's still a forward thinking design.

Things get tricky for Rock and Ace by the
eighth stage. No, not the Ambiguously Gay
Duo, although I can understand the confusion.

As a game, Xybots is competent, but also stunted by the limited technology of the time. Your view of the maze only comprises about a quarter of the screen, and combat with the robots is surprisingly flat despite the 3D viewpoint. It's a lot of dashing back and forth, mashing the fire button and hoping you can sneak a shot past each robot's (aggravatingly effective) defenses. Don't stop to blow the smoke off your ray gun, though! In the quarter-munching tradition of Gauntlet, your energy depletes over time, forcing you to quickly find the stage exit. Note that reaching the exit will be all but impossible in later stages, when your radar stops working and the maze is packed from wall to cardboard wall with malicious machines.