Atari 2600
A realistic game in both concept and execution. This game casts the gamer as the skipper of a spaceship. Besieged by meteors of various sizes, you must navigate your way through a deep space asteroid field and clear a sector of dangerous space debris. The craft can rotate a full 360 degrees and has a front-mounted laser cannon to chop up the moonlets. 6/10
What is "Asteroids"?
This three-screen climbing contest challenges your sailor to catch all the kisses thrown by his lady love who's perched at the top of the screen. His task is made harder by the bully, who walks along the multilevel playfield, hoping to knock the sailor out. The Sea Hag also tries to bar the path of true love by hurling bottles at our hero. 8/10
What is "Popeye"?
This popular sequel to the previous entry in the series features three screens of climbing and dodging action. Now it's the mustachioed man who has the upper hand. He's caught the gigantic gorilla and put him in a cage. The hero, a pint-sized chip of the old block, must rescue his daddy by obtaining keys that unlock the cage. A host of jungle creatures snap their jaws at his hide whenever its within range, but the Simian Son can bonk them with fruit. 8/10
What is "Donkey Kong Junior"?
Your mighty hero, the alias of a cowardly prince, defender of a mystical castle and star of the excellent animated cartoon show of the same name, works out here against the weaponry and minions of his arch-enemy, the none-too-handsome skull-faced villain. The action consists mostly of zipping liberally back and forth, dodging and destroying fireballs generated by his fearsome foe. Much too repetitive to keep players interested long, but the graphics show promise that the game never keeps. 5/10
What is "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe"?
Play the role of the famous Captain in command of his famous Starship on a mission to seek out and destroy the enemy starbases. There are nine sectors of space, each filled with enemies. Travel through them all, fighting the ridged-forehead enemy and the pointy-eared enemy ships armed with deadly torpedoes, to reach the enemy mother-ships, or take shortcuts through the Black Hole to Sector 9 where the dreadnought waits for the ultimate battle. 9/10
What is "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"?
This cartridge won a Certificate of Merit Award last year in the "Videogame of the Year" category,
and it won't take most players more than a couple of rounds to understand why this city defense game has proven so popular. As the person in charge of repelling the airborne attack against the undersea metropolis, you command three weapons batteries, located at the center and side edges of the display. The attackers whiz across the screen, firing at your positions. 6/10
What is "Atlantis"?
A total simulation of this sport's action uses the play-mechanic wherein the portion of the stick which strikes the ball on the volley dictates the speed and direction in which it will travel. The crowd jeers, the balls "pong" and the computer plays a game that would make Jimmy Conners shudder. 8/10
What is "(Real Sports) Tennis"?
Bounty Bob, the intrepid Mountie, can only get his man, Yukon Yohan, by thoroughly exploring the 11 stations of Nuclear Ned's abandoned mine. The on-screen character completes a playfield by covering every inch of the horizontal beams, using ladders, slides, lifts, and even in one case a cannon, to get from one elevation on a field to another A countdown clock ticks off the limited amount of time available for performing this feat - Unelapsed time is credited as a bonus. Radioactive mutants patrol the mine sections and can kill you. 7/10
What is "Miner 2049er"?
The same nine-hole course can get boring time after time without variations like different pin and tee placement. Game could also use a close-up of the green, yet graphics carry the load. There are nine clubs to choose from. Disc aims swing, side buttons enable player to hook or slice the ball if timing is right. Honor system is used to decide which player goes first and player furthest from hole is always up. Bunkers, trees and water hazards make life difficult. Trajectory of shot must clear height of trees or program will begin to sound like a lumberjack convention. 7/10
What is "PGA Golf"?
This translation of the classic Stern coin-op pits a player-controlled humanoid against guardian robots, as he explores a maze of rooms. Using the joystick, the humanoid moves through the maze that's full of robot guards. Shoot each robot, then escape that maze by running through an exit. When leaving a room, the humanoid is instantly transported to another maze full of robots—up to eleven robots can be on screen at once. 9/10
What is "Berzerk"?
This is an exciting game, whether it's played by one or two players. In the single-player mode, the arcader steers a car around a four-lane rectangular track filled with 80 dots. There's an opening, permitting lane switching on each face of the rectangle. When a car passes over a dot, it disappears and scores a point. By changing lanes periodically, the player can clear the board. 5/10
What is "Dodge 'Em"?
The gamer controls a critter who tunnels into the ground and does battle with the many denizens that dwell in those regions. These ghoulies can be dealt with in direct confrontation, where the character uses his tongue (activated by depressing the action button rapidly) to pump and eventually blow up the attacking nasty. When all the enemies save one are rubbed out, make a bee-line for the top left-hand corner of the screen so he doesn’t get away! 8/10
8/10 Dig Dug (This is a pervy review!)
Video racing contests in the tradition of Pole Position are becoming increasingly popular with arcaders and Epyx's racing game allows ColecoVision owners to get in on the racing fun. The game begins with a freeze-frame depiction of a high-powered racing vehicle at a pit-stop, being prepared to enter, or re-enter, the big race. Next comes the qualifying round, in which gamers use either the Coleco driving wheel module or a standard joystick to game position for the actual event. The action button serves as the gas pedal with the secondary toggle acting as a brake. 8/10
What is "Pitstop"?
Speed and accuracy in solving mathematical problems is the key to helping the gorilla get past the animals that block his path. Keypad selects number of problems and difficulty When gamer is correct with the answer, the gorilla scoots around the animal in his path. When he's wrong, the gorilla must dive into the water to get past and then must answer another problem correctly to get back on land. There are 18 levels of difficulty. Higher levels provide adults a real challenge also. 6/10
What is "Math Fun"?
This translation of the Konami coin-op puts the player in the cockpit of a fighter ship, flying over varied terrain. The mission is to reach and destroy the enemy's base, but there are five levels to traverse before the ship gets a shot at the target. Difficulty increases as the game progresses, in this highly successful version of a play-for-pay favorite. 9/10
What is "Scramble"?
The gamer uses the joystick to control an on-screen hero who must move from room to room
in a complex, tightly-guarded by enemy robots, in this festival of fight-and-move thrills. The
outstanding innovation in this game, which first saw the light of day on an Apple II program from Sierra On-Line, is that only foes which would logically be in the on-screen protagonist's line-of-sight are visible to the player on the screen. This feature makes this game less predictable than contests which give the human holding the joystick an omniscient view of the action. 8/10
What is "Marauder"?
Fernando Herrara's classic computer SF shoot-out game has been licensed by Parker for the Atari 5200 and the translation offers everything the original did with the exception of one or two intermission parades (which conclude each successful defense of the planet Earth). Using a new type of thrust-propulsion system, players can move their ship in one direction and fire in the other, while defending earth from a variety of space-borne alien assault troops. Most deadly of these are the floating space mines, pulled inexorably toward Earth by our planet's own gravitational pull. Should so much as a single mine hit Terra it goes boom in an incredible graphic display of ultimate destruction. 8/10
What is "Astrochase"?
In this game, the prehistoic hero must rescue his girlfriend and to reach her, he must leap past rocks and holes in the ground; ford a river while avoiding the Fat Broad's club; jump over logs and duck
low-hanging branches, cross a chasm by clinging to the dooky bird, avoid lava chunks spew-
ed by a volcano; get past the dinosaur's gaping jaws while leaping from one diving turtle's
back to another; and avoid stalactites in the bronto's lair.
What is "B.C.'s Quest for Tires"?
A crudely-rendered figure moves through a labyrinthine maze representing a sewer. His job: clean-out the rats and similar vermin infesting the underworld. Movement is slow and choppy, and the firing capability is rather random. Rats are represented by tiny dots or lines and the disc is used to navigate the "hero" and direct his anti-rat weapon. 4/10
What is Sewer Sam?
Aliens are attacking the galaxy, plunging toward the center from the far corners of the sector. The player mans a cannon on center screen, and the joystick rotates the gun to blast away at the attackers that zip directly toward his position. A special zapper clears the screen of all enemies, but it can be used only once on each level. 9/10
What is "Bedlam"?
Although this maze-chase has a nominal science fiction theme — theoretically, you're moving from deck to deck of a huge mother-ship looking for your scout craft — it is closest to being a version to 'video tag'! Your on-screen character enters the playfield from a room at the bottom. You must then catch, one at a time, a series of three aliens who rove the halls. Catching an alien gives you custody of the key it carries. 6/10
What is "Malagai"?
Somewhere at the bottom of a hollowed-out mountains there is a lost temple. To reach it, the player must first capture the elusive Flame Spirit and send it to the Skull Spirit that guards the temple's entrance. The louder the music, the closer the adventurer is to the Flame Spirit, (It can only be seen in the glow of the hero's flashlight.) But guardian bats swoop down, and if they touch the hero, they steal back the crown, returning it to the temple. 7/10
What is "Mountain King"?
This multi-phase cartridge turns presidential electoral politics into an engaging action-strategy
contest for one or two candidates. After selecting party and issues, the players barnstorm across a map of the U.S. to collect money from fund-raisers while avoiding bad press. Then the candidate must travel to each state and by moving through crowds of hand-shaking voters, gaining popularity. Finally, it's time for election day, the returns come in just the way they do real life -- sweeping across the country from East to West. 8/10
What is "Campaign '84"?
Remember those old puzzles that came in Cracker Jack boxes where there were eight sliding squares to be shifted laboriously into vacant slots in order to complete a picture or pattern? That's the idea behind this enchanting videogame puzzle in which players frantically position blocks of topography allowing the onscreen protagonist to move smoothly from sector to sector along the juxtaposed trail (which only happens to be littered with sacks of gold. Highly recommended. 9/10
What is "Happy Trails"?
Lovely star-laced Molly has been kidnapped and it's up to the heroic hero, manned by the arcader, to rescue her from the villain, Spud. The entire scenario has an extra dimension since the hero has
a voice built right into the programed cartridge. When Molly is snatched, her cries help summon the hero who pursues Spud onto the game field until he finds the key to unlock Molly. 9/10
What is "Spike"?