A common critique against the Atari 2600 that I see both with my friends and online is that a lot of the library is "too simple". Games that take only a few minutes to see everything there is to offer, small distractions that were once cutting-edge technological marvels that under the lens of todays expectations are now seen as having the depth of a mario party minigame, if even that. In my time so far playing the shotgun-spread of random 2600 games I've discovered that in spite of the limited capabilities of the hardware and rudimentarily-designed games that there can be a lot of games that either remain fun and enjoyable because of their simplicity like Kaboom or Basketball, or games that have layers of depth under their simple exteriors like Yars Revenge or Combat. When it comes to even reviewing games this vintage, I do sometimes wonder about whether or not the passage of time and progess of games these past 5 decades have clouded any sort of critical vision I could put on them, as if there could have been some form of cultural context that enhances these games that can only have been experienced from being alive and playing these in their time. Sometimes I wonder if I'm giving games like Adventure or Space Invaders too much credit and putting them on a pedestal more for their retrospective historical value rather than their actual in-the-moment gameplay. What I am really getting at with this really long-winded introduction is that when it comes to retro titles of any age, fun games stay fun. Canyon Bomber here is a game that I feel would be just as uninteresting to play in its release year as it is now.

It's a port of an old black-and-white arcade game where it's sort of a competitive reverse-breakout. Two planes drift over a giant pit of blocks and pressing the button drops a bomb into the block pit where you get points for anything it touches. First player to get 1000 points or have the highest score when either player makes six mistakes, and they win. The main gameplay is really passive, as the only thing you can really control is when to time shots so there's really not much depth outside of hoping your plane has the right height and distance to properly aim your shots. Not like aiming really matters anyways because the first 75% of any round has the entire playfield full of blocks where missing a shot is literally impossible, so just mash that shoot button and try to fire as much as possible baby!!! By the time the board clears up enough where aiming is actually necessary, one player usually already has a score advantage so in that case it's actually a viable strat for whoever is in first to tactically kill themselves as soon as possible to end the game while they are still in the lead. In the single-player mode the AI is actually braindead due to the fact that they can't actually get penalized for missing shots the same way you can, so they are just in a perpetual state of mashing fire no matter what the playfield is. There's also a bonus mode where there are submarines to shoot instead of blocks and you have to use the paddle controllers to aim when your sea charges explode which makes it a game of aiming both horizontally and vertically, so there's at least some level of sauce there.

Either way, this game isn't really the most interesting thing to play, and it's games like this that are what I feel people believe most 70's video games to be as a whole. Even in multiplayer, where atari games usually shine their brightest, I feel like this game gets overshadowed by plenty of games that had been out already by the time this dropped. I guess this games ties to the arcade give it some historical value, but how many people really are out there reminiscing about canyon bomber the same way people do about games like Pong, Asteroids, or Space Invaders??? Maybe a few people? At least one dad out there that really got into this? Nobody that I've met. If you want to play some good-ass atari, there are tons of other, more interesting options out there.

It's a quaint little party game where someone writes a deadly scenerio and an AI tries to write how it would kill each person, as everyone tries to write what they'd do in defense to try and survive. It's fun and has roughly the same appeal as a decent jackbox minigame, though I do think the AI can be a bit buggy and very biased. My group had several times where the bot glitched out, skipped players, crashed entirely, the works. Clearly, AI is the future. It also seemed like the game kind of determines who lives and who dies without even putting much thought into either the prompt or what the players write. If the game writes out your prompt and follows it up with a "However," in the next sentence then that's certain death, and it happens a lot. One of the players in my group discovered that the meta for consistently living is to call doraemon and make up some bullshit gadget that he has that can diffuse whatever specific situation you are stuck in. I'm not even joking, using the doraemon strat he swept us for like the entire rest of our play session. I guess the moral of the story is doraemon is the most powerful character in all of fiction, i guess. This shit's built into discord so as long as you are okay with the activity having access to your discord social security number or whatever the fuck those things take from you then it's def worth a play.

BEHOLD, THE ATARI KUSOGE

this is some unbalanced bullshit and I'm here for it. The game basically consists of a shmooving stick figure known as the wizard fighting for his life against the "imp", a whirlwind-looking entity that eternally stalks our poor wizardly friend like a tropical hurricane. Unfortunately for Hurricane Imp, our Wizard must be a Florida resident because he's packing heat and can shoot the storm as a way to deal damage. If the Wizard's damage reaches 100, the Imp wins and the game is over. If the Imp's damage reaches 100, the wizard gets a kill point and a health refresh and the Imp respawns except with more health. It's really weird that it's not just a round-based versus game as it has the weird kill score counter tacked on but like sure. It does fundamentally make it an inevitable losing game for the wizard as there's really no win state for the wizard whatsoever, so that's cool.

That's not even to mention the actual imbalance of the gameplay. It's kind of like combat in that there are two bodies that shoot each other until one stops moving but in this game it's really more of a predator-and-prey dynamic. The Imp is completely invisible unless it's either close to the wizard or fires an attack, so the wizard really has no idea when or where danger could come from. The wizards shots also have a cooldown of like a second or two whereas the imp sure as hell doesn't so the wizard basically has to dodge and weave aiming shots against an invisible predator hunting them down whereas the imp just has to get up close and mash button to win EZ. Also the more damage the wizard sustains the slower he moves just for good measure. It's so comically weighted against the wizards favor that I can't help but be entertained by it. If for some reason the wizard needs even more things to worry about there's also the option to add a flame on the map to defend that serves no purpose outside of getting an additional hitbox the imp can use to deal damage to the wizards health bar.

Unlike a lot of versus-oriented 2600 games there is indeed a single player mode where the AI controls the imp, but really the most fun I've had with it is through playing with a friend as it just turns the game into an inescapable horror movie where one person gets to play the monster. Despite its wildly imbalanced nature I've happened to have a lot of good times just shooting the shit playing this with someone making house rules to give the wizard some kind of thing to aim for and whatnot. I do wish there was more than one map but what can ya do. The game wasn't actually ever released on a cart in its actual time as it was supposedly to be one of the last 2600 games before development shifted to the 5200 but got cancelled for like not being complex enough of a game or something like that, so I kinda get the lack of pretty much anything here. Despite the fact that it's probably much more of a "toy" than a "game" given how loose the gameplay conditions are, I've somehow managed to have a lot of fun with the 2P mode so I can't say I'm not a wizard fan.

Certainly a game of all time. On one hand, the camera and combat is kinda ass, the game pulls a mario maker and drip-feeds the character creator features through a weird RPG levelling system instead of having everything available from the start, getting new moves for your characters is kind of counter-intuitive and emphasizes not using the custom characters that are the main selling point of the game, and the english dub is so horrible that it completely nullifies some really decent writing and solid gags just from how bored everyone sounds (like bro this isn't even a funny bad bad dub its just a bad bad bad dub). On the other hand though, this game has a really intricate character creator that's simple to use to the point where it really does feel like you can make fully 3D characters as easily as just sketching them out so you can basically make any character to your hearts content in it AND you can unlock THE Reimu Hakurei as a secret character so really let's call it a draw. The game is a pretty standard platformer otherwise and if I had this as a kid i'd probably hella fuck with it and try collecting all the different pre-made dudes. If the game had a bit tighter combat and the voice performers actually gave a damn, this would be some certified kino. (apparently there is an undub so I would certainly recommend playing that over the base english version, I didn't know it existed until it was already too late)

Here are the characters that I made before Reimu basically made everyone else obsolete for the rest of the game

amogus
this was the first thing i made to figure out how the character creator worked, and of course im gonna make an amogus im creatively bankrupt. his stubby legs meant i couldn't use him for shit in combat so i basically gave him psychokinetic elemental powers for puzzle solving purposes and long-ranged combat (until reimu could do a 3-hit combo using all 3 elements)

lostcontrol
This was the second character I made because I needed to make someone simple so I made the fucked up little triangle guy from that one meme. He was my movement guy as his tiny triangular size made him able to dodge enemy attacks and zip around the stage like a lil speedrunner. Eventually I needed a character that could fly to get the reimu card so I turned him into a one-winged angel. The music made him lose control.

jashinchan
Jashin was my first actual challenge to make but she surprisingly came out alright. There's no slithering option for movement so she just instead kind of bounces around but you know i'm cool with that. She was pretty useless at first because her punches did jack shit for damage so I rectified that by arming her and making her the combat character. At first, I just gave her a hastily-made pistol, but decided that wasn't fitting for her character and got rid of it. I gave her instead a battle axe (maybe she borrowed it from Yurine or something) for close range combat and a mega buster for long range combat.

TEST
I had to redo this mfer like 4 different times trying to get a correct hunched posture, making this guy took me an hour. I needed a character with wheels for the speed section of the game and asked my friend who would be the scariest cartoon character to see running at you at a million miles per hour. They said Robotnik from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog would be the scariest, and so it was written. His legs are actually wheels so they spin around and his mustache and asscheeks have jiggle physics. Due to technically being a vehicle, he's technically the only character that Reimu didn't immediately render obsolete. I never learned how to change his name to anything else so hes just TEST for the rest of eternity, truly a lab subject that shouldn't have escaped his confinement

craig
my final character, the only one that isn't based off of some other character or whatnot. Originally he was going to be my combat character as I was like "what if i just make someone with really fucking long arms that just punches people from far away", but then it didn't work because he was slow as balls and I just got jashin to be the combat character anyways. Later on I needed a character with long legs to reach a specific point to get the flying ability early so I added some really fucking long legs to craig in order to get the job done. Completely deformed and experimental, craig is a being whose God has forsaken him. Behind that tiny smile is a pain greater than what anyone could know, and I stay in heaven because I fear what I hath created.

"We know that millions of people all over the world just love the PAC-MAN arcade game. PAC-MAN has won the hearts of men, women and children everywhere. We also know that PAC-MAN has traditionally been an arcade game. Well, we at ATARI know all about arcade games. After all, we make some of the greatest arcade games In the world, and we know now to bring the same dynamite game play into your home. Our PAC-MAN has all of the excitement and challenge of the standard arcade game, and you get to play in the comfort and convenience of your own home. This is especially advantageous if you still plan to make an occasional appearance at the arcade to show off your great playing skills. (Little do they know that you've been practicing at home all along.)"
-Page 1 of the Pac-Man Atari Manual

at that point in 1982, you could probably argue that those words in the manual were the biggest lie ever told in gaming. When it comes to converting arcade games to the ol' 2600, obvious compromises need to be made in order to crunch out that game essence. Some games, like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Defender, Berzerk, etc, make the conversion relatively unscathed. But sometimes you just get some absolute nonsense like Pac-Man. While this game is in literally no means an accurate conversion of the arcade classic, it does show some interesting insight into Atari history both in a cultural and gamedev sense.

So like, the game pretty much shares gameplay similarities with the arcade version and that's kind of it. You eat dots and avoid ghosts that chase you, but compared to the arcade the ghost AI is different, scoring is different, the hitboxes are different, the maze is different, you get the idea. The maze isn't even like a bastardized facsimile of the original, it's just a bunch of circles in a grid. The hitboxes for actually eating the pellets video wafers seem to be a lot smaller and more precise than the hitbox for touching ghosts which makes things feel kind of inconsistent since you gotta be further forward towards pellets video wafers in order for them to actually count as eaten whereas the ghosts touch any pixel of you and pac man dies right then and there. At least on the control front things still feel responsive and snappy. There are only 8 different game variations here, and they just change how fast Pac-Man and the Ghosts can move to somewhat alter difficulty. I found that Game 6 is the fastest for both and even then it's still not that fast, so that's my rec if you want the most engaging Pac-Man gameplay. The slowest ghost speed is designed for younger children apparently, and at that speed the only way the ghosts will ever get you is if you actively try and get yourself killed which is awesome. Also this is probably just a me thing but using the stiff Atari joystick to try and quickly maneuver Pac-Man definitely hurts my hands after a little while. If there are any boomers on this site reading this please let me know of any proper Atari controller holding tech because I still haven't figured out how to use it in both a comfortable and consistently functioning way just yet.

If you look at this game solely through the lens of how accurate of a conversion this is, it's pretty dire. But ngl this game is pretty cool to look at retrospectively. Atari crunched the fuck out of one guy in 6 months to make something they KNEW would sell millions on brand alone (and sell it did, this is the best-selling game on the system), and so within those constraints the guy likely chose to go for preserving what he believed to be the essence of Pac-Man, rather than trying to make a straight conversion with no proper time or resources. Honestly, the essence still comes through pretty well even in this conversion, and a solid amount of the 8 million copies sold were probably satisfied casual customers just trying to get their fill of eating dots and chasing ghosts without much care towards the details. It's also that by 1982 the Atari 2600 was already roughly 5 years old, Pac-Man was already 2, many people had understood standards of what they should be expecting from a first-party conversion of an immensely popular arcade title, and this definitely wasn't up to those expectations. Gaming wasn't a fad anymore, the market of core gamermen had bloomed by this point, and if there's anything we know about those guys it's that they have quite high standards for their gamin. As a result, this game (and it's partner in crime that would release at the end of the year, E.T.) could be described as one of the first games known to the general public as a "bad game", and are frequently cited by historians and fans alike as a major cause of the great American video game crash of '83 as well as being touted as some of the worst games ever made in the later internet sphere of things.

Do I think this game really deserves that kind of reputation though? I mean, kind of? It's not nearly as ambitious as something like E.T. and is a pretty blatant result of Atari cutting corners to get as much easy profit on their grubby hands at the cost of making a quality product for their consumers, so it's not exactly like this game is great or misunderstood or anything imo. The Atari could absolutely have done a more direct conversion of Pac-Man, as both the Ms. Pac man port and plenty of 2600 homebrew can prove, so it's not like it was entirely the hardware at fault either. I just think that the end product is such a fascinating result of so many factors that it's hard not to be curious about it. It will obviously never happen, but I do wish Namco would reference this bizarro version of Pac-Man or include it in compilations as a historical curio or something. If they had a 2600 pac-man skin in a championship edition game or something I would absolutely pop the fuck off ngl. I definitely still wouldn't really recommend it to anyone outside of the curious gaming historians out there in this day and age, but an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel irredeemable worst-game-ever-made this game is certainly not.

I genuinely can't think of many other game series that have it as good as the Wonder Boy/Monster World lineage of games. From having every game of the original series be a well-revered classic among those that have played them, their lineage being preserved by M2 in the wonderful Sega Ages 2500 collection, and the Dotemu remaster of Dragons Trap that was made with more love for the source material and attention to detail towards it than most AAA remakes these days, Wonder Boy fans have been and continue to be eating fucking phenomenally. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is absolutely no different, being a fantastic tribute to a series that's already so respected and beloved among the retro gamermen.

This game continues to evolve the style of open-ended yet still focused and linear design of Dragon's Trap and Monster World. It definitely leans towards the whole "metroidvania"-y style of genre moreso here than in those other games, but it still doesn't really fall in the design conventions of that genre all too well. The animal transformations return from Dragon's Trap (you can now play as the pig!), and unlike that game where most of the transformations were relegated to their own sections of the game, here you can switch between any of the 6 different forms you can earn on the fly whenever you want. There's the Pig that can sniff for secrets and use magic, the Snake that can go in tight passages and climb grass walls, the Frog that can use its tongue as a grappling hook, the Lion which can dash through blocks, the Dragon that can fly and breathe fire, and the Boy that can use a series of air-dashes. Each form has their own time to shine in the various levels, as the level layouts make the most out of each ability that you can use, with plenty of secrets throughout. If anything I do wish that there was more taken from Monster World 4, as I felt like having a changable Pepelogoo companion that could interact with each form in a unique way would have been cool. Designwise, it just feels like the culmination of what would happen if Dragon's Trap and Monster World were freed of their technical limitations, yet still designed in a very old-school traditional way.

The Monster World games are also known for their tight cohesion and continuity with one another, and despite not explicitly carrying the Wonder Boy name in its title, this game continues to have all the callbacks to previous titles as you would expect. The final dungeon from Monster Land is still here, each of the main sacred relics are artifacts from previous games, hell the in-game sanctuary is even adorned with stain-glass windows depicting all the previous heroes from games gone by. It's not so in-your-face that playing the previous games is required reading, but I would say that series familiarity will make this game hit like 10x harder than it would be if you went in blind.

And the music, oh my GOD the music dude. From the goddamn TITLE SCREEN I knew I was in for a fucking good OST. They literally got the whole ass avengers of game composers to make new tunes and arrange existing Wonder Boy tracks. They got Keiki Kobayashi, Yuzo Koshiro, Motoi Sakuraba, Michiru Yamane, and Takeshi Yanagawa in the kitchen to make some absolute bangers for this game alongside the studios in-house composer, Cédric Joder assisting with arrangements. Everyone on the sound team is firing on all cylinders, giving this game one of the best god damn game soundtracks I have ever listened to.

The game is just a banger, through and through. My only real gripes can be with the games length being a bit longer than my personal preferences for a Monster World game, mostly due to some sections having a few more mandatory subsections than was really necessary imo. The haunted house section was also a bit of a low point but that could have just been me being stupid and taking way too long to figure out the puzzles. If you are a fan of the Monster World series, this is such a no-brainer must-play that you've probably already went through this by now lmfao. If you enjoy classic open-ended sidescrollers, the whole Monster World series is seriously worth your time. Most fans of other game series would kill to be able to eat even half as good as Monster World fans do.

The developers of the Doko Demo Issho series finally realized what the world needed: Suika Game in 3D. And unlike a lot of other game series, the jump to 3D is extremely smooth here, as all the same core mechanics are the same. The original Suika Game was a fun addictive time waster, but add the existence of an entire third dimension and it becomes crack cocaine, with every "one more try" sinking me deeper into the depths of my fruity prison. Instead of the bucket-like play field of Suika Game, Fruit Mountain has you rotating around and aiming fruit onto a platter to join them together. It allows for some really cool setups to get fruit to combo into one another as well as the potential for sweet trickshots to get fruit right in that nook where you need them. There's also a combo system for linking fruits together in succession, so even score seeking players will find more depth here than in regular Suika Game. Theres also a cute anime girl painting in the background the entire time, a feature that should be in every video game and I want to know her name. I'm not an artist though, but i do wonder what she's actually painting since her subject is a constantly-transforming pile of fruit that keeps getting added onto. Not very still of a "still life", imo.

It's suika game but better and in 3D and there's a cute girl. I think the suika fad has already mostly died out, so I don't know if this'll make the same waves again, but if I need to kill hours with fruit, this is the absolute go-to.

Highkey a banger video game. It's basically a game where you run around these circuit-like levels leaving behind dominoes to make them fall on specific designated trigger points, and when all the points have been activated, the levels are over. Linger in a level for too long, and Mr. Domino perishes. Each trigger spot has a designated space that knocks over any dominos that happen to be on it, so the sauce in the game comes from trying to manage the perfect run of setting everything up perfectly on one lap and watching the fireworks unfold on the second. There are also spaces on the levels that do things like change Mr. Domino's speed, replenishes some time, or hard resets the entire level. My only major gripe comes with how Mr. Domino controls; the levels are laid out on a grid and theres a sluggish heft in how he shifts between lanes and lays down dominoes, and if you don't grasp both the learning curve of how the game works and how to actually handle Mr. Domino, the game can certainly be frustrating. Once it all clicks though, this game rules and is incredibly satisfying to learn the levels and play through. I'd normally be upset about how this game has a limited continue feature, but since the game is for the most part entirely about memorizing the level layouts and there are only 6 levels it's not hard to get back to a previously game-overed level. If played well this game only takes like 30 minutes to clear.

Some might wager that this game has a misleading title, as in playing this you will find that through the myriad of obstacles that can and likely will slip you up, Mr. Domino is in fact actually one of the most stoppable characters in video game history. I wager that the title isn't necessarily a statement but rather an end goal; by learning and getting good at the game, with your efforts nobody will ever be able to stop Mr. Domino. If the ending is anything to go by, the only one that can truly stop Mr. Domino is himself. May he live on in our hearts forever as a true pioneer of dominokind. dominento mori

Sasuga Arzest. I definitely have to admit, this game reminded me a lot of their previous works, notably Balan Wonderworld and the Blinx series in just how stupefyingly confusing they are in design. Not due to the game having any obtuse mechanics or anything, but instead just from having design choices that leave me scratching my head wondering why the hell certain things even led up to how they are in the final game.

It really all just boils down to the level design, the pacing, and the boss fights. The levels have like 3 flavors; some feel like dimps-style 2D sonic levels with mostly an emphasis on pushing you forward through as many speed setpieces as possible, some feel like they are regular classic sonic levels yet designed with Sonic CD assets that are more served for exploration and backtracking (which this game doesn't particularly encourage, nor do they do it in a particularly smooth way like how Mania's CD levels handle things), and there are some levels where it genuinely felt like they had nothing so they just kinda whipped some stuff up and called it a day, truly nothingcore. I definitely felt like I was going through the motions playing through the levels, as they really just didn't feel like they had anything particularly distinct going on in them most of the time either in a level design or spectacle sense to make anything stand out. The levels lasting in the 8-10 minute range certainly doesn't help things either lmao.

The pacing is all sorts of messed up. Typically in 2D sonic games theres a nice rhythm to how acts work; there's usually like the first act to establish the level theme and any specific gimmicks, and then a second act that expands upon said theme and gimmicks. Throw in a boss at the end, and badda bing badda boom. In Superstars there's no set standard to ANYTHING. Some levels might be two acts of mostly the same thing, some levels have bonus optional acts that are character specific, and some levels just have one big act with a boss at the end, which just really feels underwhelming to go through. Why in the hell is there no consistency?? It makes the entire game just feel cobbled together, like they only had so much time to make so many levels so some zones just had to get their second acts cut. It just doesn't flow very well.

Lastly, the bosses. Definitely this games most controversial aspect, the bosses in this game are horrendously designed. Most of them have a very stop-and-go style of design to them where they are only vulnerable for one very specific window of their cycle, essentially having you wait through their whole attack patterns over and over again, dragging shit out to a ludicrous degree. Add the fact that some bosses are more than happy to use instant kill attacks like crushing attacks or bottomless pits, in which getting hit makes you have to do the whole contrived boss fight all over again from the very beginning. The Death Egg Robot was particularly egregious, that shit took me over an hour of attempts to beat just because that mfer won't die and getting back to the stupid platform-breaking death pit takes way longer than my patience can handle. Did I also mention that boss fight is also tied to a timer determined by how quickly you finished the death egg level, essentially making a last sonic level where going fast actively punishes you in the long run. In their infinite wisdom, Arzest decided to rectify this problem by just making the timer for the boss fight do nothing when it reaches zero, instead of, oh I don't fucking know, maybe LOWERING THE BOSS HEALTH TO MAKE THEIR ARBITRARILY LONG FIGHT A LITTLE LESS ARBITRARILY LONG???

I just don't get it man. I would love to go out to lunch with an Arzest designer because this company just continues to baffle me with how their games are made, and I'd love to talk with the people behind the scenes to try and understand at least somewhat where they are coming from. Their games always have decent artistic merit and are usually quite solidly coded and bug-free, just the actual games always manage to feel like complete nothingburgers to actually play, like they aren't designed by actual humans. Maybe their office is just full of alien creatures on a different wavelength, maybe they don't have proper ventilation, or maybe they are just a well meaning group of devs that have to work behind the scenes on whatever shoestring budget their publisher/rights holder chooses and never get to develop their ideas to a solid enough level. At least they get credited unlike shadow devs like Tose, for what it's worth. If anything, playing this has made me want to play more Arzest titles in the future, to see if maybe one day I can see through the mid and understand their sensibilities. Can't say I can particularly recommend you join me in that journey.

(I didn't even mention this games inconsistent OST, the fact that the xbox port in particular has a noticeable amount of input lag on it compared to the other versions, and the fact that the emerald powers were certainly cool in concept but were something I completely forgot to use entirely.)