Game EXP: Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 (NDS) -Atari 2600- Arcade at Home Pt. 2

Welcome back and apologies for the delay.  I ran into an issue last Friday (December 30th) where I had not uploaded pictures for the following three games and then I found out that my 3DS was back with my in-laws and I was not about to drive back over The Pass and then back again over The Pass so that I could go back to work on Friday.  I also realize that today, being the first Monday or Friday of the month, I would normally post our Year in Review but I wanted to get this article out today and just move the aforementioned article to Monday (January 9th).  Now that that housekeeping is out of the way, let us get to the last three games in the "Arcade at Home" category which includes two arcade ports, and one unfinished and unreleased game.

Gravitar

It probably would have helped if I liked the Gravitar arcade game to begin with as the Atari 2600 port really felt like the arcade game, so at least success on that front.  Yes, the controls and graphics are all simplified, as is to be expected, but knowing what to expect and how the game is played I felt gave me a bit of an advantage going into this iteration.  That being said, I am still not a fan of Gravitar.  The game is too strict and difficult for me to have much fun.  The wildness in my scores over the 10 minutes I played showed that even having played the arcade game, I was not able to git gud enough to actually improve my score.  Granted, there were times when I would try to get to a specific solar system just to find out what that particular level was like and then found myself stuck there as the game will not let you leave until you have destroyed all of the enemy gun placements.  I think.  I may have also gotten pulled into the sun on a few occasions.

Honestly, it really just boils down to the base game and the authentically created experience is just too difficult and the pixel-perfect flying required to maneuver around tight corners and avoid enemy fire is just not fun for me.

Verdict: No.

• Game 1: 2000
• Game 2: 1250
• Game 3: 1050
• Game 4: 850
• Game 5: 1400
• Game 6: 950
• Game 7: 1150

Missile Command

First off, there are 17 variations of the single-player mode, and knowing that I could not play them all in 10 minutes, I stuck with a few, but still tried to play as many as I could without compromising each game I played (as in I did not try to lose to play more modes).  I did accidentally start my first game as a two-player game and while it seemed to play/control the same as the single-player game, I am not sure why my score was so low compared to the single-player games.

What somewhat surprised me about this game was that I actually enjoyed the game more with smart cruise missiles compared to the slower ones.  Similar to my experience with Centipede on the 2600, the easier modes felt too easy and felt like there was not enough challenge to keep the gameplay interesting.  Even though I ended up dying (having all the cities destroyed) in the end, it still felt like it was through my own error and not that the game beat me on its own; like in baseball if the other team got a base hit because the throw to the first base player was overthrown.

My only gripe with the game was that because you control your reticle with the joystick, it moves slower than it would with the trackball in the arcade or the stylus on the screen and I felt that I could rarely get the reticle where I wanted it to be as fast as I needed it to be and my resulting shot was never as accurate as I wanted to be; this was especially true in the later levels when the cruise missiles were coming in fast.

Verdict: Yes.

• Game 1: 2370 (2-player, start at level 7, smart cruise missiles, slow target)
• Game 2: 15355 (1-player, start at level 1, dumb cruise missiles, slow target)
• Game 3: 13010 (1-player, start at level 1, dumb cruise missiles, fast target)
• Game 4: 11875 (1-player, start at level 1, smart cruise missiles, fast target)

Tempest

Tempest is a bit of an outlier in this collection, although it does fall into the Arcade at Home category because it is just that.  The in-game description says that Tempest is "An unreleased prototype..." which is, at least I think, pretty cool that this Atari 2600 port was pulled out of potential obscurity.  There is no accompanying manual to go along with the game so it was kind of figure out as you go along, but having knowledge of how Tempest is supposed to be played was key to figuring out how to play the game with Atari 2600 graphics.

However, it is probably better that Tempest was not released for a couple of reasons.  First off, unlike the arcade game, you only have a single section to play on instead of an entire polygon, looking like a blue/black striped pair of underwear.  Your playable character and the enemy characters look close enough to whatever they are supposed to be in the arcade game, even getting some of the movements accurate.  And while you still shoot towards the center of the screen while the enemies come climbing out of the void, that is where the similarities end.

It is not always easy to tell which segment the enemies are coming up from and where you need to be to hit them, even when they are not moving laterally.  Unlike the arcade where each stage presents a new and more complex polygon to move around, all of the stages here, or at least the first three because that was all I was to make it up to, are all identical.  Starting in the second stage though is when enemies start shooting back at you, but half the time I could not tell what it was that hit me.  I thought I had waited long enough for their shot to pass before moving over on top of the path they were taking to shoot them only for my character to die.  I was also not 100% sure if when the enemies got to the top that they would start hunting you like in the arcade and at times it seemed like that was the case, but other times I could move on top of them and still shoot them.

I get what Atari was trying to accomplish with this prototype and it does look like Tempest, albeit Tempest-Lite, but it does not feel like Tempest, or at least how I want Tempest to feel.

Verdict: No.

• Game 1: 3300 (5 Lives, Easy)
• Game 2: 2550 (3 Lives, Easy)
• Game 3: 1950 (5 Lives, Hard)
• Game 4: 2550 (3 Lives, Hard)
• Game 5: 5200 (5 Lives, Easy)
• Game 6: 3000 (3 Lives, Easy)
• Game 7: 4150 (5 Lives, Hard)
• Game 8: 4400 (3 Lives, Hard)

So that closes out our look at the Atari 2600 ports (and a prototype) of their respective arcade games.  Having a ratio of four out of six games, being surprised the most by Battlezone and disappointed by the prototype of Tempest.  I guess it somewhat evens out with two of the games today receiving a No on the Replayability Verdict compared to the clean sweep of Yes from "Arcade at Home" Part I.  Something else I discovered while playing these games, is that it is somewhat difficult to take a good-looking picture of action-oriented games on the 3DS while also holding the camera in your hands.

We will be back on Friday, January 13th with our look at the next series of games from Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental