Game EXP: Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 (NDS) -Atari 2600- Mind Games Pt. 1

 

This collection of games from Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 on the Nintendo DS surprised me more than most of the curated categories presented.  My first thoughts going into 3D Tic-Tac-Toe were not positive.  After reading through the manual for Atari Video Cube, I felt confused as to how I was supposed to play the game, a prime example of learning by doing.  And Fun with Numbers sounded too simple to be its own video game.  Like a lot of the collections, not all of the games I felt like I would return to, but I did end up having a surprising amount of fun amidst the confusion on some level with each of these games.

3D Tic-Tac-Toe

I was initially a little skeptical about 3D Tic-Tac-Toe before I read the instruction manual because I thought it was going to just be Tic-Tac-Toe on a 3D board.  I was not expecting four 4x4 grids stacked on top of each other that felt more like a three-dimensional Connect Four.  Like standard Tic-Tac-Toe, you are trying to connect a series of Xs or Os, but here, instead of three, you are trying to connect four of your pieces across one 4x4 tile, or spanning across all four stacked 4x4 tiles.  The manual does a good job of explaining how winning works more so than I could, so we will go with that.  "The object of the game is to place four X's or four O's in one horizontal, vertical or diagonal row.  To do this you may use one plane or all four planes."  In my first two games, I definitely thought this meant I could win with two or three planes, which was not the case.  Chalk one up against me for misreading the rules.

One thing that kind of annoyed me was the difficulty settings, besides the fact that I lost five games all on the easiest setting.  What bothered me was that, like a lot of chess video games, is that on harder difficulty settings, the time it takes for the computer to decide where it is going to move takes time.  Like, a lot of time.  Like, upwards of 20 minutes per move on the hardest difficulty setting.  That could mean, that in my longest game which had 16 moves by the computer, that it could have taken nearly five-and-a-half hours, and the computer still would have come out with the same winning result, although considering how poorly I played, it probably would have beaten me in only a few hours instead.

In the first two games I played, I was still trying to figure out a strategy for working with four different boards and did not realize that my rows had to be in sequential order from either top or bottom, and not scattered between the four boards but still filling in a row/column.  In my last game, I decided to play a purely defensive game trying to block the computer whenever I saw what I thought they were trying to do because I recognized that I was not able to pull one over on the computer, so I thought maybe I could accidentally force them into a mistake.  Well, even on the easiest setting, I still lost 0:5.  But you know what, I still had more fun than I was expecting.

Verdict: Yes.

Game 1: Lost (9:10)

Game 2: Lost (6:7)

Game 3: Lost (11:12)

Game 4: Lost (10:11)

Game 5: Lost (15:16)

Atari Video Cube

You know, even after reading the instructions on this I was a little confused as to how the game was supposed to play.  I got that it was kind of a more mobile Rubix Cube, but if you could remove the stickers from a side and place them where you wanted to put them; because I totally never did that with the one Rubix Cube I had growing up.  There is the added complexity though that your character then takes on the color of the square you select and replace (and here we go with me trying to explain the mechanics and rules of a game that I felt was pretty confusing until I had been playing for a couple of minutes).  Your character starts off as a particular color, let us say, Blue, and you want to pick up the Pink square.  So when you pick up the Pink Square, you become Pink and the square becomes Blue.  When you are Pink, if you pick up a Red square, you become Red and the square becomes Pink.  Your goal is to have five sides of this cube their each individual color.  However, more complexity ensued.  Whatever color your character is, you cannot move into/through that color square.  So while you are picking up colors and moving around this cube, you constantly find yourself bumping into walls you cannot see because the square on the other side is the same color as you.

Getting all of one side to be a particular color, in the two games I played, always seemed to take a while as there might be two or three of the same color on one side and the rest of the same color squares scattered around on the other five blocks.  As I started moving one color to a particular side, I ended up starting to move another color to another side, slowly separating the colors to where I wanted them to be, rather than where they sort of ended up being placed.  By the time I had one side a single color during that first game, everything really started to click and I found that I was having fun.  That first game did take me about six-and-a-half minutes to complete, but during the second game, when I felt that I knew what I was doing in the Normal mode, I took only (I think?) 5:46.

A few minutes into my first game, I was pretty convinced that I was going to be giving this a No verdict because I could not tell what I was doing even after a couple of minutes.  But by the end of my first game, I was actually looking forward to my second game and trying a different mode; there are 18 modes so I figured I would just try Normal and use the time scoring method.

Verdict: Yes.

Game 1: (Normal, Scored on Moves): 546 Cube 28

Game 2: (Normal, Scored on Time):  5:46 - 9

I just realized that the number of moves from the first game and the time from the second is essentially the same number albeit in different number formats.  That was obviously not intentional.

Fun With Numbers

This is not what I was expecting with Fun With Numbers, which is essentially just doing math problems and the game telling you if you are correct or wrong, then moving on to the next problem.  There are two difficulty settings, one where you are timed and the other there is no timer.  You are given a total of 10 problems.  At the end of the 10 problems, the game flashes your score at the top, and then you start again on the same mode or choose a different mode.  The (Choose Top Number) mode allows you to select the top number in the equation and the bottom number is randomly selected, but this would allow you to pick, say 1 or 0 and blaze through the answers; unlike me who chose 8 and temporarily forgot what 7 x 8 was.

Before we leave Fun With Numbers, I will say that my initial low score on Random Division was because it took me multiple attempts to figure out the mechanism for the remaining number.  Because the equations I was given were all single-digit, there should not need to be spaces for a three-digit integer remainder.  So at first, I could not figure out why my answer of 1 2 to 5/3 was wrong, or why my answer of 3 1 to 7/2 was wrong.  Apparently, you have to have the remainder placed in the second of three spaces after the answer, so 2 _ 2 for 8/3.  I don't know.  Needless to say, which is why I am saying it, I did not have fun with Fun with Numbers.  I wish I could say that I wanted my money back, but that joke is a bit null at this point.

Verdict: No.

Game 1: 1 Table Addition (Choose Top Number)

Game 2: 3 Table Multiplication (Choose Top Number) 9/10

Game 3: 5 Random Addition 10/10

Game 4: 7 Random Multiplication 10/10

Game 5: 6 Random Subtraction 10/10

Game 6: 8 Random Division 5/10

Game 7: 8 Random Division 10/10

So those were the first three of the seven games in Mind Games, the remaining four will be featured in next Friday's article.  Since I first played these games, I have gone back to 3D Tic-Tac-Toe a few times and have managed to win a grand total of zero games.  I do not know what it is about not being able to wrap my brain around getting a line of four Xs to work correctly, but something is just eluding me.  And it is still a lot of fun even on the Easy setting, primarily because I am still finding it challenging, but also because the wait for the computer to make its move is not long.  And with Atari Video Cube, it is just really satisfying once you get that first square completed and quickly after the second and third.  I could probably try to do it in as few moves as possible, but it really is just the satisfaction of the act of completing the puzzle that I enjoy.  And I have already used enough words on Fun with Numbers on a game that has the same mechanic as those arithmetic worksheets from third grade.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental