Game EXP: Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1(NDS) -HIGH SCORES-

 

This is not the last article for our look at the 51 games in Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 from Atari and Code Mystics on the Nintendo DS, this is the penultimate article in our nearly six-month-long series.  The purpose of this article is to again list all of the games in this collection, hyperlink them to their respective article, and give my verdict on whether or not I find the game enjoyable and worth coming back to, all in one place; although honestly I would not mind the frequent views to individual articles.  But this is something that I would like to see if I were looking up these games, so that is why we are doing it here today.  

I am going to categorize this list by how the game itself split up the games, first by the arcade games, and then the Atari 2600 games by genre.  Within each of those genres, I will be alphabetizing them as they appeared in the game.  I am also using the headers followed by a breakdown of the Yes:No; so for instance Atari Arcade (5:5) means that I gave this category five Yes and five No verdicts.  That is just how my brain works, but if you feel like they should have been all categorized alphabetically, then you are welcome to let me know.

• Atari Arcade (5:6)
• Asteroids: Yes
• Battlezone: No
• The Bradley Trainer: No
• Centipede: Yes
• Gravitar: No
• Lunar Lander: No
• Missile Command: Yes
• Pong: No
• Space Duel: Yes
• Tempest: Yes
• Atari 2600 - Action (1:5)
• Air-Sea Battle: No
• Flag Capture: No
• Human Cannonball: Yes
• Outlaw: No
• Sky Diver: No
• Submarine Commander: No
• Atari 2600 - Adventure (3:2)
• Adventure: Yes
• Haunted House: Yes
• Swordquest: Earthworld: No
• Swordquest: Fireworld: No
• Swordquest: Waterworld: Yes
• Atari 2600 - Arcade at Home (4:2)
• Asteroids: Yes
• Battlezone: Yes
• Centipede: Yes
• Gravitar: No
• Missile Command: Yes
• Tempest Prototype: No
• Atari 2600 - Gambling (0:1)
• Slot Machine: No
• Atari 2600 - Mind Games (2:4)
• 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe: Yes
• Atari Video Cube: Yes
• Fun with Numbers: No
• Hangman: No
• Math Gran Prix: No
• Surround: No
• Atari 2600 - Racing (0:3)
• Dodge 'Em: No
• Slot Racers: No
• Sprintmaster: No
• Atari 2600 - Space (2:0)
• Star Ship: Yes
• Stellar Track: Yes
• Atari 2600 - Sports (3:8)
• Basketball: No
• Bowling: No
• Championship Soccer: Yes
• Football: No
• Homerun: No
• Miniature Golf: No
• Realsports: Baseball: No
• Realsports: Boxing: No
• Realsports: Football: No
• Realsports: Tennis: Yes
• Realsports: Volleyball: Yes

The final scores/verdicts are:

Yes: 20

No: 31

Now, I would not take this score as me saying that this collection is not enjoyable, or unplayable, or not worth it (by 2010 standards).  There are 20 fun games in this collection, which is a pretty significant number of games that are definitely worth playing and replaying.  Some might even have been fun had I been able to play them with another person as they were originally intended, but my whole purpose in this endeavor was judging them based on their presentation in this specific collection.  If you want to pay between $9.99 and $27.99 for (what you hope is a legitimate copy of) the DS cartridge and you want to experience these games on that system with a somewhat (but still playable) small screen, then you might consider this on the DS.  A large number of these games are included in the recent Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration collection released on the Switch, Steam, Xbox S/X, and the PlayStation 4/5; specifically it only has 18 of the 40 Atari 2600 titles and missing some of my favorites like Human Cannonball, 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, Atari Video Cube, and Star Ship.  But then again there are over 100 games across eight consoles and arcades, so there is that too.

Next Friday's article, "Game Over" will be my closing thoughts about the games I liked, the ones I did not, and anything else that I feel like putting down after revisiting these games.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I Wish I Could Read You Just Like A Book

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

 

We return to sports for this collection of Sports themed games from Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 released by Code Mystics on the Nintendo DS in 2010.  These games I grouped together because they are all played on courts.  Yeah, I know that is a potentially strange sub-category of the Sports genre and possibly less cohesive than Part I of Sports where we featured football and baseball games.  All three games here differ in the actual sports, how they are played, the rules, as well as the overall quality of the games themselves.  

Basketball

I guess I should not be surprised by the limitations of the Atari 2600, but I was in fact surprised when I started Basketball and found that it was only a one-on-one game on a court that looked like a court at a local underfunded park.  The controls are pretty simple and at the same time, a little confusing.  You move with the joystick, and jump/shoot with "the button."  When you shoot, you hold the button down and your player raises/lowers the ball which determines how far you shoot the ball.  Thankfully that is the extent of the aiming as the game automatically aims the ball at the basket and if you are at least close enough to the hoop, the ball will more than likely go in.  There are also only two-point shots.

Playing the game as a single player, I only played against the computer AI and I noticed that if you are either winning or the game is tied, the computer is a lot more aggressive, sticking closer to you, harder to shake off, more likely to steal the ball, and more successful in their own shots.  If you are trailing, I have noticed that the computer will run in the opposite direction or at least give you room to make any kind of shot you want from anywhere on the court.  This change in AI reaction definitely made the game more interesting and tense, especially in Game 2 as I kept trying to get in a final shot before the end of the game.

In the third game, I changed the difficulty settings to both be A, which according to the manual makes the players faster.  I immediately noticed that the computer would stick to my player to the point that it was almost impossible to take a shot without them jumping in front and blocking me.  

However, I was able to make three shots, figuring out that while they played amazing defense, they seemed more defensive when it came to offense.  Eventually, we ended up in a stalemate, facing each other while constantly stealing the ball from each other and not moving.  So I just stood there to see what would happen, and I was only a little surprised when the game ended.  I do not know if I broke the game, or just hit that sweet spot, like in Pong, where the game would not allow itself to move into/out of a position that it deemed to be disadvantageous.

Verdict: No.

Game 1 (Difficulty B): 44 - 40

Game 2 (Difficulty B): 42 - 42

Game 3 (Difficulty A): 0 - 6

RealSports Tennis

Wow.  Just wow.  Color me impressed.  For a tennis game, the team at Atari got this one spot on.  Not because the game mechanic felt accurate, or because the court itself was accurate in any way apart from there being a court at all, but because the game just felt fun.

The serving mechanic was simple in that you just had to have your player over the bouncing ball and when you pressed the button, you hit the ball over the net with no need to worry if your serve was going to be in or out.  It was just in because there were no service boxes, no alleys, just a boxed court, and a net.  Hitting the ball had the same simplicity, although I think that the direction you were pressing on the joystick when you hit the ball had some effect on the direction you hit the ball, as well as how much your character moved forward while hitting the ball being the indicator for how hard you hit the ball.  This is all just speculation as I do not recall reading about it while breezing through the instruction manual.

For being a RealSports title, this was a pretty barebone take.  There was no way (that I could tell) to hit a lob or to hit a top or backspin.  It was just to get your player to where the ball lands and the game will automatically hit the ball back across the net.  Even knowing that I did not need to press the button, I still found myself pressing it when I went up to hit the ball, it just felt good to do so.  And while I did destroy the computer player, they put up a good enough game to have points, and the games actually were tense.  Even the 6/0 set does not accurately show how many points the computer scored either through my own error or their skill.  They do a great job returning volleys reminiscent of a Wimbledon match and about as realistic as an Atari tennis game is going to be.

I did not finish my first match, taking about 5 minutes per game, but it is likely that I would have won in straight sets.  And while I played on "Slow," the game did not feel slow, but just the right tempo.  I will definitely play the "Fast" mode too and play around with the A-B difficulty settings to find the perfect match.

Verdict: Yes.

Game 1: (4: Slow / Difficulty A): 6/1 - 6/0 - 0/0

RealSports Volleyball

Hmmmmm.

RealSports Volleyball is really just beach volleyball albeit with an interesting day/night mechanic.  You play two volleyballers (ballers?) with the major difference in how you play the game being if you have setups turned on or off.  In my first game, I had setups turned on because that seemed like a good idea (I guess?), but this was definitely the more difficult of the two modes.  With setups, you could either hit the ball back over the net or set it up for your other player, although I could never determine how the game decided if it was going to be a setup or not.  This added a level of complexity because I did not always know if I was going to have to go running after the ball on my side of the net after a setup or hold back and wait for the return.  With setups turned off, the ball would always go back over the net so as long as you tracked the ball with one character, you were almost always guaranteed a shot that landed in; sometimes the ball would land out of bounds, but this seemed more random than because of something I did wrong.

Something else that added some psychological complexity was that the net did not seem to have any height to it as at times it seemed more like the players were kicking the ball a few inches off of the ground back and forth rather than batting it up and over the net.  This resulted in several quick-fire volley exchanges.

The day/night mechanic I thought pretty interesting but never experienced it because my games never ran into the night.  During the day, the court/sand is yellow and the sky is a shade of purple/blue, but at night (also shown when the game is over), the ball would no longer leave a shadow, making it harder to track.  This feels like it is supposed to be an in-game difficulty timer of sorts, encouraging people to play fast otherwise the environment will play against the human player (at least in a single-player game).

On one hand, I had fun once I felt I had a better grip on the game and getting used to controlling two separate characters who essentially covered the same general non-overlapping area, but on the other hand, it was pretty hard to always determine who could cover the ball even when tracking the shadow of the ball.

Verdict: Yes

Game 1: (1-Player with Set Ups) 3 - 15

Game 2: (1-Player without Set Ups) 15 - 11

So those were the court sports, sports games.  Oddly enough, I had higher expectations for the one game of these three that I ended up not liking while really enjoying RealSports Tennis, which I went in not expecting much.  I do play tennis, or at least played recreationally from the age of 9-10,  then I played competitively in high school, and back to recreationally again off and on.  So I thought I was going to be pretty harsh on a game that I actively enjoy playing the real-world equivalent.  RealSports Volleyball was another surprise highlight from these games, pleasantly surprised by the day/light mechanic even in its most rudimentary sense.

I feel that 66% of these three games (as well as the four games that preceded them in Part 1) are a great example of making a fun sports game.  The game has to at least look like the sport that it is trying to replicate, but the controls, especially on a console that has one joystick and one button, need not be overly complicated (swinging a bat or selecting a play) and above all else, should be accessible and fun.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Game EXP: Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1 (NDS) -Atari 2600- Space

 

In today's look at Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1, released by Code Mystics on the Nintendo DS back in 2010, we look at games that focus on outer space.  Being the 1980s, I would have thought that there would have been more games in the Space category, but there were several games like Asteroids, Lunar Lander, and Gravitar that could have been here instead if they were not already in other categories. So we have just two games here today and just a quick heads up that the pictures I took with are a little blurry (for Star Ship) and washed out and low contrast (for Stellar Track).  Both games are a lot easier to read on the 3DS screen which is why that is something that I do not openly discuss in my review for either game.  So let us get to them.

Star Ship

Star Ship surprised me a bit.  I was not expecting a first-person space shooter like this, but something closer to either Battlezone or Submarine Commander.  Here, you can fly both left and right as well as up and down with inverted y-axis controls with ships to shoot down and obstacles to dodge.    Granted the gameplay itself was pretty rudimentary, but I still intuitively knew what I was doing and how to play the game.  The primary thing was after reading the manual to recognize asteroids which you just have to avoid as they are invincible, unlike every other object on the screen flying at you.  I was even able to play three different games, with two having different mechanics altogether.

First, there was the primary Star Ship mode which is the first-person space shooter.  You fly through space shooting objects that fly at you before they either collide with your ship or you pass them by scoring as many points in the 2 minutes 16 seconds the game gives you to play.  The Slow Obstacles mode felt a little too slow, but it was a great introduction to the game.  The Fast Obstacles was a little bit more of a challenge and I got a grasp on how best to shoot the various alien ships flying at me and how to completely avoid the asteroids.  In the Warp Drive mode, I played on Dual Obstacles, so there were two obstacles on the screen most of the time, but in this mode, you do not have guns and you just have to avoid everything.  The button simply increases your speed, which means you can cover more ground (and get a higher score) in the 2m16s, but at the risk of colliding with an obstacle with a significantly shorter reaction time.  

The Lunar Lander mode was a completely different game altogether, not even using the same perspective as either Star Ship or Warp Drive.  Instead, you have to avoid objects floating in space while you land your lander on the floating moon/asteroid.  I was a little afraid that this was going to be as complicated and frustrating as Gravitar or Lunar Lander, but the mechanics were pretty simple in that you just had to press the button when you were in close proximity to the moon and you landed.  Then you repeated the process after a second, with the point to score as many landings with as few obstacle collisions in the time allotted.

The modes here are pretty simple, but simple was a lot of fun in this case.

Verdict: Yes.

• Game 1: [1-Player Star Ship, Slow Obstacles] 32
• Game 2: [1-Player Star Ship, Fast Obstacles] 14
• Game 3: [1-Player Warp Drive, Dual Obstacles] 15
• Game 4: [1-Player Lunar Lander, Slow, Obstacles] 15

Stellar Track

Who-boy!  The instruction manual to this game was a bit beyond intimidating, almost akin to the manual to Submarine Commander.  You are told that you should keep the manual handy while you play the game so you can reference how to access certain menus because specific menus are only accessible on either the right or left joystick (meaning you scroll through menus by pressing the joystick either left or right and the right side has specific menus that are not on the left side; again, a lot of the descriptions in the manual are a lot more complicated than how the game actually operates).  I was a bit worried because as I have mentioned before, you cannot save your game to go back an look at the manual in the menu which meant that I would have to pull up the manual on my phone or computer while playing.

You are also told to know how/when the best time to use Short Range scans versus Long Range Scans, is because the energy output required costs more for an LRS than an SRS, and a specific situation may not be the best to run one scan over the other.  The manual also tells you that when engaging alien ships, it is best to have a pencil and paper (and calculator?) to "calculate the minimum energy required to destroy Aliens."  All of this attention on energy usage is because how much energy/fuel you have left at the end of the game is part of how your final score is determined.  If you do destroy all of the aliens but have used up the majority of your energy stores, you will receive a much lower score/ranking than if you are conservative with how you travel/scan/attack.  Very intimidating coming from the last group of games I played.

The game itself is both not as complicated as the manual makes it out to be, and needlessly complicated regarding how you move your ship through space; both sector space, and quadrant space.  Movement is determined by which direction you want to take your ship into warp, but you need to know the layout of which quadrant you are in (by performing a short-range scan) and if there are any obstacles in the way in the direction you want to warp as you cannot warp through a sun.  How you direct your ship is where the needlessly complicated part comes in.  Because the game is presented in columns and rows, such as being in Sector 4,5 or Quadrant 5,8 so it would make sense that you should be able to enter your coordinates in a way that would make sense, such as wanting to move to Sector 5,4.  However, to move from Sector 4,5 to Sector 5,4, you would enter coordinates 2,1.  But only if there was not a sun in your path, then you would need to move around it.

Battle against alien ships was a little confusing, partly because of the small screen size and the sudden "red alert" coloring, but also because directing your photon torpedoes ended up being similar to how you select your warp destination.  The trade-off is that if you fire torpedoes, you have to target the enemy ships yourself and if you are off by even one digit then you will miss.  If you fire with your phasors, you are guaranteed to hit, but in turn, you will use up more energy which will already be depleted when you use your warp drive to reposition your ship to be able to attack.  Then when you are hit by alien fire, which happens any time they are in your quadrant and you perform a short or long-range scan, you again lose energy.  There is a fine line to battles that I feel I have yet to master but feels somewhat manageable, but I have never been in a quadrant that had more than three alien ships in it.

The two games I played were not nearly as confusing as I had originally feared, and even with the overly confusing way of navigating and firing weapons, I oddly enough thought the game was more fun than I had feared.  The first game took just about seven minutes before I ran out of energy and the second only lasted just over four minutes because I found myself boxed in by three suns in difficult-to-navigate locations; apparently, you use up energy when you try to warp, and are blocked by a sun.  Really, if the navigating and firing had been simplified to just entering grid coordinates instead of direction and number of spaces, Stellar Track would have been a lot easier to say that this was a Yes game.  As it stands, it is more of a weak Yes, but one that I would likely come back to in order to have another go at it.

Verdict: Yes

• Game 1: Surrender to the Aliens / Cadet
• Game 2: Surrender to the Aliens / Cadet

I did appreciate that both of the Space games were significantly different from one another and amongst the two games, there were three different types of games.

In the next series of games, we start on March 10th, and we will be three weeks of sports games.  So if you are a sports fan or someone who likes to read about antiquated sports video games from 35+ years ago, we will have a lot for you to digest.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Beware Humans

P.S.  Stellar Track was the last game I played, being the most intimidating game in the collection due to how unconventional it was.  I did start it earlier than the Sports games, but after seeing what I was in for amounted to a pen/paper-type resource management space-sim, I backed out and came back to it last.  I think that is partially why my review of it is so much longer than just two paragraphs.  It could also be why I ended up with such a favorable opinion of such a strange game.  It definitely has that getting dads into video games who would never play Pac-Man energy.

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

 

Welcome back to our deep dive into Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1, released on the Nintendo DS in 2010 by Code Mystics.  For the next two weeks, we will be looking at the games categorized as "Arcade at Home, all ports of classic Atari arcade games that not only attempted to recreate the feel of the original arcade cabinet while making use of a joystick and a single button, but also were able to add additional features and modes that would not have been possible in the arcade.  All of the original games we previously covered in their respective categories when we were looking at the arcade games (Asteroids, Battlezone, Centipede) and while there has to be some reference and comparison between the two, I did try to go into each game with an open mind

Asteroids

You know, oddly enough, I actually enjoyed this version of Asteroids.  I liked the ability to decide what kind of ability my little ship had and how difficult I wanted to make it to earn an extra life.  I liked that the asteroids were bright blocks of color compared to the vector-line graphics of the arcade, although I do wish that the asteroids did break up into multiple fragments like in the arcade game because here, each asteroid just broke up into a single smaller and harder to hit piece.  I feel like the game description should have used "normal" instead of "slow" regarding the speed of the asteroids because the difference between slow and fast was noticeable, but I never felt out of my league.

I know a lot of Atari games have different variations or settings of the same game, be it single-player, two-player, and often other slight modifications to the game (like having ships that fire back in Submarine Commander).  Asteroids has 66 different variations.  These all range from the number of players to having access to shields to being able to activate a 180 turn, to activating your hyperspace engines to warp to another part of the screen to escape imminent destruction, to setting the bonus points needed for an extra life.  Two versions of the game implement a Young Children's Version which has slowed down asteroids, and an extra ship at the start.  Playing the game for only 10 minutes will allow me to experience maybe only 10% of the game types, but that is our plan, and that actually turned out to be perfect.

Out of all the ability options, I definitely preferred having the shield (Being similar in execution to Space Duel), which in one instance, to test the shield, I did explode after being hit by an asteroid, but that was likely because I held down the shield too long to see how long I could last while passing through a large asteroid.  It turns out you gain about 1 second of invulnerability before you end up exploding.  In other instances where I activated the shield before an asteroid hit, it ended up just passing through my ship leaving me unharmed.  The hyperspace ability was fun but in a stressful way because, from what I could tell, you could not decide where you spawned out of hyperspace.  Maybe it is decided by the direction your ship is pointing and the game chooses a random point between where you are and the edge of the screen, but even then, coming out of hyperspace still might only give you a split second for your eyes to catch up to figure out which way you needed to fly to avoid another asteroid.  Lastly, the flip ability, which is as simple as its name implies, just flips your ship 180 degrees, but you still maintain the same velocity in the direction you were previously facing.  So the flip really is only useful if there is an asteroid about to hit you from the opposite direction you are facing.

Lastly, this was the first 2600 game I played in this collection that had any semblance of music, albeit simplistic JAWS-inspired music that felt like it was speeding up to the end of the stage and if I did not shoot the last asteroid fragment before the song reached its tempo-increased end then my ship would explode.  Not really being an Asteroids person from the arcade game, I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun I found I was having here in this graphically simplified but heavily variable port of Asteroids.

Verdict: Yes.

• Game 1: (1-player, hyperspace, bonus every 5000, slow) 2210
• Game 2: (1-player, hyperspace, bonus every 5000, fast) 6490
• Game 3: (1-player, shields, bonus every 5000, slow) 8980
• Game 4: (1-player, flip, no bonus, fast) 3750
• Game 5: (1-player, children's version) 2740

Battlezone

Wow.  Just wow.  I was honestly not looking forward to playing this iteration of Battlezone as I was expecting a poorer version of the arcade game that I already did not like.  But once again, like the simplified version of Asteroids, Battlezone's adaptation to the Atari 2600 surprised me in a lot of ways.  First off, I had fun,  I actually did not mind playing the game six times in 10 minutes.  I liked that the game options were simple, that there were just three difficulty settings and nothing else to worry about.  

In-game, you had your radar which accurately showed you where enemies were, and your view screen, which was more like a third-person view rather than an attempt at a view from a targeting periscope similar to the arcade game.  So there you are, just driving your tank around through a grassy field hunting down other tanks, a spastic fighter jet-thing that I could never shoot down, and a purple flying saucer that never fired back and was supposed to be a distraction but I found to be fun and engaging.  The number of colors on the screen was rather surprising too as I was expecting a single-color foreground, a single-color background, a super blocky radar, and slow gameplay.  This was a really fun, faster-than-expected third-person tank shooter with satisfying Atari 2600-level explosions.

Verdict: Yes.

• Game 1: (Novice) 20000
• Game 2: (Intermediate) 28000
• Game 3: (Advanced) 17000
• Game 4: (Intermediate) 25000
• Game 5: (Intermediate) 14000
• Game 6: (Advanced) 9000

Centipede

This version of Centipede took me a moment to get used to.  I was expecting at least a triangle-shaped avatar similar to the sprite in the arcade version but instead, you are a featureless rectangle that at moments looks too similar to the blocks that are supposed to be the mushrooms from the arcade game.  Maybe because I was playing the game on a New 3DS screen and not a TV, but the projectile your little Elf character is firing at the invading centipede was very faint, especially when the color scheme is on the darker red side, so it can be hard to know exactly where your projectiles are hitting.  

Despite the simplified graphics, this still feels like Centipede, but only on the Standard Version, in which the game manual is not specific on the differences between Standard and Children's versions, despite the total point ceiling of 999,999 and 99,999 respectively.  To me, in the Children's version, the enemies moved a little slower allowing me to get a much higher score than any of the other games I played in the Standard Version.  That being said, I did grow pretty bored playing the Children's version as it felt like the challenge of the game had been stripped away, which I guess is kind of the point.

I do wish that there were other modes in the Atari 2600 version of the game besides just the Standard and Children's versions because only having two modes with only one I found enjoyable gives me overall mixed feelings about the game.  Yes, the Standard mode still feels like Centipede, but the Children's version takes away a lot of the tension.

Verdict: Yes.

• Game 1: (Standard Version) 6750
• Game 2: (Standard Version) 8724
• Game 3: (Children's Version) 39935
• Game 4: (Standard Version) 15439

So that closes out the first three of six games in the "Arcade at Home" category for Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1.  I was pretty surprised by all of these games, initially going into them thinking that I was going to get inferior versions of the original arcade games and while there are necessary downgrades to each of the games here, I felt that each still retained the feeling of the original game and in the case of Battlezone, the simplified mechanics and presentation was exactly the way to approach this specific title.  Very happy all around with this selection.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
S nem látja bajai végét

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

 

The next three titles in the Adventure games are all from the Swordquest series.  These games were originally intended as a four-part series, but only three games were released prior to the video game crash of 1983.  Like a lot of games, a lot more of the story in-game is told outside of the game itself.  In the manuals for each game, there are some cursory descriptions of what you are supposed to be doing, along with in-game mechanics.  Where the real story comes in, for each game, is from the accompanying comic book that does not actually come with this version of the game.  I will get into this a bit more with each game, but because I feel like it is an integral part of both enjoying these games and actually being able to play them, I needed to bring that up here first/again.

Swordquest: Earthworld

Swordquest: Earthworld. . . is interesting and a mixed bag.

As it is presented in this collection, it is a medium-firm "No."  First, the game manual references a 50+ page comic book that accompanied the original release of the game, which provides backstory to the game, and why you find yourself wandering in a zodiac-themed maze.  The characters Torr and Tarra interact with characters and enemies that feel like they might reference areas and objects in the game.  

Then, a little further in the game manual, it says that sometimes the video game itself will give you clues, like "16 4" which says that there is a clue to look up on Page 16, Panel 4 of the comic.  This comic is not included in this presentation of the game although I was able to find all three comics online.  As it stands, including a game that references a source material that is not included in the packaging and is only available from a 3rd party website is not great from the player's perspective.

I can easily see there is a certain amount of fun in this game from the 10 minutes I played.  Having a full comic book as part of the larger story that you look back to when prompted by the game is a neat gimmick and I can imagine being eight years old and sitting down to play along with a piece of paper with maps and notes along with the comic on a Saturday morning before cartoons start at 10 AM.  But as part of this collection, Atari would have had to include physical copies of these comics because you cannot save your game, exit the game, look up the comic in the Extras menu (because it doesn't exist there) then go back to the game to figure out what that 4th panel on page 16 was trying to hint at as all the while losing the momentum to get back to the game.  But, I guess we all have phones though, right?

I like the concept, and I like the execution by Atari for the original release of the game, but how they include it here, it's going to be a no from me dawg.  But that being said, I think I might actually come back to this once I get passed the feeling that I need to have all of this information from the comic tucked away, to have the comic out, and some paper for notes in order to beat this game

Verdict: No (At Least for Now).

Game 1: Did not finish.

Swordquest: Fireworld

Similar to Swordquest: Earthworld, there is an accompanying comic that the game manual suggests you have some knowledge of as well as to have on hand to decipher clues that you earn by referencing page numbers.  Unfortunately this time around, in the Fireworld, I was unable to complete any of the trials to figure out what the clues could have been because the trials, which are essentially mini-games, here were wonderfully difficult.  And by wonderful I mean they were a pain in the ass, all except the deadly snake pit which was alike a slow-moving shooter.

The majority of the tests that I came across involved dodging objects that would progressively get faster the more you get hit.  So, if you happen to get hit frequently (as I did nearly every time) by the objects be they fiery goblins, flaming firebirds, or jawing salamanders, the speed at which they fly at you increases with each hit, eventually making the test feel utterly impossible.  The other types of tests are in a similar vein, where you have to move the flying objects themselves into a stationary object at the bottom of the screen and one miss means that the objects fall faster and it becomes more difficult (see above).  Pile on top of all of that information that there is a lot of flashing going on from the objects themselves because some of them are spinning themselves, and also your run-of-the-mill memory issues with a lot of objects on the screen at the same time, and you have a hard to control and hard to see screen.

The other thing that I found rather annoying was that the layout of the maze seemed to be procedurally generated because the map I was creating while playing became useless after I tried doubling back to the room I just came from.  Just something I noticed.

Verdict: No.

Game 1: Did not finish.

Swordquest: Waterworld

Hmmmm.  You know, oddly enough, I did not hate Swordquest: Waterworld.

I started the game after going through the manual before even reading the accompanying comic because I thought that the game was going to be similarly developed.  That there were going to be difficult mini-games that were nearly impossible to beat, along with clues referencing a page and some dialogue from the comic to solve the puzzle.  While some of those preconceptions were true, based on what the manual said, I likely should have read the comic first because you apparently need to have a "careful poetic reading of the comic book ... [which will give you] information that will be helpful in selecting the valid word-clue answers from the false ones.", but even though I did not, I felt that this game was at least somewhat approachable.

Like the previous two games in the series, Waterworld has a maze of sorts and you perform one of three (randomly?) selected "skill-and-action tests."  If you successfully pass one of these tests, the following room will show you some or all of the available items to collect, but if you fail, they will be invisible and you will be unable to select them.  Thankfully the rooms appear in a vertical line and there is a roman numeral in the upper left corner that lets you know which room you are in, which is helpful if you decide that you are going to put all of your items in a single room.

While selecting items, the game did flash with two items at the bottom of the screen, presumably showing me a combination of items needed to function as a key.  I think.  I looked through the manual a couple of times to figure out what the end-game goal was and apart from finding the correct combination of items to place in each room, I cannot think of any way else to end the game.  Which I obviously did not.  

You know, I think I will go back and read the comic for Waterworld and reattempt this game because it feels more approachable than the first two in the series.  I like that the rooms are numbered and not procedurally generated, I like that it does not feel impossible to get the right combination of items together through a combination of trial and error and the (hopeful) knowledge from reading the comic (and interpreting it poetically).

Verdict: Yes.

Game 1: Did not finish.

So that is the Swordquest series and closing out the Adventure series as categorized by Atari and/or Code Mystics.  I have seen that the final game, Swordquest: Airworld will be included in Atari's 50th-anniversary game collection,  Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration which was released back on November 8th.  I cannot say if the comics are included in that presentation of the game.  However, I still feel that you would need to have a dedicated comic available when you are playing any of these games as backing out of the game to pull up a comic from the same game would get very cumbersome.  I guess you could always just print out the comic?

The point is, I felt that so much of the success of these games and being able to successfully play them all hinged on access to the comic and a comic with accurate page numbers at that.  And since that one thing is missing from how this collection is presented, I am really surprised that they were included in this collection with the belief that they could be enjoyed beyond nostalgia and as a video game history artifact.  But that is just me.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Adore You Still