Game EXP: Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! Part 2 (PC/VSD)

  [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party!

Systems: Windows, Linux

Release Date: February 5, 2025

Publisher: Svinta

Developer: Svinta

Time Spent: 4.4 Hours*

Today we'll look at the eight remaining games I was able to play in Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! on the Steam Deck and my explanation for why I was unable to continue with game number 18.  Part 1 of our series published on Monday looks at the first nine games and the general approach to the game, so go back and read that if you haven't already because we're going to jump right into game number nine.

And our playlist up on YouTube is located here.

Smartly Sort

The basics behind this game are pretty simple. Pick up and place the running blobs in the box based solely on their color. Each color is associated with a different shape, too, but they're hard enough to see with the filter on, and it's really just easier to focus on their color instead. What's hard about this game is using the touchpad on the Steam Deck quickly and efficiently.  You also cannot let any of the running blobs make it across the screen as that counts against you the same way that sorting the runners incorrectly does.  What I found worked best for me was to use the Steam Deck's touchscreen functionality as I found it worked better and allowed me to sort at a faster rate.  But not fast enough to catch the orange runner or to figure out where you're supposed to put this one.

Face Fixing Frenzy

Hoo boy.  I thought for a while that this game was going to be the end of the road for me.  In the first section, you're expected to button-mash the keyboard to wake up Sally, and for the first half, I was only using the L/R trigger buttons, but then once I figured out that I could also use the directional pad and buttons along with the triggers, you'll notice this section passing a lot faster; except that times that it wasn't because this was apparently pretty loud and was waking Conklederp up.  The second section of this game caused me some serious grief.  I just couldn't get the mouse to move as quickly and as accurately as I needed it to pop every pimple (which I also found to be a pretty disgusting portion of this mini-game).  Then the apparent accuracy needed to click and drag specific objects to their corresponding other half before applying them to Sally's face was equally frustrating.  Like Smartly Sort, I ended up reverting to using my finger to play this mini-game, but even then, it was only after coming back to the game and turning off the filter (believing that part of my issue might have been the warping of the image from the filter, or just me being a shitty player) and I was finally able to make it through.

Crazy Clown Cafe

The concept of this game was rather simple: play a modified Shell Game but with cakes, then deliver individual cakes to a customer, but avoid the banana peel on the ground.  What made this game maddening were the controls which only used the mouse.  Getting the clown to move requires you to slide the mouse, or in the Steam Deck's case, your thumb across the trackpad, then click the R trigger to jump, but you have to maintain the movement of the mouse/thumb through the jump as the Clown does not maintain forward momentum.  Now, I don't know how the real estate of the trackpad on the Steam Deck relates to an actual standard size mouse pad, but it genuinely didn't feel like there was enough room.  On top of that, the Clown starts moving the split second you're on that screen.  The first half-dozen times I started, I thought that the Clown was falling over as part of a "this is what happens," but no, it was because the "start" button is on the right side of the screen, so when you click the button the start the game if the cursor (which sadly is not visible in the video) is still hovering over the start button, then the Clown will start running right into the banana.  This also made selecting the cake when it landed on the far side of the table in the Shell Game portion, all the more anxiety-driven because you almost had to select the cake while you're moving the cursor back over to the left side of the screen.  And even after feeling like I had a good grasp on the controls, moving always put me on edge.

Pill Puzzle

I don't want to say that I was made for this mini-game, but I know that for at least the time I was ranked #1 (I'll need to jump back in and double-check), I can say that my Mom could be proud of me; The Kid would probably comment that I should've gotten to at least 300.  So Pill Puzzle is essentially a mix of Dr. Mario, Tetris, and any generic match-three game on the market.  The game wasn't difficult perse, but you could only rotate the blocks in one direction since you could only use one button, then once the blocks started speeding up, that's when it became difficult to get them where I wanted them to be.  Obviously or I would've gotten 300+ points.

Downer Diver

After the fun and relative easiness of Pill Puzzle, I was worried about an underwater stage, but Downer Diver was a lot more relaxing than I had feared.  While the game did start you out with 5 HP, I was afraid that you would have to do the run flawlessly without getting hit, which would send you back up to the surface to attempt your descent all over again.  I also feared that upon reaching the treasure chest at the bottom, you would then have to go back through the stage all the way to the top.  But no.  Instead Downer Diver is a more-or-less semi-relaxing descent into the water while avoiding often slow-moving sea creatures and once you get the chest, that's it.  You're done.

When Pigs Can Fly

This mini-game is essentially just Downer Diver but in reverse.  Instead of a diving duck, you're a flying pig.  The basics are pretty much the same although there are some tweaks to the mechanics.  Instead of pressing down, you press the A button to flutter your wings and can release A to slowly drop down to avoid mid-air obstacles.  The one thing that threw me in this game was how to effectively avoid the wind and not get pushed into the clouds.  I obviously was able to make it through the windy section, but I feel like you should be able to beat this without taking a hit, but I don't know how to maneuver around the wind gusts without just trying to occasionally dodge while powering my way through.  And honestly, that end of the level. . . just a little sad.

Trivial Timed Tasks

What is it with the collection of games and accuracy?  Trivial Timed Tasks is made up of four separate games, all with a 30-second time limit, and failing to complete the task in the time allowed kicks you back to the game select screen.  So this one is pretty brutal as evidenced by the fact that it took me 22 minutes to figure out all of the sections.  Getting through the cheese section unscathed took an embarrassing amount of attempts.  Even the fact that one-hit-kills here, which makes sense because they're mouse traps and you're a mouse, makes this one of the many unforgiving mini-games not just in this collection of tasks, but out of all of the mini-games in this entire game.  In the second game, the claw game, once I figured out that you should grab the clock, it became a lot easier to get through; and thankfully the hit box for each item was very forgiving.  The fly-swatting game felt more hectic although once you realize the trick to this one* it becomes a little easier.  The final game, the ship battle against the pirate, is the definition of simplicity.  Unless you're me and you don't realize you're supposed to sail off-screen at the end to actually beat the stage.

The Painful Platformer

You know, despite this one also taking nearly 20 minutes to complete, it wasn't nearly as difficult as I feared, it just takes a long time to get through.  If there had been a countdown timer for different sections, this would've been significantly more difficult.  I also like the inclusion of two other characters to play as, both with different jumping heights.  Sunny Shyon has a shorter jump which requires them to take longer, often having to double back after obtaining the hard-to-reach key to progress through the stage.  Hopper has a higher jump which means you can skip having to redo sections and just, jump up and grab a key.  The problem with Hopper is when the stages get more compact which even with Sunny, often requires you to jump and then move laterally to not hit the ceiling spikes.  So not overly difficult, just a long stage that gets more stressful as you near the end.

Disco at Dusk

This is where my Mr. Goofer adventure sadly came to an end due to some kind of incompatibility with the Steam Deck.  Before you play the game, you have to select the song that you want to play, but you're also able to load and play your own custom songs, as long as they're in an OGG format.  Now, for whatever reason, the Steam Deck didn't like how the game brought up a separate window for song selection, and while I was able to move the mouse cursor around on the screen, I wasn't able to click on anything (as in my clicks weren't registering).  I tried multiple times but to no avail.  Unfortunately, you have to go through this process since if you select the option to play the mini-game, the game tells you that a song needs to be selected first before you can play.  

Yeah, I was pretty sad that this was how the game ended for me.  I did boot it up on my laptop to see if I could just play this level and then go back to the Steam Deck for the rest of the game.  I did try to locate where the game saves its save files to then transfer that single file to my laptop, but since that's apparently not a uniform location, I wasn't able to find it either.  My last option was to replay each of the mini-games to continue and finish the game on my laptop, but as I started playing through the first six games again, I began to feel that that wasn't something that I wanted to do all over again.  That being said, this was a decent collection of games that you're not likely to find outside of an Atari 2600/Intellivision or your local Wunderland/Quarterworld arcade.  There's charm here, but some of that charm is hiding a nasty-looking and unforgiving mouse trap.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
I Let Him Croon and He Lets Me Steer

P.S. I promise that if I figure out where the save files are located or if I make it to Disco at Dusk on my laptop, I'll continue and hopefully finish this fun/frustrating/endurance-driven collection of games and upload the videos to our existing playlist.

Game EXP: Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! Part 1 (PC/VSD)

 [Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party!
Systems: Windows, Linux
Release Date: February 5, 2025
Publisher: Svinta
Developer: Svinta
Time Spent: 4.4 Hours*

Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party! is at its base, a collection of 25 individual unconnected arcade games that you might find at a nickel-and-dime arcade with some modern adaptations.  You start out with access to only one game, and after completing a specific requirement, you unlock the ability to play the next game.  Of the 25 possible games, I was only able to play 17 as I ended up being soft-locked out of the 18th due to compatibility issues on the Steam Deck with the 18th game, which we'll get to on Friday.  Like any collection of 25 games in a single package, there are going to be some great games, some good games, and some bad games so we're going to break down each game and give our brief thoughts on each.  One of the connecting factors for a lot of the games is that they are unforgiving and require a lot of patience and fortitude to reach the required number of points to unlock the next stage.

We also have a playlist up on YouTube here which we'll be uploading videos to throughout the week.

Coin Catch

A pretty simple game where you have to catch the right things and avoid the wrong things.  Thankfully, you don't have to catch all the things, only just don't touch the bad things like bombs and dynamite.  But then there's me during my first playthrough where I mistook the grey circles for bombs or at least something bad because the gold coins, gold bells, and red fruit looked like the things you were supposed to catch.  I never did figure out about the fruit bonus, if you're supposed to only catch fruit, but I wasn't about to find out.

Jumper

This game went on waaaaaaay too long in every way shape, and form.  You can only jump one height, from what I could tell, until you get the propeller hat and that just gives you a higher jump and changes the rhythm that you established in the previous 79 jumps.  I also couldn't tell if the pace of the barrels changed at all throughout the game, but it feels like they stayed at the same rhythm and momentum the whole time.

Recker

The first of several multi-stage mini-games that actually do a pretty decent job of introducing mechanics that help in later stages.  How ladders will launch you into the air once you reach the top instead of a traditional climbing mechanic.  With each timed stage, if you don't wreck all the things and reach the end flag before the timer reaches zero, you have to start the whole sequence of games over from the beginning.  What kind of annoyed me a bit was that the second stage where you have to avoid the union workers and smash the glass they're carrying requires almost near-constant movement and down-to-the-wire precision, that even two missed jumps will eat up too much time and you won't be able to reach the flag before the timer reaches zero.  Frustrations aside, a pretty fun and satisfying mini-game.

Laser Launch

Like Recker before it, Laser Launch introduces the first of several games that offer two distinct mini-games, but this one changes the fundamentals of the second game.  In Recker, you're Recker breaking things with your mallet in each stage.  In Laser Launch, you're first playing a Space Invaders-like game except the aliens don't progress down the stage and there is no timer, only lives.  After defeating all of the enemies, you then play an Asteroids clone on a much smaller screen with a larger ship, but instead of having a set number of lives, this is more of a bonus stage to rack up as many points as possible within a two-minute time limit.  Neither Space Invaders or Asteroids are really my cup of tea so I didn't find this game overly interesting.

Icebreaker

Just like Laser Launch, Icebreaker is a two-part game, starting off with a Pong-like game where you have to survive an unbeatable snowman where the snowball that bounces back and forth slowly increases speed as the seconds count down.  Oddly enough, with 5 seconds remaining the timer starts broadcasting an audible "tick" sound each second which makes the game all the more nerve-wracking as you fear missing hitting the snowball back and having to start the game over from the beginning.  The second phase of this game is a Breakout-clone, but like the second half of Laser Launch, is purely optional in its completion if you just want to continue on to the next game.  I will say though that the ball physics in both games leave a lot to be desired and the direction that the paddles move when they hit the ball doesn't seem to have any effect on the trajectory or speed of the ball, which only made the Breakout-clone frustratingly difficult towards the end.

A Gridlock Maze

You know, this was kind of an interesting take on the Pac-Man genre, and unrelated, the first time in this collection that I ran into any kind of compatibility issue with the Steam Deck; which is also slightly my own fault.  In A Gridlock Maze, you control a chicken as they move through a maze filled with trucks that move vertically and horizontally and you have to collect every pellet on the screen to proceed to the next level.  The compatibility issue came up after collecting the larger pellets in the corners of the maze as the Enter key wasn't mapped to any of the buttons on the Steam Deck I tried the Right Trigger, R Shoulder Button, and all of the A/B/X/Y so I was never able to use the speed boost.  There is a second stage that is slightly more complicated in that it requires the player to keep the lines that the trucks move in their mind since the grid is more open with less obvious "lanes."

Goofball Pinball

I know of at least one person who would absolutely hate this game, but I won't name-drop her here.  Goofball Pinball was a strangely created pinball game on so many levels.  First, there's no door/stopper from having the ball re-enter the hammer chamber either after your initial hit to start the game, or at any other time the ball is in play.  It can just end up back in the alley where it started.  Second, the flippers are useable only with the directional pad, meaning you can't press both flippers at the same time; except this only applies to the Steam Deck since you're able to press two keys at the same time on the keyboard, which the game was initially designed for.  Thirdly, the ball has horrible unweighted physics.  I don't know how else to describe it than just that the ball physics is absolutely horrible.  Lastly, because there was no ball limit, this game just felt, like so many other games in this collection, like a test of endurance.  The second game, required to actually pass this stage, the Skeeball section, was a lot more difficult than it initially looked because you only have 12 balls and 10 targets to hit, which means you're only allowed two misses while you try and figure out the right angle to throw the balls.  And since trying to get the ball up the ramp on the left portion of the screen feels more like luck than any actual skill required, you really feel like messing up the Skeeball is tantamount to restarting from the beginning.  The good things I will say are that the sound effects for the bumpers and slingshots were very satisfying.   

Whack-A-Gopher

While as simplistic as both of the games in Whack-A-Gopher are and considering the difficulty with down-to-the-wire timers in previous games, I was surprised that there wasn't a timer of any kind here.  Even a "whack the mole, but don't whack the bunny" mechanic since the pinwheels at the top felt like stand-ins for lives.  Or even if you miss a gopher you lose a pinwheel since there never seemed to be more than one gopher pop up at any given time.  So this was just, whack until you get a score then play a simplistic match three and just really hope that the game is forgiving enough to give you at least one possible match.

Odd Hue Out

This was probably one of the stranger games in the collection.  The first of the two games is to simply fill in the playing space while the second game is to click on the one square on the grid whose color doesn't belong.  And then do that 100 times to move on to the next game.  This is another example of a game that just goes on way too long.  There's no bonus square to hit or any other way to boost your score.  It's all just a test of patience and endurance to make it to 100.  I guess nerves could be factored into the equations, which is what happened to me when I missed the second time.  The first miss was getting the yellow square that turned red and blended in with the other red squares around it.

So those were the first nine games in Mr. Goofer's Mini Game Arcade Party!  Like I said waaay up there, there are some fun games and some not much fun games and most require the player to maintain a level of patience and an exercise in monotony I feel is not often seen in arcade games.  We'll cover the other nine games on Friday, but if there's a future patch, we'll likely cover the rest of the games, which I will also get into more in Friday's article.

How's that for a cliffhanger?

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

*P.S.  I spent an additional 18 minutes earlier today, and that will make more sense on Friday.

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- Gambling

Today's article is a bit of an outlier compared to the rest of the articles in the series.  In the self-titled categories created by Code Mystics for Atari Greatest Hits Volume 1, they titled this category as "Gambling," but only one game apparently was a fit for this classification: Slot Machine.  I fully acknowledge that I am already biased towards video game-centered gambling although I would not be surprised if there were some kind of tells to help you win this specific Slot Machine.

Slot Machine

I am not a gambling man, let alone a video poker or video slots person.  I have been wary of video game gambling since the mid-'80s thanks to Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack on the Intellivision, but I did love that game.  A video game slot machine on the other hand seemed odd and honestly kind of confused me on some of the game modes.  Granted, my idea of a slot machine is the simple one where you are trying to get two or three of the same on three tumblers on a single line.  Slot Machine here has two primary games, one where you only play the center line or one where you play five potential lanes.  There are also two forms of payout, either payoff or the jackpot.

I will be honest with you that I am not sure based on the game manual what the difference is between the jackpot and pay-off form of winning and I need clarification about how all of the numbers work.  The numbers at the top I kind of understand are the money you are betting with, with the number on the right being your money and I guess the number on the left being... someone else's bank that you are playing the slots against?  I think you are playing until either side hits zero first and once a side reaches zero, the game is over.  The question mark at the bottom of your column next to the zero was confusing too.  It really just felt like error text, or the game not knowing how to calculate a lower than zero score, "I guess you won zero?"  I also thought that the symbols on the slot machine itself could have been clearer as to what you were trying to aim for.  It could also be that anything beyond a single-line slot machine is just too confusing for me, although even playing the center payline was not as clear as I wanted it to be.

This really just is not fun for me because you could hypothetically play forever if the game gives you good results on the slots but to what end?  A high score I guess.  Yeah, not fun.

Verdict: No.

Game 1: 0:12? (1-Player, up to 5 paylines, jackpot)

Game 2: 0:22? (1-Player, center payline, pay off)

Game 3: 10:0? (1-player, up to 5 paylines, pay off)

Game 4: 4:0? (1-player, center payline, jackpot)

Game 5: 0:1? (1-player, center payline, pay off)

Hunter S. Thompson's interior monologue really sums up my feelings about video poker and overly complicated slot machines and while this likely spilled over into my psyche while playing Slot Machine, I still submit that this was not a fun game to play, and at least there was only one game in the Gambling category.  Next week we will return with a great follow-up to Gambling, Mind Games which includes a few surprisingly fun and innovative titles.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

But Then They Cry Themselves To Sleep

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

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
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