Data Driven Gamer: Imagic

Showing posts with label Imagic. Show all posts

Friday, January 31, 2025

Games 444-445: Early Mindscape

1985 introduces our first two whales on Apple's new Macintosh computer - Balance of Power and Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True, both by publisher Mindscape. A subsidiary of Scott Foresman, then the USA's largest educational textbook publisher, Mindscape quickly carved its niche as a clearing house for edutainment and other studious software. The Mac, which Apple had hoped to market as a serious, grown up computer, would be a good fit for Mindscape's serious, grown up games.

But what of their ancestors?

We've got two lines of ancestry here - first there are the prior games of BoP's designer Chris Crawford, of which I've only played one - Avalon Hill's Tanktics. Certainly there's a non-whale or two since then worth playing!

Second, there are the earlier games published by Mindscape themselves. Mobygames lists Tink!Tonk! Tonk in the Land of the Buddy-Bots, an early childhood educational game with characters by prolific author Mercer Mayer as a 1983 Atari release. It's a little unclear if this is accurate; the manual states a software copyright of 1984, but also states a 1983 copyright for TINK TONK, Inc, suggesting that these were pre-existing characters, though I can't find any evidence they existed before Mindscape's software.

However, it shows in a 1984 Mindscape catalog, so this is at least among the company's first wave of releases, as part of the Sprout line of ages 4-8 educational software. Only Crossword Magic is verifiably older, and that's because it was initially self-published on the Apple II by developer L&S Software - Mindscape handled the ports to Atari and C64.

So, I've picked my introductory Mindscape title. An educational title meant for very young children.

Game 444: Tink!Tonk!: Tonk in the Land of Buddy-Bots

Tonk is not impressed by the Buddy-Bots.

In Tonk's main game mode, you explore an open world in the style of Atari's Adventure in search of robot parts to assemble your buddy-bot, which are won in six minigames that test pattern recognition skills. An alternate mode lets you practice these minigames independently.

I beat the hardest difficulty in twelve minutes. Cause I'm that good.

The manual has a map of Buddy-Bot Land, which is a big time saver even though it does not show all of the part locations.

Now, there's a nasty secret about the highest difficulty. It's possible to soft-lock your game! The land is randomly seeded with robot guards, who will confiscate a part and take you to King Gork's castle in the south. They are easy to run from and won't follow you across sectors, but they can make crossing certain sectors impossible.

You're not getting through that.

There's a good chance that the southeast quadrant of the map will be completely inaccessible without using the raft. And you get one chance to use it.

Apart from that, this is quite straightforward. Visit each sector, avoid guards and pitfalls, find parts, and play minigames that wouldn't challenge a preschooler.

There's a part right there.

Caves mean minigames

Bot puzzle! Can you reassemble it correctly?

Getting caught is no big deal. Gork just stands there as you leave.

Looks interesting!

But it's pointless. The bots don't do anything and don't even care if they're assembled correctly.

Match the bot with his silhouette for a part.

Can you reassemble this bot from memory? Fail and he'll forlornly sigh YOU FORGOT ME.

GAB rating: Below average. Not much to say here! It's competently programmed, visually appealing, the music is catchy, and like most kid's games, fairly insubstantial overall. The Adventure-style gameplay makes it interesting enough to rate, but not interesting enough to rate any higher than this.

Let's do one more Mindscape release - this time, another educational title, but one that's very much not meant for small children.

Game 445: Crime and Punishment

We haven't seen Imagic in a while! The short-lived developer of some of the Atari VCS and Intellivision's most technically advanced video games refocused on 8-bit computer game development by 1984, releasing their final titles in 1985. Crime and Punishment, an educational title about American justice, was their sole collaboration with Mindscape.

1984 saw the passing of the Sentencing Reform Act, a culmination of a decade-long research project led by tenured law professor (and Federalist Society speaker) Jack Kress. In an effort to reduce sentencing disparities owing to judge's personal biases, which had long been an issue, the most notable byproduct of the act was the Sentencing Guidelines, a non-binding rubric system for calculating legal remedies for felonious offenses, which is practiced at the federal level and has influenced state-level systems. Other byproducts of the act included mandatory minimums and abolition of federal parole.

Imagic's Crime and Punishment, co-authored by Kress, aims to be a learning tool with two programs; an information module with a brief overview on the history and operations of the U.S. criminal justice system, and a game where you play the judge and must estimate appropriate sentences for convicted felons. As someone who's taken an introductory course in criminal law, I found the module a reasonably good primer and even learned a few things I didn't already know.

This was released more or less simultaneously on C64, IBM, and Apple computers.

Commodore 64

IBM PC

Apple II

There aren't a lot of differences between versions. The PC version probably has the best looking judge graphic, but it doesn't play nice with any version of DOSBox - only PCem runs it without missing graphics. Apple II displays more colors than the others - six as opposed to just four, and actually shows the flag correctly, but the judge looks awfully stupid in it.

Ultimately I decided to use the Commodore 64 version, although it doesn't really take advantage of the platform. Despite some questionable color choices, and some very long loading times at the start, I think it's overall the best looking and sounding version, with better color contrasts, less harsh beeper music, and is the only version with a pleasing gavel-knock sound.

As judge, you may review the facts concerning the case, including details such as the injuries or damages, the relations between offender and victim, the offender's character and reputation, and media coverage before pronouncing sentence, after which you are shown the median sentence according to Kress's guidelines, and scored according to how close yours was. The game claims you are penalized for asking too many questions, but I haven't seen any proof of it.

The guidelines themselves are not provided, even in a simplified form; you have to go by your feelings, your knowledge of comparable real-life cases, or experience playing. By far the most important factor is the crime itself. But sentencing is also affected by factors such as their criminal history, the circumstances surrounding the offense, and others.

You knew this was coming.

Let's look at this case of lockpick and blackjack possession. The defendant pleaded guilty, and said he had to steal in order to support a drug habit. He was raised in the inner city by an alcoholic father, received a merit scholarship, and studies political science. He has four prior convictions including burglary and a juvenile charge of public lewdness. His probation officer urges a stern sentence.

Some more, possibly irrelevant details

A first time offender might get away with probation, but I'm going to trust the probation officer. Six months in jail.

I did okay, but after doing a few more cases, I figured I could do better with some proper data analysis. The cases are procedurally generated, but are based on a set of about 80 templates.

I played through 120 cases and took notes on crime type, sentencing, prior convictions, and in cases of white collar crimes, monetary losses, which makes less of a difference than you might think. From this data, I made a table of crimes, in rough order of most to least severe. This is going to wreck my SEO.

Prison and probation sentences are in years/months, jail sentences are in months/days.

Crime	Sentence	First offense	Repeat	Cases
Murder (repeat)	Death			1
Sabotage	Prison		23/8	1
Assassination	Prison	22/10 to 30/1		2
Treason	Prison	21/11	27/3	2
Rape/murder	Prison	21/10		2
Kidnapping/rape	Prison		20/9 to 22/3	2
Sedition	Prison		20/7	1
Murder of a police officer	Prison	19/7 to 21/10		2
Smuggling	Prison		16/7	1
Rape/burglary	Prison		15/2	1
Kidnapping	Prison	13/11	15/2	2
Attempted assassination	Prison		12/8	1
Rape	Prison		11/7	1
Forcible sodomy	Prison		11/7 to 14/11	2
Sexual assault on a child	Prison	12/8	11/6	2
Arson	Prison	10/5		1
Attempted murder	Prison		9/9	1
Hijacking	Prison		8/11 to 9/9	2
Robbery	Prison	7/4 to 8/4	10/2	4
Assault/burglary	Prison		7/0 to 7/8	2
Sexual exploitation of a child	Prison	6/2 to 7/0		2
Cocaine sale	Prison	5/10		1
Attempted rape	Prison	5/2	6/5	2
Burglary of a dwelling	Prison		4/1	1
Forced prostitution	Prison	3/11		1
Assault with intent to rape	Prison	3/11	7/8	2
Daytime burglary	Prison		3/11	1
Terroristic threatening	Prison	3/7 to 4/1		2
Assault	Prison	3/1 to 4/2		2
Unlawful imprisonment	Prison	2/4		1
Burglary of a business	Prison	2/4		1
Computer piracy ($71,000)	Prison		2/2	1
Illegal business practice (tenth offense)	Prison		2/0	1
Unlawful business practice	Prison		2/0	1
Forgery	Prison	1/11	2/2	3
Heroin use	Prison	1/10	3/11	1
Illegal commercial enterprise	Jail		23/14 to 23/26	2
Burglary of a business	Jail		22/4	1
Possession of a deadly weapon	Jail		22/4	1
Computer piracy ($1,695)	Jail		22/0	1
Illegal business practice (second offense)	Jail		19/6	1
Dealing in unsafe products	Jail		18/12	1
Accepting bribes	Jail	17/26	19/26 to 23/14	3
Resisting arrest	Jail		15/22	1
Perjury	Jail	15/0	15/2	2
Cocaine use	Jail	14/28 to 15/2		2
Carrying a concealed weapon	Jail	14/20 to 21/18		2
Drunk driving	Jail		12/8 to 20/16	2
Possession of burglar's tools	Jail		10/24	1
Violation of probation	Jail		10/16 to 10/20	2
Menacing	Jail		8/28 to 16/4	3
Aiding and abetting a felon	Jail		8/20 to 15/22	2
Mail fraud	Jail		7/26	2
Illegal price-fixing	Jail		7/2 to 16/0	2
Theft of trade secrets (tenth offense)	Jail		6/16	1
Bribery	Jail	5/2	14/4	2
Offensive touching	Jail		4/0 to 6/20	2
False alarm	Jail		2/8	1
Criminal trespass	Jail	1/26	9/6	2
Criminal solicitation	Jail		1/22 to 2/16	2
Operating a pyramid scheme	Jail		1/14	1
Theft of trade secrets (second offense)	Probation		9/0	1
Operating a pyramid scheme	Probation		8/2	1
Auto theft	Probation	8/1		1
Criminal impersonation	Probation	8/1		1
Theft by con game	Probation		7/10 to 8/7	2
Unlawful use of a credit card	Probation	7/4	8/1	2
Pimping	Probation		6/8	1
Marijuana use	Probation		6/5	1
False advertising	Probation	6/2		1
Statutory rape	Probation	5/3 to 6/10	7/1	3
Reckless driving	Probation	4/9		1
Prostitution	Probation	4/8	5/4	2
Loitering	Probation		3/9 to 4/9	2
Hunting out of season	Probation		1/4	1

There are a few inconsistencies, but not that many. The crimes of operating a pyramid scheme and burglary of a business had to appear twice each because of sentencing disparities that could not be accounted for based on damages. Another surprise is that in the two cases of sexual assault of a child, the first time offender got a longer prison sentence than the repeat offender - but I had not considered factors like the age of the child, or what the prior conviction was for.

The list also shows some questionable priorities in terms of criminal severity. Why is repeat heroin use punished far worse than repeat drunk driving? Why was a home burglar who stole $50 given four years, and a business criminal who defrauded a million dollars given 19 months, both cases being second offenses? But this reflects the real-life priorities of common law, and my critiques are far from the first or the most insightful.

But overall, the list seems like solid groundwork. So let's try out some cases.

Case 1: Perjury

Details on the perjury itself are scant, but the defendant has six prior arrests with one conviction for animal abuse. I opt for a 15 month jail sentence, as per the table above.

Yeah... too harsh. It's worth five gavel taps, but I'm advised to do better.

Case 2: Dealing in unsafe products

The defendant is a Vietnamese immigrant, has a prior conviction for vandalism, had been held in contempt of court, and is a business owner. ACLU urges leniency. I opt for a 15 month jail sentence, given the minor priors.

I should have gone with the table! This is exactly what the last sentence said. Still, this is worth eight gavels.

Case 3: Smuggling

This is a serious offense, but it's his first, and he pled guilty. The offender was raised by welfare hippies, and works a steady job. Community opinion wants leniency.

From the table, I estimate a 15 year prison term.

Six gavels for a somewhat excessive sentence.

Case 4: Kidnapping

Not looking good for the defendant, who has ten prior arrests and nine convictions of unspecified crimes. I follow the table exactly and give 15 years, two months.

Should have gone higher still, but this is still worth eight gavels.

Let's do one more.

Case 5: Illegal price-fixing

This is a first-time adult offense, though he used fake I.D. as a juvenile. The defendant informed on his accomplices, has a history of being cold and calculating, and dreams of being a millionaire.

His dreams may be ruined, but owing to this being the first offense, I grant leniency with a five month jail term.

Ouch!

I thought I'd perform better than this, but even after 125 cases there are still a lot of holes in my chart. The difference in punishment between first offense and repeat offenses can be very significant for some crimes, and insignificant for others.

GAB rating: Below average. It's a unique concept for sure, but in practice this just isn't very good at all. Without any guidelines to reference, you're just playing a guessing game. Of course this isn't meant to be a conventional game as much as a learning tool, but it's a missed opportunity in that regard as well. Apart from the information module, the game does nothing to discuss criminal law or any of the legal theory behind it. It will teach you that accepting bribes is a more serious crime than offering them, but doesn't foster any discussion on why.

Still, I like the idea, and there's nothing else quite like this. I'm surprised that Crime & Punishment never got revisited in the years to come - one can imagine a CD-ROM edition with interactive sentencing guidelines, gigantic databases of real-world reference cases, Encarta-like articles on legal concepts hyperlinked from the case files, and FMVs of Jack Kress pounding his gavel as he admonishes your weak justice game. I'd play it.

Monday, April 27, 2020

Games 179-180: Video Pinball (VCS) & Dragonfire

Imagic's debut year of 1982 was a productive one. In March, they released Demon Attack for the Atari VCS, followed quickly by Star Voyager and Trick Shot. In July, they released Atlantis and Cosmic Ark, a diptych that I reviewed earlier this year. In September, they released another pair of VCS games, Riddle of the Sphinx and Fire Fighter. In October, they released four Intellivision games; Microsurgeon, Beauty and the Beast, and greatly expanded ports of Demon Attack and Atlantis. Finally in December, they released their final game of the year, Dragonfire for the VCS.

The manual credits development to Bob Smith, whose prior credits include Video Pinball at Atari, porting Tanktics to the TRS-80, and the aforementioned Star Voyager and Riddle of the Sphinx at Imagic. Bob Smith's Video Pinball, running on the VCS, is separate from Atari's arcade game with the same title, and as Smith's first original title, I felt I had to play it.

Game 179: Video Pinball (VCS)

I thought I was done with pinball video games for awhile! The best, it turns out, was not saved for last.

It's... not as bad as it looks, provided you aren't expecting this to play much like a pinball game.

Actually, there's one thing here that Smith did very right. All of the Apple II pinball games that I played used dual paddle controllers, which helped with immersion but made it a horrible inconvenience to nudge the table in the games that even allowed it. Here, everything is done with the joystick. You tap left for the left flipper, right for the right flipper, up for both, down to pull the launch plunger, and press the button to release it. To nudge, you hold the button and tap the stick in a direction. This is key to controlling the ball, and there isn't very much flipper action thanks to the huge, very bouncy targets and the fact that the floor is flat instead of inclined. Nudge the ball in one direction for too long and you'll tilt, but there's no risk of this with rapid fire light taps, and the amount of time you can sustain a single nudge without tilting isn't random or hard to figure out. Trying to fight the ball's lateral inertia is mostly futile unless you're chasing a roller, and nudging up and down doesn't seem to do anything, but nudging into the ball's trajectory can help.

There are two meaningful gameplay options. Difficulty B plugs up the two side-drains, which makes it nearly impossible to lose the ball, so I stuck with difficulty A. Then there are four game modes; mode 3 only differs from 1 by resetting the bumper value whenever you lose a ball, and modes 2 and 4 are pointless two-player variations of 1 and 3. I stuck with mode 1, because who wants a lower scoring game?

The targets have these scoring behaviors:

Bumpers are initially worth 100 points per hit.
Hitting all three diamonds raises the bumper multiplier by 1 each time. In game mode 1, this lasts the whole game, but in game mode 3 this resets when the ball drains.
Hitting the right rollover with the Atari logo four times gives a free ball. You can only do this once per ball.
Hitting the left rollover increases the number on it by one. When the ball drains and you didn't tilt, you get between 1,000 and 4,000 points for each accumulated hit. I don't really understand the logic that determines the value per-hit. One time I got it to 4 and earned 12,000 points, another time I got it to 6 and only earned 5,000. The manual claims you get 1,000 points for each rollover up to a maximum of 4,000, but this is clearly wrong.
A special target near the middle of the screen randomly lights up for four seconds at a time and is worth 1,000 points per hit.

Of my 48,726 points, 17,000 came from the left rollover bonus, and I conservatively estimate that 28,000 came from hitting the bumpers. That was with a maximum bumper value of 300 points, which can go way higher than that, so I think it's clear that diamonds are the most valuable target, points-wise, and obviously the earlier, the better.

Anyway,

GAB rating: Below Average. I said it's not as bad as it looks, but it's a long way from good, even with tempered expectations. My interest in a pinball game, real or simulated, is proportional to how much stuff is on the table, and being a VCS game, there's not much here. Most of the good stuff is at the top half of the table, and there aren't many ways of deliberately getting the ball up there from the bottom, given the flat ramps and weak flippers. The emphasis on nudging over flipper action does make for a very different experience, but doesn't make it fun, just different. I didn't hate my existence for the time I spent on this game, but I have no desire whatsoever to try to improve on my score, even though I'm certain I could if I so desired.

Of all the pinball games I've played for Data Driven Gamer, this one ranks almost last, being worse than the arcade game, but better than Bill Budge's Trilogy of Games Pinball, which I did not rate. I'm pretty sure that I'm done with video pinball games for awhile, until we get to Pinball on the NES, and after that there isn't any pinball on the agenda for a very long time, until the 1992 phase.

Moving onto 1982 at Imagic,

Game 180: Dragonfire

The manual is adorned with a seriously ugly dragon image, looking something like a a snake who is leatherfacing an iguana's poorly-fitting epidermis, and a bunch of tendrils and teeth glued on like something out of a Flash Gordon serial. Dragons have occupied the castle, and you, a spry young prince, have volunteered to sneak in and retrieve its treasures. Supposedly the king needs these treasures to raise an army to fight the dragons, but alas, when you escape the castle alive with all of the treasures, all you get a new castle, occupied with a more difficult dragon to run away from.

Gameplay alternates between two phases, like Cosmic Ark, but they're more interesting. First, you have to approach the castle and avoid fireballs, which are spat at you high and low. This phase has an unchanging difficulty factor, and I found I could pass it fairly consistently with a basic strategy; run for the middle of the screen and wait for the fireballs to come. Most of the time a high ball comes first and is followed by a low ball, so duck under the high ball, and then when it passes, run to the left and jump over the low fireball when it comes, and pray you don't get torched inches away from the castle entrance, which usually doesn't happen with this strategy. Your running momentum carries with your jump, so it's easier to jump over the low ball if you're also running toward it. Sometimes the fireballs come out so closely together that you can't dodge both from this position, and when this happens, retreat to the safety of the right side of the screen and try again once they pass.

The second phase involves scooping up the treasures in the castle hold while the dragon crawls around on the bottom of the screen and shoots more fireballs at you. The dragons have simple movement tracking behavior, but avoiding their fire on the harder castles is no picnic as both the dragons and their fireballs move faster than you do. This phase gets really annoying, because the prince skids around the floor like he's wearing socks at a skating rink. It's infuriating to keep sliding right past a treasure because the controls didn't handle quite the way you expected them to. And if a treasure appears right at the bottom of the screen in the middle longitudinal section, good luck recovering it without getting torched by a dragon that can instantly zip right into burninating range from either edge of the screen. You can also take refuge by retreating to the hold door, and this can be strategically useful as it allows you to wait a bit in safety until the dragon moves to a position where you can more safely emerge and snag a treasure, but also risky thanks to the slippery controls which can cause you to miss the egress entirely and get trapped on the edge of the screen instead as the dragon pins you down against it with a barrage of fireballs.

Difficulty switches don't seem to do anything, and game modes determine the starting level along with the usual pointless two alternating players option. You can start on castle 1, 3, 5, or 7, and the difficulty peaks at castle 9, which is guarded by a white dragon, and all subsequent castles also have a white dragon with the same movement speed and behavior. Reaching castle 9 doesn't even take two minutes, so this option seems a bit superfluous, except for the fact that I don't even last two minutes on my best playthrough, in which I lose my last life on castle 10.

Unusually, Dragonfire gives you seven lives, far more than the traditional three. But you lose them fast, and there's no way of earning more.

GAB rating: Average.

I've now played Imagic's Demon Attack, Atlantis, Cosmic Ark, and Dragonfire. Apart from their debut title Demon Attack, none of these rated better than Average. Imagic's gameplay concepts are novel, and they all look really nice with due consideration to the system's limitations, but they're just not that much fun to play for more than a few minutes. I can almost imagine Imagic picking up gameplay concepts that Atari rejected on the grounds that they weren't fun, and then building the most polished and technically impressive games that were feasibly possible around these rejected concepts, enhanced with colorful visuals far beyond anything Atari themselves ever attempted on their own system. It's almost ironic that Demon Attack, being so obviously derivative of Space Invaders, is also the most fun I had with any of their games. Maybe it's not fair to judge their library based on only four games when they were so prolific, but if Mobygames votes are anything to go by, these are their four most widely played games by a big margin.

Imagic's output of 1983 was even greater than of 1982. In January through May, they produced nine games, seven of them targeting the Intellivision as the lead platform rather than Atari VCS. In June through December they released another seven games, all of them VCS-focused. None of these games were hugely successful by any metric from what I can gather, and none qualify as whales. In 1984, with the video game market not yet recovered from its 1983 decline, they focused on Atari, Commodore, and IBM personal computers, with their sole console output consisting of two ColecoVision ports of non-Imagic games. Finally in 1985, they released two interactive fiction games on personal computers, before being absorbed by Activision in early 1986.

Thursday, January 16, 2020

Games 139-142: Atlantis, Cosmic Ark, & ancestors

Imagic released Atlantis in July 1982 and its sequel Cosmic Ark in August 1982, both for the Atari VCS initially. They were developed concurrently, Atlantis by Dennis Koble and Cosmic Ark by Rob Fulop, both of them former Atari programmers. It would be weird to play one game and not the other.

But before I do, here’s a roadmap of known and inferred influences to these games:

Game 139: Colony 7

Released in 1981 by Taito, arcade-history.com claims influence from Atari’s Missile Command and Tekhan/Centuri’s Pleiades, which itself was intended as a sequel to Phoenix, a game which Atari claimed Demon Attack had imitated to the point of copyright infringement, but I didn’t see the resemblance.

And while I find the Missile Command influence is obvious and significant – you defend your colony with weapons aimed by crosshairs which explode radially on reaching altitude – the Pleiades connection seems superficial at best. Pleiades is a multi-stage shmupoid like Phoenix, and while the first stage appears to be about defending a city from an alien invasion, and is visually similar to Colony 7, the defense aspect doesn’t really factor into play.

Pleiades

Colony 7

Colony 7, on the other hand, is all about city defense. Unlike in Missile Command, you have unlimited missiles, so fire away. The targets are quicker, more numerous, and less predictable, but your missiles, which are dual-fired from turrets on the side of the screen, fly faster and with little cooldown. The reticle is controlled with a joystick rather than a trackball. You also have some additional weapons; three Mega Blasters which explode with a much larger radius than the stock weapon, and a single screen-clearing Eradicator rocket. These weapons are visible below the ion shield and can be destroyed by enemy fire, as can your turrets.

There is also the option, at the start of the game, to purchase “extended weaponry.” Most of the sources on the Internet that try to explain what this does get it wrong. It doesn’t give you any additional weaponry, but rather it expands their blast radii, which is most noticeable with the stock missiles.

This makes the game pretty easy, but I’m not one to turn down an edge if the game offers it and doesn’t explicitly tell me this is an easy mode. That said, once I had figured out how the game works, I made it to wave 14 on my very next try, and I’d like to think that I failed there not because it was too challenging, but because my attention span was waning from the monotony.

GAB rating: Average. The creativity involved in mashing up shmupoid and Missile Command gameplay is commendable, but it gets old pretty fast, and as it lacks Missile Command’s more advanced mechanics as well as any ability to move around as you would in a normal shmup, there isn’t much depth beyond figuring out which targets to prioritize and when to use your super weapons.

Game 140: Space Zap

I played this game on real hardware at ACAM. There’s not much to it – you don’t move, but you can shoot in four directions at targets that pop up, shoot projectiles at you, and at the end of each wave, spin around you. It’s a lot like whack-a-mole, actually.

There’s no cooldown to your attack, so once the aliens start to appear and vanish faster than you could possibly react, blast away in the hopes that you might score some lucky kills. Focus on the mines, but don’t stop shooting, ever.

That was my first and only attempt in MAME, and didn’t feel much of a need to replay for a better score.

GAB rating: Below Average. Standing still and waiting for targets to appear just isn’t all that interesting.

Game 141: Atlantis

Atlantis has apparently been thriving under the sea for centuries, but one day, the Gorgon Fleet arrives, intent on demolishing the city. You command some defenses - two angled turrets and one "command post" with an upwards-aimed gun, but it’s only a matter of time before you are overwhelmed and Atlantis sinks again.

There are four game modes, and unusually for an Atari game, difficulty switches do nothing. Game 1 is the standard mode, but the others are:

No command post firing
Two controller mode (also no command post firing)
Easy difficulty

These extra modes didn’t sound especially interesting, so I stuck to mode 1.

You control three defense facilities – one command post in the center, and two sentry towers on the left and right side.

Unlike in Colony 7, the guns can’t be aimed; your available actions at any given moment are simply to fire the center gun, fire the left gun, fire the right gun, or to do nothing. The center gun is ostensibly the most useful one, but its kills are only worth half the points, which you need in order to repair the city, and it tends to get blown up really fast.

If they fly this low, it’s too late.

The right gun is higher than the left, and farther away from the center, so the cross-fire isn’t exactly symmetrical.

So, what can we learn from this? Well, apart from showing that the center gun is best, it shows that high-altitude planes must be targeted with the gun facing the same direction, and low-altitude planes are best targeted with the gun facing its opposite direction. But it doesn’t take long before the planes can fly faster than your own bullets, making the high-altitude ones essentially invulnerable unless you pull off a lucky blind shot. It’s much easier to shoot them head-on at lower altitudes.

One crucial thing to understand is that the Gorgon planes always start at high altitudes, and any that make a pass across the screen without getting hit will instantly wrap around it and descend a level. Anticipation is the only way you’ll hit them after the first few slow and easy waves, and understanding their movement patterns buys you more time to anticipate.

My best attempt just surpassed the 40,000 point mark.

GAB rating: Average. It reminds me much more of Atari’s Anti-Aircraft, a game I didn’t care for at all, than of Taito's Colony 7. It looks really nice for a VCS game - it even seems to be made with a 4:3 aspect ratio in mind - and the defense-oriented gameplay is certainly more interesting than the passive, boring shooting galleries seen in Anti-Aircraft and Air-Sea Battle. The bleak, menacing atmosphere as your city is bombarded into rubble stands out especially, and feels less abstract but no less grim than the desolate landscapes in Missile Command. But it’s pretty shallow and repetitive, with little room for decisions and tactics, and also suffers from a bad feedback loop where once the game is hard enough that you start making mistakes, you’ll spend most of your play time without your most effective weapon, and have just the side-turrets and no gameplay decisions to make at all except for timing your shots correctly.

Once Atlantis is destroyed, a vessel with its last survivors flies off into space, setting up the perfect lead-in to:

Game 142: Cosmic Ark

Read the manual here:
https://atariage.com/manual_thumbs.php?SoftwareID=945

The manual’s only explicit reference to Atlantis is that it describes the Cosmic Ark’s crew as “Atlantean,” but this is enough to infer that this is a direct sequel to Atlantis. Oddly, though, the Ark’s mission isn’t to colonize a new home for the Atlanteans, but to rescue creatures from a dying solar system. This raises a few questions – just how much time has passed since the previous game? Is this the same vessel that escaped Atlantis? Did they settle somewhere in between games, or is the Ark’s crew truly the last of the Atlantean people?

Few answers are found in the manual or game, but the gameplay involves two phases. First is a Meteor Shower phase, which is a simplified version of Space Zap, where meteors approach from four directions and you zap them with your joystick. A missed shot will cost you energy and time, so you can’t spam as you could in Space Zap. The difficulty switch controls the size of the Ark, with position ‘A’ making it bigger, making it harder to zap the meteors.

After surviving a meteor shower, the ark will enter planetary orbit and launch a shuttle, and the Rescue phase begins. Two creatures pace around the landscape, and you must abduct both of them with your tractor beam while they try to evade you. An alarm will sound when the meteor showers are about to begin again, and you must return to the Ark promptly or it will be destroyed. After the first rescue, subsequent planetary surfaces will have defense laser turrets which move up and down and fire at predictable intervals.

Eventually the Ark will be destroyed by the meteor shower, rendering the whole mission pointless. An escape shuttle will fly off into space, setting things up for a continued storyline, but Imagic abandoned this arc.

As with most Atari games, there are multiple game modes:

Standard gameplay
Only Meteor Shower rounds
Two-player alternating
Hard variant of 1
Hard variant of 2
Hard variant of 3

I didn’t see much point in modes 2 or 3. The alternating two-player mode gives each player responsibility for a different round type, but it’s still just alternating play.

The hard variant modes, on the other hand, are hilarious. Right off the bat, the Meteor Shower round is too fast for me to react. Only with difficulty switch in position ‘B’ did I manage to barely squeak by, only to find this on planetfall:

GAB rating: Below Average. It’s like WarioWare, if it only had two microgames. Standing still and waiting for targets to appear still isn’t all that interesting – you see a meteor, you deal with it by tapping the stick in its direction. Once they start moving faster than you can react, that’s it. Your game is effectively over; there’s no way to compensate for your inadequate reaction time through anticipation as you can in Atlantis. Space Zap had at least a small amount of variety – not much, but more than zero. The Rescue phase is a bit more interesting, but not interesting enough to hold up as its own game, and the two lackluster microgames don’t add up to more than the sum of said parts.

I had heard good things about Imagic before I started this blog, and I am playing them for the first time as I write about them. All of them certainly look nice, and Imagic’s developers must have been wizards to pull off the sorts of tricks they did on the VCS’s limited specs and only 4K of ROM, but Atlantis and Cosmic Ark underwhelmed me in the gameplay department, even compared to other VCS games. We’ve still got Dragonfire toward the end of 1982, and I’m curious to see if it holds up to their reputation.

Scaling:	1x 2x
PAR:	Square 12:7 Double
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Scaling:	1x 2x
PAR:	Square 12:7 Double
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Scaling:	1x 2x
PAR:	Square 12:7 Double
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Scaling:	1x 2x
PAR:	Square 12:7 Double
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Scaling:	1x 2x
PAR:	Square 12:7 Double
DAR:	Raw 4:3

Monday, August 18, 2025

Superauthenticity: Atari 2600 aspect ratios

Combat

Adventure

Space Invaders

Yars' Revenge

E.T.

Ms. Pac-Man

Demon Attack

Atlantis

Pitfall!

River Raid

H.E.R.O.

Pitfall II: Lost Caverns