It's Critter Time!

We love our second-gen consoles.
Did you know Atari manuals don't include the word "pixel"? It wasn't a concept for their hardware. Either you're displaying something or you're not.

Here's a video explaining the difficulties of capturing video when "resolution" is not a analog concept.

The Atari VCS was my first game console, and as a very young child I played the heck out of that woodgrained thing. River Raid, Keystone Kapers, and Pitfall were probably the first games I ever played.

Oh heck!! I forgot, it's summer, and NOBODY'S hotter than Atari this summer!!

My dad had an Atari 2600 that he'd randomly sometimes hook up for a weekend or two back in the late NES/early SNES era so I've got some fond memories. He mostly just played Space Invaders but we had a dozen or so cartridges and pretty much all of them were enjoyable. I'd still dig it out of the closet in the early 2000s as a young teen.

I recall getting into Yar's Revenge, but my favorite of them ended up being Dragonfire. I loved the look of it and the two different modes in the same game felt neat to me for an Atari game.



Reading "Racing The Beam" and watching Atari Archive on YouTube lately has given me a lot of respect for the thing. Get a buddy and try some stuff that has multiplayer and the simple gameplay will suddenly get very intense when you're competing. I gotta make my boyfriend play Combat or Frogs and Flies with me some time...

My only experience with Atari hardware was when one of my housemates in college got her hands on her mom's old 2600. We gathered together in front of the CRT in our lounge playing E.T. (somehow one copy that wasn't condemned to landfill). Despite the horrid reputation, we had a ton of fun running around and laughing at how stupid it was. It was definitely the wrong game in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I've played much, much worse in my gaming career.

My first experience with the Atari 2600 was with a clone console called the Rambo. My relatives had it and I didn't know what it was or what it was a clone of until like two decades later.

I’ve personally never been in the same room as one, but I’ve played Adventure and Combat using Stella and heard my mom reminisce about how she loved playing Pac-Man on hers growing up.

I struggle a bit to build the appreciation I have for other retro consoles because of the simplicity of the graphics and maybe to some degree the awkwardness with which the games map to the controllers I have access to.

Playing Adventure in particular helped make independent game design feel more accessible to me though. Perhaps I’ll pursue those inklings of creative passion some day.

I never had an actual 2600; the closest I ever got was one of those Atari Flashback console in a boxes I got for Christmas one year, and that was pretty neat. I didn't get a ton of use out of it, but it was enough to get me aware of Atari games and go digging around for more.

What I did discover a while later that was real cool was Dragonstomper. Dragonstomper used an accessory called the Starpath Supercharger, which basically let 2600 games run off of tapes. And that's interesting because...



Dragonstomper is one of the first, possibly the first console RPG. It's really basic, sure, but it actually does have all the elements to be considered a JRPG. Sadly, I don't know if I could call it a good game -- it's very much luck based and pretty repetitive.

But it's sure neat it exists, right?

Bobinator wrote: Sat Aug 30, 2025 11:58 am Dragonstomper is one of the first, possibly the first console RPG. It's really basic, sure, but it actually does have all the elements to be considered a JRPG. Sadly, I don't know if I could call it a good game -- it's very much luck based and pretty repetitive.
But it's sure neat it exists, right?

There's a certain joy of the "golden age" before all the conventions had ossified. And the hardware limitations where you only have an 8x8 pixel space with a single color to render some kind of enemy. So you get these games with their unique prompts like "Oh no, a maniac!" or you're attacked by three monkeys.

Activision made a ripoff of Sega's "Astroblaster", which they marketed under "Megamania", a random name if there ever was one. The manual just leaned into the weird enemy shapes, just calling them "hamburgers" or "steam irons" or "dice". This weird blurb that calls it a "humorous" game when it's just another shootery game.



Perhaps inspired by that success is Fox's "Turmoil". Here's another commercial trying so hard to sell us on the idea that these glowing blobs are actually wacky characters.