More Super Mario Maker 2 Levels & I Finished my Super World!

Posted on March 10, 2022 by Brian

Since my last article about Mario Maker 2 on the site, I have made three levels, one in December, one in January, and one just yesterday in March.  The most important of these is the one from January, for I finally finished my Super World!  To reprise, it is a Super World of eight required levels, all adapted from that game I designed on paper as a kid, Castle Siege. It took some time, but the last, eighth level of the Super World is finally done.   I put a lot of work into the level so I really hope people play it eventually, it’s worth the effort.  As for the other two levels, the first is my least interesting level.  The second, most recent stage is a better one well worth a try.

Jumps and Flight (Mario World) – I made this level in December, and it’s one of my easiest and simplest stages. That doesn’t mean it is easy, though; it’s at least Normal in challenge. It’s just quite straightforward, and without much in the way of nice environments or such. This is a short-ish stage. You just jump between small donut block platforms for the first half of the level, then navigate a fairly standard P-balloon path between spike walls in the second half.  There is a checkpoint between the halves.  The level has a clear but no likes and i get it, not sure if I’d heart this level either… I mean, it’s fine, but nothing special. Jump, then fly.

I made this because I wanted to make a level but wasn’t feeling my best so I just put something together quickly that I could clear easily.  I chose this setting because I wanted to make a Mario World level finally, so I did.  I mean, Super Mario World is my favorite 2d platformer ever, not Mario 3.  And yet the vast majority of my levels in this game are Marios 1 or 3, and this is my only Mario World level.  Honestly, one reason for that is because the simplicity of the NES games is appealing; there is no need to account for spin jumps or such in the NES games, or 3D World, which I also have made several levels in.  I might try making a level with that stuff later, but for now I haven’t.  And that is fine, I like the levels I have made.  After all, I love Mario 3’s visuals and gameplay, I just always disliked how excessively short its levels are… a problem I have certainly corrected, heh.  This level is not long though, unlike some of my others.  Play it if you want, I guess.  Code N0Y-X4C-96G.

2-4: Your Castle at Last! (Mario 3) – This level I made in January, and I spent a good week and a half or more working on the stage.  First, building this stage took a while, but then clearing it while editing many parts of the level as I made clear-check attempts took much longer.  I am glad I spent so much time on it, though, because I think I fixed all of the potential issues that would have existed had I uploaded it earlier.

This is a fairly complex level made up of three sections. This level is on the long side — my clear check time is 4:43 — but hey, it’s the last level of the Super World, it better be challenging and a memorable journey! I think that while frustrating at points, it is one of my best levels. The checkpoints are basically perfectly placed as well. Each of the three sections of the level is different –the first a platforming challenge; the second a few tricky jumps and then a battle against a lot of enemies; and the last, the final battle against Bowser, followed with the concluding section celebrating your victory. The first section is reasonably similar to my original concept, but the second is mostly new and the third a mostly traditional, though difficulty-increased, Mario 3 Bowser fight.  After that is the conclusion.  And since this level ends the game, there is a good-sized conclusion at the end to enjoy. Time-wise, that third part actually takes the longest to get through.  Bowser’s RNG can be frustrating as you wait for him to attack at the right spots to break through the floor. I think that was the right choice for a boss battle though, it works well. It’s really satisfying when you get him to beat himself! Clearing this level was pretty hard for me, but it’d be a much less frustrating task for anybody else in one key respect, you don’t need to beat the level from the beginning without dying. That was what I had the most trouble with here; once I finally did that, beating it from the checkpoints took much less time.

So what is this level? It is your final trip to rescue your besieged castle from the enemy leader at its gates. First, you cross a bridge over the poisoned lake in front of the castle. Note, this is a night forest level. That is relevant at times. In this section, you jump between bridge sections, avoiding fireballs while fighting or avoiding some enemies. There’s just one mushroom at the start, but that’s enough for this part. After the checkpoint, which is about 40 seconds into the level on average, there is one final tough jumping section, first. This jump is partially blind, but I couldn’t come up with a better way to make it happen.  I did mark with coins where to go.  You can see the area you need to drop to, it’s just on the bottom of your screen.

The jump after that is trickier, but it’s not as hard as what you face after that: a battle against enemy forces. Here, you get a frog suit, and there are several more around the area. You fight against Bowser Jr. and a bunch of troops in a mushroom forest garden, including Hammer Bros. and Magikoopas. I recommend going up to get the frog suit guarded by the two Hammer Bros. on the gate into the garden; it’s worth it to get rid of them. For this battle, you just need to kill Bowser Jr. to continue, but most of the other foes will need to go to get him. I strongly recommend staying up high and not going down into the bottom of the garden. Once you complete this, you get the second checkpoint and face Bowser. As I said, it’s a conventional Mario 3 Bowser fight, so you have to get him to break a floor. I did add a few fireballs on certain tiles to make things a little tougher, but that’s it. There are several frog suits in this area to give you additional hits, and yes, I needed them.

After you beat him, there’s one last little run back to the castle’s back door, and you win. Make sure to hit the P-switch that opens the door, then get to it! It’s on the bottom of the garden. I tried to make this clear with some notes made of coins.  Working on this part of the level actually took a lot of time.  It may have made a lot more sense, level design wise, to just have the door after Bowser connect to the castle for your victory, but the problem is that that doesn’t make sense in the stage map — the castle’s back door has to be in the garden, so you have to backtrack back to it.  So I added one-way gates and markers and such to try to help people figure out where to go, I hope it’s not confusing.  Just remember, again, to hit a P-switch and grab a star and you’ll be fine.

As anyone who plays the level hopefully will realize, during the process of making this level I decided to use frog suit powerups to represent your allied forces. They should be knights, but there is no way to represent that in Mario Maker 2, really.  I think using frog suits works reasonably well.  Touching them saves them, essentially.  They were going to defend the castle to the last. Fortunately, you saved the day, and all of them,  first.  Or you would if anyone completes the stage… sadly, maybe seven weeks later it is still uncleared.  I really hope that changes, it’s such an interesting stage! Code MVS-L49-52G.

And lastly for now, over the last two days I made this level.  It’s another 3D World level, using a mechanic I haven’t really put in my other two 3D World levels before but makes for some interesting jumping challenges.

Cat Claw Clinging (3D World) – This level is a Super Mario 3D World stage all about the cat suit’s ability to hang on metal grilles and trees.  This is my first level with a clear condition, and I use the don’t touch the ground one.  When used to make levels where you have to stay on the ground, Don’t Touch the Ground is insufferably tedious… but when used the opposite way, such as here, it’s great!  For the most part this is a platformer stage about jumping between places you can grab on to that would work with or without the clear condition, but there are some points where the clear condition matters and makes the stage harder.  I think it’s a pretty well-made stage with a good challenge level.  It’s tough, but not one of my hardest levels, certainly.  It’s not easier but is a lot less challenging than my last stage.  And at a clear check time of only 53 second it’s one of my shorter levels too.  I had fun laying out the obstacles and grilles and such.  The level is mostly just ‘learn the jumps’, but one part is a bit tricky — the level is mostly another of my enemy-free stages, but one section has enemies: you have to bounce on bees through one part.  It’s a bit tricky because you have to line up the jumps just right or you  will get hit and fall.

And on that note, I decided to fully mark out where to jump from in this level with coins.  I’m inconsistent at whether to mark jumps or not; for the most part, I think that as long as a jump is visible and not something off screen, you should be able to do it without the additional help of an indicator.  Indicators on jumps are a difficulty-reducing crutch often used by Mario Maker creators that Nintendo would never use so blatantly in one of their games.  However, there are a few parts of this stage where I thought marking the jump points would be very helpful to reduce player frustration.  And once I had started, I decided to just continue on and add coins between every platform.  Why not.

Oh, this level makes frequent use of a move not listed on the controls page: if you start a cat claw dive with R, then hit the R button again while in the dive, you will cancel it and return to a normal jump.  You can’t do another dive without landing or grabbing on to something, though.   I use this feature a bunch of times for maneuvering around obstacles.  I decided to put in a hint room at the start saying to press R in a dive to cancel it, for anyone who is playing the level but doesn’t know that.  Sure, at this point maybe all of the few people playing this level already know that, but I’d rather help people out.  This level can be frustrating, but it’s the good kind of platformer frustration that, when paired with Mario’s exceptional controls and design, is so much fun to work your way through.  Code: D9L-F3K-PMG

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Atari 5200 Game Opinion Summaries Series II: Part III

Posted on February 3, 2022 by Brian

There are only six games covered this time, but what this update may lack in quantity of games it makes up for with quality: several of these are among the very best games I have played on the 5200, and indeed, in my opinion, of the 1980s as a whole.

Table of Contents

Space Dungeon
Star Wars: The Arcade Game
Tempest [Cancelled Game Homebrew Release]
Wizard of Wor
Vanguard
Xari Arena [Cancelled Game Homebrew Release]

Rankings

The Summaries


Space Dungeon – 1 or 2 player alternating. Two controllers required.  Supports the Atari 5200 Controller Holder.  Developed by Taito America Corporation and published by Atari in 1983.

Space Dungeon is an innovative and brilliant game that I had not heard of before the ’00s, as with most games on this console, but everyone really SHOULD know. Space Dungeon is one of the first twinstick shooters. Indeed, this might be the very first game which uses the classic twin-stick control scheme, with one stick for aiming and one stick for moving. This game, one of few games developed by Taito’s American branch which would mostly just be a publishing arm, released in arcades in 1981. As a result, it pre-dates Williams’ much more famous Robotron 2084, the so-called (but not actual) “first twin-stick shooter”. That game became a massive arcade sensation which made twin-stick games popular, and proved to be a second major success for creator Eugene Jarvis, following Defender. It deserved the success, Robotron is an amazing game which does just about everything right.

However, that this predecessor in its genre, Space Dungeon, was forgotten and has remained a very obscure title only released in arcades, the Atari 5200, and a half-baked PSP collection port is a tragedy! Because this game is AMAZING. The original arcade game gets most of the credit of course, but this Atari 5200 port is fantastic, playing just like the arcade game except for a lower screen resolution and some slowdown. I said in my first Atari 5200 Game Opinion Summaries list that Defender was my favorite 5200 game, and it still may be because that is an exceptional port of one of the very best pre-crash games, but this game gives it a serious run for its money; honestly, it’s probably a tie between these two games. They are both A+ graded classics, hands-down. The game lacks variety once you get used to it, but other than that is one of the absolute best games of its era. And again, it is quite innovative too.

What makes this game so good, and so original? First, the controls. I am not sure what the first arcade game with twin-stick shooting was, it seems to be unclear whether it was this game or another game released in 1981, Mars from Artic Electronics, but either way, at the time this control scheme was very new and the game implements it extremely well. You move with one stick, and fire with the other. It must be said though, both movement and shooting are eight-way only, and are digital-only. So, this game does not make use of the 5200’s controller. Fortunately, the game works well on this stick and playing this game on 5200 controllers feels great; of the digital-only-control 5200 games this has some of the best controls. It probably helps that you won’t be using those mushy buttons but instead just two sticks.

Before I continue, I do need to mention that when buying this game do make sure to get the Atari 5200 Controller Holder. It is a plastic piece which you can lock two 5200 controllers into, effectively giving you one stable twin-stick joystick. If you don’t have one the game is playable, but MUCH less comfortable to play unless you make your own controller holder somehow. Getting a loose cart copy of this game is relatively cheap, but the Controller Holder costs more. It is only used by this game and Robotron, but is well worth it regardless. Comparing this game with the Controller Holder to Atari 7800 Robotron, which doesn’t have one, is a night and day difference!

Space Dungeon is, as with most games of the era, and endless score-attack game which goes until you die. Along the way you will challenge an infinite number of randomly generated mazes. Before each of the first ten levels, custom text boxes introduce the stage, and new game elements are introduced in each of the first few levels. If you get good enough to get past level ten, though, the game continues on pretty much the same from then on. Getting that far will be a significant challenge however, because this game is satisfyingly hard! Space Dungeon has a good difficulty curve, starting easy and steadily introducing new elements through those first few levels until you’re fully used to the game, at which point the real challenge begins.

In each level of Space Dungeon, your ship explores a six by six screen maze. That’s 36 screens per level. The game has a fantastic on-screen map showing both where you have explored and a lot of useful information; more on that later. The open space within each screen is always empty, but randomly placed walls and openings along the sides of each screen add some variety; no two levels will be exactly the same. In each maze, your goal is to find your way to the exit which warps you to the next stage, while getting as many points as you can along the way. There are 14 treasures scattered around each level of the dungeon, and when you touch the warp to the next stage you get bonus points for each treasure you are carrying. Random selections of enemies will try to stop you. There are eight types of enemies in the game, with several types being added in levels two and three to the base set. The enemy types have a nice variety of types, including wall lasers, a slow but hard to kill enemy that won’t be much of a threat, fast-spawning foes, and more. Some rooms have few enemies, while other rooms have many. The most enemy-heavy rooms are colored in as red on the map. If you kill enough enemies in them the levels will be cleared and go to a normal black square on the map, making them easier the next time you enter them as you explore around. It’s a mix, and due to the random generation you never know what you are going to get when you enter a room.

So, the core gameplay loop is to fly around, explore the map, get treasures if you want, and then go to the exit, while killing as enemies along the way. You never HAVE to get treasures, it is optional. I usually try to get them, though. It’s a great design with great controls and enemies that are a very well thought through balance of challenge and fun. Enemies explode in pretty cool ways too, scattering bits of themselves all over the screen every time they blow up. This really shows off the 5200’s graphical capabilities, a purely sprite-based console like the NES would have a very hard time with this most likely! It can sometimes feel unfair that the enemies can attack you from any direction while you can only fire in the eight cardinal directions, but you get used to it. Every situation is survivable with the right actions.

When you lose a life, highly interesting game mechanics come into play, reminiscent of a both a Souls-like game and a Rogue-like. You see, you don’t just respawn. Instead, you start back from the level’s starting screen. Your map exploration data for the level is carried over, including which rooms are red enemy-heavy ones and such. Unfortunately, the actual contents of rooms is not carried over, so if you die in a room with some interesting setup of enemies when you get back to that room those foes will not be there. This is one of the only flaws in this game, really, but I’m sure keeping 36 screens of stuff in memory was way too much. But anyway, when you die, you drop all treasures you were carrying. All of them are left on the screen you died on, and a map marker shows which screen you died on. So yeah, this game has corpse runs! The idea may have been seen in some game before this one, but it’s very interesting to see it here in this twinstick shooter. There is an additional wrinkle, too: one enemy type, the Thief, also collects the treasures as it goes around. The Thief’s location is marked on the map at all times. If you shoot the Thief it drops all treasures it is carrying, but a few enemies appear as well. You cannot kill the Thief for good, it’ll fly off after being shot. So, wait too long and the Thief will get your treasures and you will need to hunt down the Thief instead of your corpse marker. Helpfully, the map always tells you where the Thief is. This whole system is a really interesting mechanic which adds a lot of depth to the game.

And that is Space Dungeon. While like all classic games the simple design could get repetitive, this game mixes that repetition up with its always-changing levels and room layouts add variety. With simple but very responsive controls, good graphics with lots of stuff going on on screen as the enemies blast apart, and gameplay that is a hybrid of an arcade twin-stick shooter with some elements of a roguelike adventure game mixed in, once I bought the game in early 2021 Space Dungeon almost immediately became one of my favorites. The game is repetitive, sure, but it is incredibly engaging and fun as you explore the maps, look for treasures, fill out the maps, blow apart enemies, and then do it all again on the next stage. The difficulty is incredibly well balanced, providing a good but approachable challenge. This is my favorite game that I bought in 2021.

Space Dungeon has only ever been released in arcades, the Atari 5200, and on the PSP in the Taito Legends Power-Up collection. Sadly there has never been a release on a modern console with two sticks. There should be.

 

Star Wars: The Arcade Game – 1 player.  Has analog controls.  Developed and published by Parker Bros. based on the Atari arcade game, in 1983. Yes, this is an official port of an Atari game that was not not made by Atari. Licensing…

Atari’s first Star Wars arcade game is a vector graphics game. This game is a target-shooting game which borders on rail shooter. Think of as being basically like a light gun game with a joystick, except if you move to the edges of the screen you can move around a little to change direction or avoid obstacles, depending on the stage. The game has three different sections: a space battle against oncoming TIE Fighters, a flight over the surface of the Death Star shooting at towers trying to take you down, and finally you re-enact the famous Death Star trench run scene, albeit sometimes with obstacles added in the trench, as the game gets harder, in order to up the challenge. I don’t know if I’ve ever played the game in an arcae, but I have played home versions of it, such as this or the very good port included in Rogue Squadron 3 for the Gamecube. It’s a good, classic arcade game.

This home console version is as straight a port of the arcade game as the Atari 5200 can muster. Obviously the graphics here are sprite-based and are no match for the perfect lines of the vector arcade game, but even so this is a pretty nice looking game. Each of the three stage types are here, and they all play just like they should. The controls are very good, and are fully analog like you would hope for. Your cursor moves responsively and while it takes some practice to reliably hit targets, once you get used to it the game can be quite fun. It is repetitive, as you’ll just do those three stage types on repeat as you destroy one Death Star after another, but they do add more enemies and obstacles in the stages as you progress, so the game does change as you get farther into it. This is a simple game. In the first stage, the TIE fighter attack, you just need to survive. Shoot the shots heading towards you and shoot down what TIEs you can. That may sound easy, but the TIEs are fast and can be hard to hit, it’s tricky. In the second, which first appears in the second loop, you fly over the Death Star’s surface, shooting the tops of towers. If you get all of them you get a points bonus. They are shooting back though, this is no bonus stage. And last, you go down that trench, avoiding walls and such that may appear in later loops, before the exhaust port appears. Shoot into it to destroy the Death Star. Otherwise, you’ll repeat the trench run until you run out of lives or destroy it, after which it’s on to the next level to do the same thing again but slightly harder.

You start with nine hits before you get Game Over. It’s a generous enough amount that beating the first loop will be simple, but make no mistake, getting a high score will be plenty challenging. That’s pretty much the game, though. It just has the one mode. It’s a pretty good game with good graphics and decent audio, and is and a solid port of an arcade classic. However, this game is simple to a fault. There’s little depth here, just memorization and twitch reaction. I like games with a bit more strategy than you find here, which is probably why I prefer games like 5200 Space Invaders or Galaxians over this or Blaster. Oh, while Blaster is better than this game, both games are good. Also, Star Wars: The Arcade Game can be frustrating at times as I try to stay alive while TIEs zip by too fast to hit as I pile up damage. Also, the very limited amount of movement you can make can be an issue as well, you are mostly railed onto your path and while you can avoid some obstacles and shots by moving the cursor to the correct edge of the screen to turn slightly away from it, dodging isn’t easy. Sega’s Star Wars arcade game from a good ten years after this one also has limited movement, but you can move around a bit more in that game than you can here. It works as it is, but is occasionally annoying. And of course there is no way to reproduce that vector look on an ’80s TV. Overall, I think Star Wars: The Arcade game is good, but not great. It’s fun, but doesn’t have the variety or depth to keep me coming back long term. Still, this game can be had for a reasonable price and certainly is worth owning.

Arcade port. This version was also released on the Atari 8-bit computer, there without the analog controls of course. Other ports were released on many other platforms: Atari 2600, Apple II, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, Colecovision, Atari ST, PC, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, and Commodore 64. The arcade version is also included in Rogue Squadron 3 for the Gamecube.

 

Tempest [Cancelled Game Homebrew Release] – 1 player. Has analog controls.  Supports the Atari 5200 Trak-Ball controller.  Developed and almost finished by Atari in 1984, but cancelled and not released. An unfinished prototype rom leaked later on. Almost 30 years later the original programmer went back and finished the game in 2012, and AtariAge published it in 2013.

Tempest is one of Atari’s more popular classic arcade games. It was another vector monitor game, a tube shooter where you spin around the outside top of a tube shooting enemies coming up towards you from the bottom. As with a lot of games though, the 5200 version was never released, it was cancelled along with most 5200 projects in the works in 1984. Fortunately, this one had gotten far enough into development for it to be salvageable into a completed game, as I described above. The result is a pretty fantastic conversion of Tempest to the 5200. This is a great game and a standout for the 5200. However, it is impossible for me to look at this game without thinking of Tempest 2000 and its sequels. I know it is deeply unfair to this game to compare it to a game ten years newer and that was made for much more powerful hardware, but I have a lot more experience with Tempest 2000 than I do the original game, honestly, so I can’t help it. Tempest 2000 is a trancendent masterpiece and one of my favorite games ever. This game? It’s quite good, but isn’t on that level. But for the hardware this does about as much as you can. It is a clear downgrade from the arcade version of the original Tempest as well, but not much could be done about that.

As in the arcade game, in Tempest for the 5200 you control a ship which moves around the upper edge of a polygonal shape, either a wall or circle of some kind, which extends into the distance below. From the bottom of the shape, enemies emerge, moving upwards towards you. If they touch you, you die. They also will shoot at you, though your shots cancel theirs. You can’t shoot all the time though, you have a shot limit. So, you need to shoot them first, but also shoot carefully, in a fast-paced and hectic game with stuff happening all over. It’s a lot to take in, but it’s also what makes Tempest so much fun. This is a simple but very well made game with brilliant design and very strong “just one more game” qualities. All of the enemies from the arcade game are here, as are the level maps. There are quite a few unique stage layouts, and though of course the game loops endlessly once you’ve seen them all it steadily gets harder as it does so. You probably won’t see most of them without a lot of practice, though, because Tempest is tough. The gameplay and controls here are very good. You move left and right with the stick. One button fires, and the other one uses your screen-clearing bomb. You get one bomb per level. This game has full analog movement. The controls are even better with the Trak-Ball controller, too. Tempest was designed for a spinner, and the 5200 does not have one of those, though homebrew ones do exist. The Trak-Ball is the next best thing for most of us, though, and fits the game very well. Once you get used to it, moving around by spinning that ball is a whole lot of fun. You have slower and more precise control with the trackball than the joystick.

For features, there are three difficulty levels, Beginner, Normal, or Expert. In Beginner or Normal modes you can start from any odd-numbered level from 1 to 9, but in Expert you can start from levels all the way up to level 81. There are only a dozen or so different level maps, but each time they loop the background color changes, which is a nice touch. There are apparently 96 individual levels, just like the arcade game, but given the utterly insane speeds of the higher stages I’ve never gotten even close to seeing them. I mostly play this game on Normal. I presume it loops after level 96?

I should mention the major downside of 5200 Tempest, though: the graphics. While great for the 5200, these low resolution, very pixelated graphics can be a bit hard to make out sometimes. Where, exactly is that enemy in that pixelated blob? Are they on this block of the stage or the next one? And are they on top, or not? It can be quite hard to tell when you will touch an enemy and die, and when you still have room to shoot them and they are actually aren’t quite on the top. The lines of the well are a different color from the enemies, their shots are a slightly different color, you are a third color, and the game highlights which space you are on top of, but even so the graphics are low resolution and extremely pixelated, to making out details is tough. This is probably the games’ biggest drawback. Well, also I wish it had background music, but the arcade game didn’t have it either. Impressively, considering the games’ 3-d nature, Tempest runs very well, with no slowdown and minimal flicker. This is a crazy-fast game that runs pretty smoothly. Once the screen really fills up with enemies some may seem to blink a little as they move from path to path, but it’s minor. It runs amazingly well. Staying alive will be the challenge.

Even in this very low-rez form, Tempest is an impressive and somewhat creepy game; the tension as you shoot down that well at the creatures crawling up at you can get to you. This is particularly true once some reach the top and start moving around the top lip towards you. You’d better hope you have some luck or a bomb! Tempest is kind of a horror game in a way, and this is even more true in Tempest 2000. This is a tense, challenging shooter where focus is key. The game is on the line between chaotic randomness and strategic shooting; you can do okay at Tempest, and have fun, while just spinning left and right and shooting down randomly, but if you want to do well at the game thought is required. I like a game to require strategy, and this game does if you want to do well, but just randomly zooming around and shooting can also be fun, in the earlier levels at least. The game eventually gets insanely difficult, particularly if you tackle the higher levels in Expert mode. Tempest 2000 is an easier game to play long sessions of, this game is more punishing. Even so, Tempest is a fantastic classic game and this is a great port of it. Sure, the pixelated graphics take some getting used to, but you’ll get it. If you like Jeff Minter’s shooters or have a 5200 Trak-Ball controller this game is definitely a must own. Tempest for the 5200 is not my favorite Tempest game, but given how exceptional Tempest 2000 is, that isn’t much of a criticism. The game is still fantastic and holds up well today. This is a fun and addictive classic which shows what this hardware can do. This is yet another game that Atari absolutely should have released back in 1984, this is the kind of game which convinces people to buy your system!

Arcade port. This version is 5200 exclusive, but the arcade version is available in many classic compilations for modern platforms. There is also an unreleased Atari 2600 version, which is much worse, and much less finished, than this one. Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, and BBC Micro versions did release in Europe, but at the time that’s it. The arcade version is available for many modern platforms in various collections: The PS2, Dreamcast, PC/Mac (several different times each), Linux, SNES, PS1, Saturn, GBA, PSP, DS (two times), Xbox, iOS/Android, and N-Gage all saw Tempest release in collections. There is also a standalone digital Xbox 360 release.

 

Wizard of Wor – 1 or 2 player simultaneous. Developed and published by CBS Electronics under license from Midway Games in 1983.

Wizard of Wor is one of the best pre-crash arcade games developed internally at Midway. Midway’s most successful games of the era, such as Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, weren’t developed by Midway itself, but Wizard of Wor was. Apart from a very short-lived attempt at making their own console, however, Midway would not start making home console versions of its game until the mid 1990s, however, so the game was licensed out for home systems. CBS Electronics made this port, from the time CBS had a short-lived videogame development division before the crash. Unfortunately the speech samples from the arcade game don’t make it to this version, but otherwise this is a very faithful conversion of a good game. The graphics are not the best that the 5200 can do, but it looks nice enough and represents the game well. Unlike the Atari 2600 version there is zero flicker in this version, which is great.

The arcade version of the game is a single-screen action/maze game where you need to kill all the enemies in each stage to move on to the next one. It’s a bit like Night Stalker on Intellivision or Berzerk, except I’d say it’s better than either of those. The games’ pacing is a good balance of fast action and strategic thinking. The play area is wider than it is high, six tiles high by eleven tiles long, and there are many walls breaking up the space. There are various maze layouts, with harder ones as you progress. The current level number and both players’ scores are always on screen, along with a little map showing where both players and all enemies are. The level name is regularly shown as well. This map is necessary despite the single screen nature of the game because some enemies can only be seen on the map. Oddly, Wizard of Wor on 5200, as with most all versions of the game, flips the players — the first player starts on the right and uses controller two. Strange. And you can’t just play as player two, the two player game is simulaneous co-op.

In the game, the two players start in the two lower corners of the maze. You start as a Worior, trying to kill the evil Wizard of Wor and his many minions. This is a pre-crash arcade game, though, so it is endless; if you are so good as to complete all the mazes, it just loops back around. In each level, from your start point you move around the maze, aiming to shoot the enemies as they appear before they can kill you. Walls stop movement and shots, of course, but there are also open areas. There also are portals on each side of the screen to move to the other side, though unlike in Pac-Man you cannot use these all of the time, sometimes they are closed. You attack with shots, and can only shoot one shot at a time. You will need good strategy as well as quick reflexes to succeed here. Enemies kill you with a touch or a shot. Your shots can stop their shots if you shoot at the right time, but dying is easy and lives scarce, you only get three to start. It’s a hard but extremely well-designed and addictive game. There are five enemy types in total, each with quite different abilities. As an aside, if you look them up, you’ll see that the enemies all have amusing names — Warluck, Burwor, and more. Some can turn invisible, watch out for those. When the Wizard himself appears, do your best to shoot him down before he flees.

The controls are simple, you move with the stick and fire with a button. This game has digital controls, so it is not ideal for this controller, but it works well enough for this initially slow-paced game. Once you get farther in, though, you’ll probably want a digital controller to do your best at this game. It’s entirely playable on the regular controller, which is, again, all I’ve got other than the Trak-Ball that is not for games like this, but it will make reaction times slower. The game starts out quite manageably, as the enemies move around slowly enough for you to easily kill them. But once you face the enemies that can turn invisible some of the time, and worst of all the Wizard of Wor himself, staying alive will be a plenty challenging task. The invisible enemies are on the map, but good luck following that map and the main game screen at the same time without dying! It can be frustrating when you try to shoot an enemy’s shot but instead you die while also killing the enemy and lose one of your very limited lives, but it’s all fair. If you shoot too late, you’re getting hit.

The game ups the tempo as you go not only with harder enemies, but also with the audio — there is music of sorts in this game, a background tone which increases in tempo as you kill more enemies and get closer to clearing the level. It really adds to the experience, and the tension. More games from this era should have music. The sound effects are all very close to the arcade as well and sound great. This game makes a lot of sounds, it adds to the fun. It is disappointing that the speech samples from the arcade game are absent here, several 5200 games do have speech, but that is one of the few issues with this otherwise great version of the game.

Additionally, as for that two player co-op mode, it’s pretty interesting. On the one hand, the game is cooperative, as your goal is to kill the same enemies in order to proceed. Of course you compete for score, but you also will kill the other player if you shoot them. And that’s not all, you get bonus points for killing the other player, and they do lose a life. So yeah, whether this is cooperative or competitive entirely depends on who is playing… heh.

Wizard of Wor is a very well designed game with good pacing, a good, simple concept, and great execution. The colors, dungeon names, Double Score Dungeons which boost your points, the tension of trying to get the Wizard before he gets away, this is a great game! Really, the games’ only issues are that the simple concept may get repetitive after a while and that the controls are digital and not analog. The slower reaction time of digital controls on an analog stick will make it harder to stay alive as the game gets harder, unless you have a digital stick for your 5200. After dying a couple of levels in over and over, rarely getting farther, this game can start to feel old, even with how good it is. After a while you may want to play something else, but you’ll be back. Regardless of that, Wizard of Wor is good to great. This game makes a fantastic first impression, and while dying again and again early on can be frustrating, the game is more than good enough to be worth going back to and improving at, trying to beat your best score each time. This is a great version of an under-appreciated arcade classic and I absolutely recommend it, Wizard of Wor is great!

Arcade port. This version is also on the Atari 8-bit computers. Other ports were released on the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and, under the name The Incredible Wizard, on Midway’s own short-lived console, the Bally Astrocade, though Midway didn’t make the port themself, they abandoned the system after just a few years. The 2600 version has very bad flicker, making it much harder to play than the other versions. Emulated releases of the arcade game are also in several modern collections, including the Midway Arcade Treasures 2 collection for PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube, the Midway Extended Play collection for PSP, and the Midway Arcade Origins collection for Xbox 360 and PS3. The 360 version is Xbox One/Series backwards compatible.

 

Vanguard – 1 or 2 player alternating. Developed by Atari under license from SNK, in 1982.

Vanguard is a port of the SNK arcade game of the same name. Atari bought the rights to this somewhat successful game, and ported it to their systems of the time. This 5200 version is very similar to the Atari 2600 version, just with better graphics and more content, as you would expect. Vanguard is a very early shmup, and is one of the first scrolling shooters of note. It’s a decently good game with simple gameplay and some oddities. Yes, in some ways this games’ early release date shows. Each level in Vanguard is made up of sections, each a short stage of their own. There are six different types of sections you will see, some which scroll left to right, one diagonally, and some vertically. Different levels will arrange the sections in different ways, so the game isn’t the same every time. The game only has one kind of powerup, and it makes you invincible. In some stages these powerups show up regularly, and are one of the games’ defining features. While invulnerable the music changes, which is neat. You can’t shoot while invincible, either. You can fly right through the walls and stuff though, which is fun. The graphics are somewhat simple but are good enough, and it’s nice that the game has at least some music, too many games on this system don’t have any even though the hardware is perfectly capable of it.

On the note of shooting, when you can shoot, you shoot in all four directions at the same time in this game. And you’ll need it, with how enemies come at you from all sides as you tackle the different stage types the game throws at you. The game lacks depth; this is a very simple game, you just fly and shoot or, while invincible, just fly. You’ll die often but there isn’t much to the game. This game, unfortunately, isn’t so much about memorizing interesting enemy patterns as it is reacting to what the game throws at you and trying to not die. The variety of stage types is nice, but there are only a few enemy types in each stage. Also, the controls have not been at all adjusted for the 5200’s analog controller, so control is entirely digital and you have just the one fire button. The game is slow-paced and does not run fast, either. This game gets old quickly as you wait around for things to happen. For instance, the invincibility powerup is cool the first time you grab one and at times can save you, but given how totally invulnerable you are, getting one is basically ‘you don’t need to play for the next while’ material, which is not great. And on top of that, the analog stick delays your inputs somewhat in a way they could have adjusted for, but didn’t. River Raid for example did adjust the controls to make them analog, and as a result that game feels a lot better to play on the 5200 than Vanguard does. River Raid is honestly more fun than Vanguard, too.

Overall, Vanguard is okay to good. The game is above average, but barely. It may be worth trying considering its importance and low price, though. Still, with slow and flawed gameplay with little enemy variety, Vanguard hasn’t aged as well as the best of the static-screen shooters of its era. I do find this game somewhat fun, but once you’re used to the various stage types Vanguard gets old fast and it doesn’t really keep me coming back. The game is a decent challenge, looks okay, and I like the variety of stage types, but with very slow and simple gameplay and sometimes frustrating controls, it is around average overall.

Arcade port. This version was also released on Atari 8-bit computers. A similar but downgraded version is on the Atari 2600. The arcade version has modern platform digital re-releases, including a standalone release on PSP in the PS Minis line and in the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection for PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.



Xari Arena [Cancelled Game Homebrew Release] – 1 or 2 player simultaneous. Has analog controls.  Supports the Atari 5200 Trak-Ball controller.  Developed by Atari in 1983-1984, but not released until AtariAge published it in recent years.

Xari Arena is a cancelled game that was in development in 1984 when Atari pulled the plug on the console far before its time. It’s sort of two player cooperative, and kind of competitive, Breakout, but with some weird, unique twists. It’s got fantastic graphics and audio, too. Unfortunately, while the game was complete, Warner Bros., Atari’s owners at the time, chose to never release it… not until fans got ahold of it much later and released it themselves, that is. The game seems to get a mixed reception among the fans who have played it, either in emulation, on a flashcart, or as I have it in AtariAge’s semi-official boxed release. Some people love this game, while others find it not very good at all. Once I explain how it plays, I think it makes sense why it’s divisive.

But what do I think? I absolutely love this game! With some of the best graphics, audio, and controls on the system and outstanding gameplay, Xari Arena is an all-time classic. While not quite as amazing as Defender or Space Dungeon are on the 5200, this is still an A-grade classic deserving of some of the highest praise you can give. Xari Arena is a truly exceptional game that gives Warlords and Arkanoid a serious run for their money as the best Breakout-style games ever made. It’s a tragedy that Atari cancelled this game, because with releases like this one and Tempest the 5200 might have gotten more of a following than it had. One of the 5200’s biggest problems, after all, is that it didn’t have a large enough exclusive library, as most of what Warner’s Atari published for the system during the maybe 15 months they released games for the 5200 were games that were either enhanced Atari 2600 games, or didn’t push the hardware all that much. This game is not like that, at all. This game was designed for the 5200, has exceptional analog controls that are great with a 5200 controller and are even better with the Trak-Ball, and, again, looks and sounds fantastic. Take the time to learn Xari Arena and hopefully you will love it.

The game does take some time to learn, though. So, this is a one or two player game, for any mixture of two human and computer players. The standard game is for two players, you against a human or AI opponent, though you can play with nobody on the other side of the screen if you wish. Yes, you can set either player to AI. Player one is on the left side of the screen, and player two the right. On each side, there is a wall of bricks. You lose if your entire wall is destroyed. You control a paddle that the game calls an energy cell. Again, you can freely move around your half of the screen, but cannot move into the opponent’s side. In addition to the two paddles, two kinds of objects move around the screen, spiral-shaped fireballs which will destroy the bricks in the two walls if they hit them but you can bounce with your paddle, and round target enemies called Xaris. Xaris stay around the middle part of the screen, but fireballs will go anywhere. When all Xaris in a level are destroyed, both players move on to the next level. A warp and counter in the center of the screen keeps track of how many of them are left. The game has 32 levels until it ends, so unlike most games of its era this game is not endless, you can win. Beating the game will be quite a challenge though, the difficulty level steadily increases as it goes along.

The thing is, though, when you touch one of the Xaris you take damage unless you have touched a fireball. If you touch a Xari without any fireball power in your paddle, your paddle will have an ‘exploding’ animation for three seconds and won’t bounce back anything, ball coming at your wall or target Xari. You do not want this to happen! So, you first need to absorb fireballs, which Xaris periodicly shoot out. You can choose to absorb or bounce back fireballs with your controller, but will need to absorb some in order to survive contact with a Xari. Each time you touch a fireball you absorb it and a hit is added to your paddle, up to a maximum of four. Once you are filled up, balls you hit with the paddle will always bounce back towards the other side of the field. Also, if you touch a Xari, it will drop the paddle level by one, so you can use up your paddle’s power to start clearing enemies once you have absorbed some balls. Alternately, you can try to hit the target enemies with fireballs you bounce back at them, as this will also destroy them if you make direct contact. Xaris are small so hitting them this way can be tricky, but it will happen. As a level goes on things will get more and more frenetic. With two dozen Xaris moving around and a whole bunch of fireballs all over, franticly trying to keep them from destroying your wall while also destroying the Xaris and bouncing back as many fireballs as possible is a significant challenge. It is also an incredibly fun one, though.

For controls, you move around with the stick or trackball, reflect fireballs with the lower button if you are not carrying a full load of four but still want to bounce a ball back instead of absorbing it, and use a fire extinguisher shield with the upper button. Fire extinguishers shield your wall of bricks from damage for a moment and destroy all fireballs in or near your wall. You can only use your fire extinguisher a limited number of times, and the number is shown on screen. You get one more per level completed, and choosing when to strategicly protect your wall with them is key to the games’ strategy. This game starts out easy enough, but as you get farther in things get faster and faster and crazier and crazier. The screen can have like 25 targets and a dozen balls or more bouncing around, and trying to keep track of everything is quite a task! The player who destroys each Xari gets points for it. For the scoring, after each level, each player gets bonus points depending on how many blocks are left on their wall. There are also point bonuses. So, while both players may always be on the same level, the scores will show how well each one is doing. The two players may both be working towards the same goal of defeating all of the Xaris, but you still compete for score. Every few levels there is a little on-screen animation showing Xaris flying around, like the interrupt screens in Pac-Man. It’s pretty cool stuff. Of course, there is one final one after you beat the game at level 32, if you can get that far. Interestingly, if one player dies, the other will keep going. The computer will continue by themselves if you die first.

The graphics in Xari Arena remind me, more than anything, of a Williams arcade game like Robotron. In terms of visual design the Atari game designer working on this game clearly was heavily influenced by Robotron, for the better, and it shows here. From the paddles to the fireballs and Xaris to the font choices for the games’ text, despite solid black backgrounds, Xari Arena has extremely bright and colorful graphics with a very strong graphical style that is both very of its time and also is timelessly beautiful looking. There’s barely any slowdown at all, either; this game runs fast and smooth. The fire extinguisher sets off a wall of light along your side that looks really cool, too. The visual look of this game stands out from most other games on this console, it looks amazing and barely looks like an Atari game at all! If this console can do this, with this many things moving around on screen all the time and with this much flash, it’s a real shame that games which pushed it were, for the most part, not released. As for audio, Xari Arena has both music and sound effects, so this is another point in its favor. The music is only decently good and not the best ever, but still, it’s a solid track which fits the gameplay well and is very catchy and memorable. The sound effects are very well chosen and each one fits its use perfectly. This game has some of the best graphical and audio presentation on the Atari 5200, with games like this released the system could have been a hit.

Overall, Xari Arena is a masterpiece. This game may be a bit complicated to explain, but spend a few minutes getting used to it and its genius quickly becomes apparent. The fantastic graphics and sound help, the system needed more of this and less barely enhanced 2600 ports, but the gameplay is the real star here. Xari Arena is a fast and frantic game with depth and absolutely brilliant design top to bottom. I still can’t believe this was cancelled in this fully complete state! Warner Bros. really mismanaged the 5200 exceptionally badly, and their choice to not release this gem should be on the list of their mistakes. If you have a Trak-Ball controller for the 5200 this game is an absolute definite must have, buy a copy today. This is a perfect game for that controller. If you don’t have a Trak-Ball, the game also plays quite well with the regular controller, though if you love games like this a Trak-Ball is a great investment. The Trak-Ball works extremely well and makes this amazing game even better.

Buy Xari Arena today, there aren’t many better games out there. This game was originally developed for the Atari 5200. A homebrew port for Atari 8-bit computers exists, but I can’t imagine the game playing anywhere near as well on digital controllers. It also was included in Atari Flashback Classics: Volume 3 for PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and the modern Atari VCS computer.

Rankings
——–

The games this time are all quite good.

Space Dungeon > Xari Arena > Tempest > Wizard of Wor > Star Wars: The Arcade Game > Vanguard

Compared to the games from the previous two parts of this update, Space Dungeon and Xari Arena are the overall top two games in the batch. Tempest is fourth, only behind The Dreadnaught Factor. And the other three are good games in the mix with the system’s higher-quality titles, with Wizard of Wor a good bit ahead of the last two.

Overall Atari 5200 Top Ten
—
1. Defender
2. Space Dungeon
3. Xari Arena
4. Centipede
5. Galaxian
6. The Dreadnaught Factor
7. Tempest
8. Castle Crisis
9. RealSports Baseball
10. Moon Patrol

Top Honorable Mentions: Super Cobra, Magical Fairy Force, Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns, Pole Position, Missile Command, Wizard of Wor

Defender and Space Dungeon are A+ classics that are among the best games of the 1980s. Xari Arena, Centipede, and Galaxian are A grade hits deserving of high praise. And the other five are A- tier titles I like a lot. The Atari 5200 is a fantastic console that deserves a much better reputation than it gets.

Posted in Arcade Games, Atari 5200, Classic Games, Game Opinion Summaries, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A list of Western-Developed, Sega-Published Games for the Genesis, Sega CD, and 32X

Posted on January 12, 2022 by Brian

I probably have written something similar to this before, but not in this format.  Here is a quick list I just made of what should be all Western-developed games Sega published for the Genesis, Sega CD, and 32X.  As you look down the list you will notice some classics and some forgettable games.  Games like sports games are important, they are some of the best-selling titles and sports games for Western markets were a critical part of the Genesis’s success.  Please note that I do say when games didn’t release in North America, but not necessarily when they didn’t release in Europe or Brazil; sorry about that.  This list shows the depth of the Genesis’s Western support.  It is one of the best consoles and has an outstanding game library.  I do not agree with people who dismiss the Genesis’s Western library.  Many of the best Genesis games may be Japanese, but American developers contributed many of the best-selling, and some of the best, games on the system as well.

I decided, for this list, to list games by their developer.  Sega’s few first party developers go first, followed by their third party studios.  Sega contracted a lot of third-party studios to make Genesis games, though a few, most notably Novotrade/Appaloosa and Blue Sky Software, released the most titles by far.  I think grouping it by developer is an interesting way to look at this information.  Each developer appears in the list at the point they made their first game published by Sega, so developer relationships go forward in time as you go down the list, though time bounces around depending on how long developers worked with Sega for.

Unfortunately for Sega, both the first and third party relationships listed in this list almost all broke down during the Saturn generation.  Sega mismanaged things badly after the boom years of the early ’90s.  But we all know that, so how about we focus on something Sega succeeded at instead, and that was making a lot of Genesis games for its largest market, the US?  I know that some people like to hate on Western Genesis games, but it’s not deserved; certainly there are many sports games and mediocre licensed games on the list, but there are also great classics like Vectorman, Comix Zone, and The Adventures of Batman & Robin.  And some of the licensed games are well worth playing as well; it’s a mixture for su1re.  Fantasia is awful, for instance, but Marsupilami is a somewhat unique and fun game.

And lastly, again, sports games are important!  They sell very well and are a key part of any successful console’s library.  People want to play them, and a more successful platform with the general audience usually has more sports games on it.  Sega’s many Western-made baseball and football games, and the smaller number of hockey and basketball games, are important and a key part of the system’s success in North America.   Sega published nine football games on the Genesis, all American-made; six baseball games, four American-made; and one hockey game and two basketball games, all made in the US.  I’m not a big fan of any of these games, my Genesis sports game loves are for the NBA Jam, Hardball, and EA’s NHL games, but they are mostly quality games and deserve to be remembered as such.

After the list, I did a quick list of my rankings for the licensed platformers.  I only covered those because Aladdin aside, they are often more overlooked than original titles like Kid Chameleon or Vectorman.

Note: Games are Genesis-exclusive unless noted.  A few titles do have modern digital re-releases, I am not counting those here.  None of the sports or licensed games have modern re-releases except for Aladdin, though.

Sega Genesis

FIRST PARTY
——————

Sega Technical Institute

1992 – Kid Chameleon
(1992 – assistance with development of Sonic the Hedgehog 2)
1993 – Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball
(1994 – assistance with development of Sonic the Hedgehog 3)
1995 – The Ooze
1995 – Comix Zone

Sega Interactive (previously Interactive Designs)

1993 – Tom Mason’s Dinosaurs for Hire
1993 – Eternal Champions
1994 – Disney’s Bonkers
1995 – Garfield: Caught in the Act

Sega Midwest Development Division

1994 – World Heroes (port of the SNK arcade game)
1995 – NHL All-Star Hockey ’95

THIRD PARTY (or first/third party collaborations)
——————-

Electronic Arts

1990 – Joe Montana Football

Western Technologies, Inc.

1991 – Art Alive
1992 – Menacer 6-Game Cartridge
1993 – X-Men

Recreational Brainware / Sega of America

1991 – Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin (first released here; game later was ported to other platforms)
1992 – Taz-Mania

Realtime Games

1991 – M-1 Abrams Battle Tank

Infogrames

1991 – Fantasia
1992 – Toxic Crusaders

Novotrade (to 1995) / Appaloosa (1996-later)

1991 – California Games (port of a multiplatform game)
1993 – Cyborg Justice
1993 – Ecco the Dolphin (first released here; game later was ported to other platforms)
1994 – Ecco: The Tides of Time (first released here; game later was ported to other platforms)
1994 – Richard Scarry’s Busytown
1995 – Ecco Jr.
1995 – Scholastic’s The Magic School Bus: Space Exploration Game
1997 – The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Ringler Studios

1991 – Mario Lemieux Hockey

Blue Sky Software

1991 – Joe Montana II: Sports Talk Football
1992 – NFL Sports Talk Football ’93 Starring Joe Montana
1992 – Disney’s Ariel: The Little Mermaid
1993 – NFL Football ’94 Starring Joe Montana
1993 – Jurassic Park
1993 – The Ren & Stimpy Show Presents: Stimpy’s Invention
1994 – College Football’s National Championship
1994 – World Series Baseball
1994 – Shadowrun
1994 – Desert Demolition starring Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote
1994 – Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition
1995 – College Football’s National Championship II
1995 – World Series Baseball ’95
1995 – Vectorman
1996 – World Series Baseball ’96
1996 – Vectorman 2
1997 – World Series Baseball ’98

ToeJam & Earl Productions

1992 – ToeJam & Earl
1993 – ToeJam & Earl II: Panic on Funkotron

ACME Interactive

1992 – David Robinson’s Supreme Court
1992 – Evander ‘Real Deal’ Holyfield’s Boxing

Extended Play Productions

1992 – Chakan: The Forever Man

Westwood Associates

1992 – Warriors of the Eternal Sun

Interactive Designs (afterwards this developer was purchased by Sega and became Sega Interactive)

1992 – Disney’s TaleSpin
1992 – Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude!
1993 – Home Alone 2

Malibu Games

1992 – Batman Returns
1992 – Ex-Mutants
1994 – Greatest Heavyweights
1994 – NBA Action ’94

Brian A. Rice, Inc.

1992 – Home Alone

Virgin Interactive

1993 – Disney’s Aladdin (first released here; game later was ported to other platforms)

NovaLogic

1993 – Captain Planet and the Planeteers (PAL and Brazil-only release)

Rare

1993 – Snake Rattle ‘n Roll (PAL-only release) (port of the NES game)

Rage Software

1993 – Ultimate Soccer (PAL-only release)
1994 – Striker (PAL-only release)

Graftgold

1993 – The Ottifants (PAL-only release)

Core Design

1994 – Asterix and the Great Rescue
1995 – Asterix and the Power of the Gods (PAL-only release)

Realtime Associates

1993 – Barney’s Hide and Seek
1993 – Berenstain Bears: Camping Adventure

Zyrinx

1993 – Sub-Terrania
1994 – Red Zone

Double Diamond Sports

1994 – NFL ’95
1995 – NBA Action ’95 starring David Robinson

HeadGames

1994 – Taz in Escape from Mars
1994 – Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio
1995 – X-Men 2: Clone Wars

Sensible Software

1994 – World Championship Soccer II

Waterman Design

1994 – Instruments of Chaos starring Young Indiana Jones (North America-only release, and probably the worst game on this list)

Artech Studios

1994 – Crystal’s Pony Tale

Probe

1994 – Bodycount (PAL-only release) (light gun game)
1994 – Daffy Duck in Hollywood (PAL-only release)

MicroProse

1994 – Star Trek: The Next Generation: Echoes from the Past (multiplatform game – also on SNES from a different publisher)

Apache Software Limited

1995 – Marsupilami

Farsight Technologies

1995 – Prime Time NFL starring Deion Sanders
1997 – NFL ’98

Clockwork Tortoise (founded by former Malibu Games staff)

1995 – The Adventures of Batman & Robin

Syrox Developments

1995 – VR Troopers

Eurocom

1995 – Donald in Maui Mallard (PAL-only release) (first released here, but a year later a SNES port was released.  The SNES version did get a US release.)

Cryo Interactive

1995 – Cheese Cat-Astrophe starring Speedy Gonzales (PAL-only release)

Gremlin Interactive

1995 – Premier Manager (PAL-only release) (multiplatform game based on a popular computer game franchise in the UK)
1996 – Premier Manager 97 (PAL-only release) (as above)

TecToy

1995 – Ferias Fustradas do Pica Pau (Brazil-only release)
1997 – Duke Nukem 3D (Brazil-only release) (based on the PC FPS game franchise, but this title is original)
2001 – Show do Milhao (Brazil-only release)
2002 – Show do Milhao Volume 2 (Brazil-only release)

Atod

1996 – Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble (also on Game Gear)

Traveller’s Tales

1996 – Sonic 3D Blast (first developed here, but would also be released on other platforms later)

Abalone

1996 – X-Perts

Al Baker & Associates

1996 – Arcade Classics (classic collection of three Atari classics — Pong, Centipede, and Missile Command)

 

32X

FIRST PARTY

Sega InterActive

1994 – Star Wars Arcade (port of a Sega of Japan arcade game)

THIRD PARTY (or first/third party collaboration)

id Software / Sega of America

1994 – Doom (port of the PC game, based on Jaguar version)

Flashpoint Productions

1994 – Golf Magazine: 36 Great Holes Starring Fred Couples

Artech Studios

1994 – Motocross Championship

Blue Sky Software

1995 – World Series Baseball starring Deion Sanders (different from the Genesis games)
1996 – The Amazing Spider-Man: Web of Fire

Novotrade

1995 – Kolibri

Probe Software

1995 – Primal Rage (port of the Atari Games arcade game, on many platforms)

Paradox Development / Blizzard Interactive

1995 – Blackthorne (port of a SNES/PC game, with new 32X-exclusive prerendered graphics)

Frontier Developments

1995 – Darxide (PAL-only release)

 

Sega CD

FIRST PARTY

Sega Multimedia Studios

1993 – Jurassic Park (different from the cart game)
1995 – Wild Woody

Sega Interactive

1995 – Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side

THIRD PARTY (or first/third party collaborations)

Digital Pictures

1992 – Night Trap (first released here, but would be ported to many formats)
1992 – INXS: Make My Video
1992 – Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch: Make My Video
1993 – Double Switch (first released here, but would be ported to other platforms)
1994 – Prize Fighter

ICOM Simulations

1992 – Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective (port of a multiplatform game)
1993 – Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective Volume II (port of a multiplatform game)
1993 – Dracula Unleashed

Malibu Games

1993 – Batman Returns (Genesis port with significant added content)
1993 – Joe Montana’s NFL Football (different from the genesis games)

Novotrade

1993 – Ecco the Dolphin (Genesis port with added content)
1994 – Ecco: The Tides of Time (Genesis port with added content)

Monkey Business

1993 – The Amazing Spider-Man vs. The Kingpin (enhanced port/remake of the Genesis game)

The Code Monkeys (programming) / Sega of America

1993 – Surgical Strike (first released here, would later get a 32X CD port)
1994 – Tomcat Alley (first released here, would later get a PC port)
1995 – Wirehead (a 32X CD version of this was in development but was cancelled.)

Park Place Productions

1993 – NFL’s Greatest: San Francisco Vs. Dallas 1978-1993

Core Design

1993 – Wonder Dog

Hammond & Leyland

1993 – Racing Aces

Delphine Software

1994 – Flashback: The Quest for Identity (port of a multiplatform title)

Stargate Productions / Sega of America

1994 – Midnight Raiders

Dynamix

1994 – Bouncers

The Learning Company

1994 – Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia (port of a multitplatform title)

Infogrames / Sega of America

1995 – Fahrenheit (came with the Sega CD and 32X CD versions in one case)

Orion Technologies / Sega of America

1995 – Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (an FMV game, different from the cart game)

Clockwork Tortoise

1995 – The Adventures of Batman & Robin (different from the cart game)

(Note: Prince of Persia, Eye of the Beholder, and SimEarth on Sega CD are Japanese-developed, Sega-published ports of games originally made in America for other formats. I am not including them here because the SCD versions aren’t Western-made.)

 

32X CD
 (note: all 32X CD games are enhanced ports of Sega CD games.)

THIRD PARTY (or first/third party collaborations)

The Code Monkeys / Sega of America (filming)

1995 – Surgical Strike (Brazil-only release at the time)

Infogrames / Sega of America (filming)

1995 – Fahrenheit

Opinion: Ranking of the Licensed Platformers (and non-FMV action games)

When compared to Nintendo’s SNES library, it is incontrovertible that Sega released far more games and was much more willing to release mediocre games than Nintendo was.  Sega also relied somewhat heavily on licensed games.  However, most of those licensed games are actually at least decent, and some are great.  Here’s my quick ranking of the licensed platform, action, and RPG games in the list above.  Note: I’m not counting FMV games here.

Bad – These games are the worst of the bunch.  Taz-Mania, Fantasia, Instruments of Chaos starring Young Indiana Jones.  I’d pick Young Indy as being worst.  Fantasia may be the most popular pick, but Young Indy is just so stunningly unfinished!

Okay –  These overall average games may be fun. Jurassic Park (Genesis), Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition, Batman Returns, Bugs Bunny in Double Trouble, Bonkers, X-Men, Spiderman vs the kingpin (yes I know a lot of people love this game. I don’t.), Little Mermaid, Chakan, TaleSpin, Asterix and the Great Rescue, VR Troopers

Good – These are good games well worth a look.  Marsupilami, Taz-Mania: Escape from Mars, Desert Demolition, Jurassic Park (Sega CD), Dinosaurs for Hire, Garfield: Caught in the Act, X-Men 2: Clone Wars, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Shadowrun

Great – These all-time classics are some of the system’s best games.  The Adventures of Batman & Robin (Genesis), Aladdin, The Adventures of Batman & Robin (Sega CD)

I haven’t played any of the educational kids’ games ones so not rating those. I also haven’t played either Home Alone game though I imagine they’d go in “okay” at best. Also I haven’t played the PAL or Brazil-exclusive ones much if at all. I don’t have power rangers sega cd either but I’m sure I’d hate it.

Posted in 32X, Classic Games, Genesis, Lists, Sega CD | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

2021 Game of the Year

Posted on December 31, 2021 by Brian

This 2021 Game of the Year article could be longer, but I think I cover the necessary categories well enough to post one this year.  (I did a GOTY list in 2019, but not 2020.  It makes a return this time.)

Introduction

In 2021, as per usual in recent years, while I bought a large number of games, few are 2021 releases. Additionally, while I did try most of the notable recent releases that I did buy, there are many games I bought this year but haven’t played yet. I have spent a lot of time playing Mario Maker 2 instead of other games. That leads into an interesting question, that of playing endless online games — for me primarily Mario Maker 2, followed by Splatoon 1 and Dead or Alive 6 — versus shorter single player games either for new or old consoles. I like both, but those multiplayer games take up a lot of time and are quite addictive.

With that said, there are a few 2021 releases that I want to recognize. Following that will be a list of my favorite games that I bought in 2021, regardless of when they released. And last, my overall favorite games of the year regardless of when I first bought them. Hey, I played over 250 hours of Mario Maker 2 this year and still absolutely love the game, I need to give it continued recognition!

Please note, some of these games are available on platforms other than the one I mention, but I only list the platform I have the game on.

The Best New Releases of 2021

1. Cruis’n Blast – Nintendo Switch – One of the first arcade racing games to be released on console in the past decade, is an outstanding, incredibly fun experience that totally captivated me for the 20-ish hours that it took me to unlock everything and beat all of the challenges, getting every collectible.  This game is by a wide margin to best game in the Cruis’n franchise and is a must-play title for anyone who likes arcade-style racing games at all.  I should have written a full review of this game a few months ago, and still plan to.  I will save my full thoughts on the game for that.

2. Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury – Nintendo Switch (this is here for the new part, Bowser’s Fury.) – I don’t like Bowser’s Fury as much as the base game, but it’s still an incredibly fun Mario experience. While it is very well made, I do kind of dislike how Bowser’s Fury gets far away from 3D World’s design philosophy, unfortunately; I really like the multiplayer, level-based concept of 3D World, but Bowser’s Fury is an open-world single player adventure. What they made is great, but personally I would rather have seen more content in 3D World’s style. It’s also disappointing that you can only play as Mario in Bowser’s Fury, that was a mistake. This is the Mario game with a bunch of interesting playable characters, after all! Put them in the new part too! Still, it’s a fantastic re-release with significant added content. And Bowser’s Fury really is very good, for the short time it lasts.

3. Diablo II Resurrected – Xbox Series X (also on Xbox One) – This is a remake, but the new graphics mode puts it in this category and not just classic re-releases, I think.  The gameplay is the same as before, but the new dramatically larger storage chest makes this game MUCH MUCH less frustrating to play than the original version, since you can store so much more stuff!  Your inventory is the same size, but your storage chest has a whole bunch of tabs you won’t find in the original game.  The redrawn art looks fantastic in 4K, too.

4. WarioWare: Get It Together! – Nintendo Switch – This game is very good, but I was aa bit disappointed, as I will say below.  I think it deserves its place here anyway, though; if you can get a handle on its complexities, there’s a very rewarding experience here.
5. Magical Fairy Force – Atari 5200 (physical release was 2021) – I covered this game in my review, but yes it’s pretty good and well worth playing.
6. Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth – PC – I’m not the biggest Metroidvania fan but this one is definitely pretty fun.  It’s short and mostly easy, but has great graphics and animation and good music.  It gets harder later on, also, and the classic anime license is nice to see.
7. Age of Empires IV – PC – While I have always liked the Age of Empires series, I found it a bit too slow-paced.  This game is a very faithful classic RTS and that is fantastic to see, but… I still don’t entirely love the series.  This is good but not the best, I’d say.
8. Seasonal Assistant – Nintendo Wii U – This little indie game is one of the dev Ultra Dolphin Revolution’s last Wii U games, and it’s a similar NES-styled top-down action game, just like the previous two Assistant games, but with a holiday theme this time.  It’s pretty fun.  I hope Ultra Dolphin Revolution continues making games on some other platform after Wii U game uploads finally are shut off next year.
9. New Pokemon Snap – Nintendo Switch – I am a strong critic of the original Pokemon Snap for N64, but this game fixes most of the original’s worst mistakes.  Most notably, there is more than an hour of content this time!  Yes it’s true, you actually have reason to play the game more than once.  There’s a lot here and it’s well done.  The visuals are nice and the game has a good amount of stuff to find and take pictures of in each environment.
10. R-Type Final 2 – Xbox Series X (also on Xbox One) – While flawed, there is more than enough R-Type greatness here to make it deserving of being on this list.  This game is crushingly hard like you expect from this series but it makes you want to keep trying.  The game sometimes feels unfair due to near-invisible enemies or obstacles though, the graphics are visually bland and sterile-looking, and limited continues were an awful choice; R-Type DX, more than twenty years ago, does continues far better!  Still, it IS R-Type.

The Most Disappointing Game of 2021

Wario Ware: Get It Together! – While a lot about this game is good, it is also extremely frustrating and difficult in a way past games in the series aren’t. I liked playing through the story despite the frustration of the extremely different ways the characters control, but quit almost immediately after that because the weekly challenge mode doubles down on the worst and least fun things about the game in an unpleasant way.  The moving-a-character concept makes the microgames much harder to figure out in an instant than past games in the series, and the very different abilities and controls of the characters are by design highly unbalanced as well.  This makes the game more varied, but also more frustrating depending on who you are playing as at the moment. Once you get into the challenge mode and have to beat lots of minigames with certain characters, or such, while trying for good scores, the game quickly gets quite frustrating.  I finished story mode and enjoyed that, but quit on challenge mode after just a couple of weeks and have not gone back.  This game is good but for its series is a definite disappointment; the experiment of Warioware but with more complex, character-based controls is, I think, not a success on the whole compared to how the series was before.

Tales of Arise also disappoints me. It’s alright but not nearly as good as I was hoping, either in gameplay, story, world design, or graphics.  The story is predictable (wait, a Tales game has… evil racists? No!), the world mostly linear, the battle system somewhat odd in how the characters share meter, and more.  It does not make my best of 2021 list.

The Best Classic Re-releases of 2021

All three of these re-releases are exceptional, must-have games or collections if you have any interest in the games included!

1. Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury – Nintendo Switch (for the re-release of 3D World) – Mario 3D World is one of the best 3d platformers ever. It plays faster than the original Wii U game, and I think I like the pacing of the original version better, but for those without a Wii U this is an essential purchase. For me, buying this made me go back to the Wii U game again. Still, it wins this category anyway because of how amazing the game is. Super Mario 3D World is a highly under-rated classic as good as almost anything in the series. It’s not quite Mario 64 or Super Mario World’s equal, but it’s a very high-tier game.

2. Blizzard Classic Arcade Collection – Xbox One (played on Xbox Series X) – Blizzard’s collection contains all of their non-licensed SNES, Genesis, and 32X games, including some all-time classics, and is very well presented.  I’m a longtime The Lost Vikings fan, and this game is there, and with a new mode that combines the best features of both the SNES and Genesis versions into one.  The pretty good topdown racer Rock n Roll Racing has some nice new modes, also.  This collection also includes the first ever re-release of a 32X game, the 32X version of Blackthorne.  Blizzard beat Sega at this one, sadly enough.  They even added the SNES versions of Lost Vikings 2 and RPM Racing as a later, free patch!  Pretty awesome stuff.  Seeing Lost Vikings 2 get re-released is particularly cool.  It’s kind of too bad that it is only the SNES version and not the next-gen one on PC/PS1/Saturn, but I know that Blizzard themselves only made the SNES game so it makes sense that is the one included here.  The game itself is the same, only the graphics and audio were changed.  I like the SNES graphics, it has nice sprite art versus the somewhat mixed quality CGI rendered stuff of the next-gen version.  I just liked the voice acting in the CD version.  Ah well.  [As for the missing licensed games, Justice League Task Force, for either SNES or Genesis, since Blizzard made the SNES game and bought the developers of the Genesis game, is pretty poor and is no loss.  The Death and Return of Superman for SNES is better, but the licensing would be a problem for sure and it’s still average.]

3. Gleylancer – Xbox Series X (also on Xbox One) – And in third but still really great, Gleylancer is a fantastic shmup and has the best CRT shader ever in a classic game re-release.  It’s very configurable and looks great.  And again, the game itself is one of the better ones of its time as well.  Gleylancer is very hard but well worth putting some effort into.  The game natively supports next gen consoles and outputs at 4K on the XSX, also.  Nice stuff.  They followed this up with a re-release of Gynoug / Wings of Wor, but I haven’t gotten that one.

My Favorite Games I Bought in 2021 That Released Before 2021

1. Space Dungeon – Atari 5200 – this absolutely exceptional twinstick shooter is something any fan of the genre MUST play! My review is written and will be posted once I finish the rest of part three of Atari 5200 Game Opinion Summaries.
2. Super Mario 3D Allstars – Nintendo Switch – This is in second because while exceptional, all three included games were previously available on other consoles.  This collection got some controversy, but is mostly great.
3. Polybius (2018) – PC – Jeff Minter makes amazing games.  This rail shooter is one of his best.  I wish I had a VR setup, I’m sure this game looks unbelievably cool that way…
4. Gate of Thunder (Japanese copy) – TurboGrafx CD – Stiflingly enclosed top-tier shmupping defines this game well.  It’s fantastic but claustrophobic at times.
5. Moose Life – PC – More Jeff Minter rail shooter goodness!  And yes, it’s very very good.  I don’t like it quite as much as Polybius, but it’s a cool game in his inimitable style.
6. Immortals: Fenyx Rising – Xbox Series X (also on Xbox One) – I was surprised by how good I found this game from last year; I’m not an open world game fan at all, but this one has enough structure to work even for me.  There is a decent balance of exploration and clear forward progression here.  The combat and controls feel good and it looks quite nice.  I don’t mind the story either, and like the ancient Greek setting.
7. ToeJam & Earl – Sega Genesis – I don’t love this game like some do, and never have, but after playing more of it I finally started to see why people liked it so much.  This game is basically a non-violent roguelike, which is a pretty interesting concept.  It executes on the idea fairly well.
8. Battlemorph – Atari Jaguar CD – The low framerate is the main thing holding back this otherwise interesting futuristic flight combat game.  Battlemorph isn’t as good as Warhawk on PS1 or Starfighter on 3DO, but is a good game that plays well and has nice variety and decent depth.  Once you get used to it this game is quite fun.
9. Castlevania Anniversary Collection (Nintendo Switch) – This is a solid collection of Konami classics.  It’s too bad that Rondo of Blood and the later two Game Boy games (GB Kid Dracula and Castlevania Legends) aren’t included, but it’s otherwise good.
10. Contra Anniversary Collection (Nintendo Switch) – Finally, a cheap way to play the Japanese version of Contra Hard Corps, with multiple hit points!  I wish they had the hit points option with English text mod here, but still, it’s pretty awesome to see.

Honorable Mentions: Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 (Xbox Series X), Vanguard (Atari 5200), Kingdoms of Amalur Re-Reckoning (Xbox One/Series X), Blaster (Atari 5200), Gridder (Commodore VIC-20), Tunnels of Doom (TI 99/4A), Trials Rising (Xbox One), A Magical High School Girl (Nintendo Switch), Dragon Quest Heroes (Playstation 4), Jewel Link Chronicles: Mountains of Madness (Nintendo DS), Super Demon Attack (TI 99/4A), Scarlet Nexus (Xbox Series X), Treasure Island (TI 99/4A), Mia’s Picnic (Nintendo 3DS), Reader Rabbit (Apple II)

And lots more highly deserving games that I bought but never got around to playing. Shame on me for that…

What I’ve Mostly Actually Been Playing In 2021: My Favorite Ongoing, Endlessly Playable Games

1. Mario Maker 2 – Nintendo Switch – I played over 250 hours of this game according to Nintendo this year, and I believe it; this game is just about the perfect game, conceptually. I mean, it’s very far from perfect — Nintendo made many significant mistakes here — but it’s great despite them and I absolutely love everything about Mario Maker. I badly wish that instead of abandoning it Nintendo had given the game the support it deserves, but even just what we have is one of the best (and worst, but that’s part of the fun!) games ever made.  Nintendo may have mostly abandoned this game, but it’s my favorite regardless.

2. Splatoon – Wii U – After getting up to A+ rank I greatly slowed down how often I play this exceptional game, but it is still the best console first or third person shooter ever made and I still go back to it as a result. Splatoon 2 isn’t anywhere near as good for several reasons, first among them the much worse input lag. That game feels noticeably worse to play than this one. I’ll stick to this game, thanks.  It is still amazing and still, thankfully, has an active community of people playing it online, particularly from Japan.  Finding a game rarely takes very long.

3. The Nintendo 3DS Picross e Series – This kind of doesn’t count here since there are a limited number of puzzles on the 3DS games, but I’m including it anyway because I play a Picross puzzle or two just about every day and yet still have a vast number left. I’ve finished several of the games in this series now and will keep going until I play through them all. I have little interest in the Switch games due to the controls, you need touch with stylus for this kind of game to play its best.

4. Dead or Alive 6 – Xbox One (played on Xbox Series X to finally make the load times tolerable) – This game is the one I like but also kind of hate but keep going back to the online multiplayer of.  The over-sexualization, monetization, unlock procedure, and more are big issues with this game, but it has great fighting mechanics, is addictive, and has people still playing it online on Xbox.  The Xbox version on a Series X is also one of the only 3d fighting games with 4k60 graphics.  I got up to A+ rank earlier in 2021 but then started losing almost every single match, so I stopped playing for quite some time and have only sporadically gone back. I still lose most of the time, which was not the case before Tecmo announced the game was being abandoned. I think the players who aren’t really good mostly quit the game at that point and never returned. It’s frustrating because the mechanics are really good, but what can you do…

Overall Game Awards: My Favorite Games of 2021, New or Old

1. Super Mario Maker 2 – Nintendo Switch (and also Best Ongoing Game)
2. Space Dungeon – Atari 5200 (and also Best Old Game)
3. Cruis’n Blast – Nintendo Switch (and also Best New Game)

Honorable Mention: Polybius – PC (not new but a must play!)

I think this top four covers my favorite games of this year quite well.  All of these four games are absolute must-play classics. Cruis’n Blast, best new game of 2021!  Buy it today if you haven’t yet, it’s one of the most purely fun things I have played in a long time.

 

Platform and Special Awards

 

My most-played consoles of 2021

Please note: I am sure that number one on this list is first by a good margin, but I don’t know for sure what the order of the rest of the systems is for certain.  I’ve just got to guess.

  1. Nintendo Switch
  2. Xbox Series X
  3. Nintendo 3DS
  4. Nintendo Wii U
  5. Atari 5200
  6. Atari Jaguar / Jaguar CD
  7. PlayStation 4
  8. Nintendo DS
  9. Sega Genesis
  10. TurboGrafx-16 / CD


Special Awards

Best Graphics: I know I got this game in November 2020, when I was so lucky as to get an Xbox Series X on launch day (due to having pre-ordered it day one), but experiencing The Falconeer in 4k 120fps is an experience that is hard to forget.  The game is good but definitely has some jank, but the graphics, reasonably high poly count flat-shaded polygons, look incredible.  Other than that, this is another game from not 2021, but Dead or Alive 6 in 4k60 does look quite nice.  As for games from this year, I’m not sure; the winner probably should be Microsoft Flight Simulator’s Xbox Series X release, but I haven’t played that.  Of the games in my top ten at the top of this post, it’s Diablo II Resurrected.  It’s a nice looking game with some fantastic lighting.

Best Music: For new games, is it cheating to say that Diablo II has a truly great soundtrack?  This game has the exact same music as the original from 2000, but it is really good…

Worst Company: Activision-Blizzard.  I may be a huge Blizzard fan, particularly of their games released between 1993 and 2003, but they sure earned this one no question!  They still make some of my favorite games ever, but between the sexual harassment and the hiring of awful former Republican party officials, Activision-Blizzard and their very long-term boss Bobby Kotick well earned this “award”, sadly.  On the other hand, but it looks like most of the worst behavior came out of the World of Warcraft team, a game I have never liked anyway, so… the Blizzard I loved, as far as I know, largely isn’t directly connected to that stuff.

Best and Worst Level Design: Super Mario Maker 2.  You sure get a lot of the worst from this game, though that’s part of the fun, but some people have made really good levels as well.  It covers the full gamut of quality and that is one of the amazing things about the game; there is an endless amount of content, and while it certainly is not all worth playing, more than enough is to fill as many hours as I want to play it for.

Best Surprise: My discovering how incredible Space Dungeon for the Atari 5200 is.  This game is seriously incredible.

Posted in Articles, Atari 5200, Atari Jaguar, Genesis, Lists, Modern Games, PC, PlayStation 4, Turbo CD, TurboGrafx-16, Wii U, Xbox One, Xbox Series X | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Atari 5200 Game Opinion Summaries Series II: Part II

Posted on November 22, 2021 by Brian

Yes, after a bit too long here it is, part two of my new, three-part Atari 5200 Game Opinion Summaries series. I’ve only got eight summaries this time, but some of them are fairly long so while this is shorter than the first update, it’s still a good-sized article. Next time, the last six games. Several of the part three games are among my favorite games made in the 1980s. None of these eight are quite on that level, but they’re all interesting in some way or another regardless.


Titles covered in this update:

 

Mario Bros.
Moon Patrol
Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns
Ratcatcher [PD Homebrew]
RealSports Baseball
RealSports Soccer
RealSports Tennis
River Raid

Rankings

The Summaries


Mario Bros. – 1 or 2 player simultaneous. Developed and published by Atari in 1983. Licensed from Nintendo.

Mario Bros. is a port of Nintendo’s arcade game of the same name. Coleco stole home console rights for Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. away from Atari in the early ’80s, but Atari did manage to get the console rights to the next game in the series of sorts, Mario Bros.  Atari released ports of the game on their consoles, the 2600 and 5200.  Meanwhile, less popular Nintendo games Popeye and Sky Skipper were published on Atari consoles by Parker Bros.  I covered Popeye for the 5200 previously, but Sky Skipper was unfortunately only on the 2600.  But anyway, Atari’s 2600 and 5200 releases were the first American home console releases of Mario Bros.   Nintendo would release a Famicom (NES) version of the game in in Japan in the same year as this one released here, but that would not see an American release until 1986.  In the interim, this was one of the better ways to play the game here.  Unfortunately for Atari, Mario Bros., while popular, was nowhere near the hit that Donkey Kong before it and Super Mario Bros. after it would be. This is a single-screen arcade game and while it is good, it has always been overshadowed by the games before and after it.

Despite that, Atari did a good job with this port. While it is not arcade perfect and, much like Popeye, it doesn’t quite match up to the NES version, Mario Bros. is a great version of an early Nintendo classic. This game and its characters look a little funny, but I think the look works. The game plays well too. As in the arcade game, Mario Bros. takes place in a sewer. This is a single-screen platformer and you walk and jump around the four-level sewer. The game has digital controls and only one button, for jumping. Jumping is limited, in that you cannot control yourself in the air at all. What jump you do is determined before you leave the ground. That’s not like later Mario controls at all, but that is how this game plays. It certainly makes things tougher. Additionally, the digital controls make no use of the 5200 controller’s additional features. This game would surely be easier with a digital controller as you would get quicker response times, useful for avoiding the many enemies. I only have regular 5200 controllers and the Trak-Ball, though. The game plays okay, it just can take you a little longer to stop moving than you’d like.

In that sewer, your goal in each screen is to defeat all of the enemies. You need to beat all of them to proceed. Your enemies are Koopas, crabs, fireballs, and various other foes. They start at pipes on the top level of the screen and move towards the bottom. Once they reach pipes on the bottom, they warp back up to the top. Very much unlike almost every game in the series since, you CANNOT jump on your foes here! Instead, you need to hit the platform an enemy is walking on from underneath to stun them. Then you can defeat them with a touch. As in Joust though, wait too long after stunning a foe and it will get back up. Some enemies need to be hit from underneath more than once to knock them out so you can defeat them. There is also a POW block on the screen you can hit from below three times. It will stun enemies. Use this power wisely though, for once you use it up it’s gone until the next level. The game gets hard quickly as your foes pile up and faster and tougher to beat enemies get added into the mix. Things may be a bit easier in the two player co-op mode, though. That’s a great feature to have.

Mario Bros. is an addicting classic game.  I’ve never loved this game, but it’s fun if you give it some time.  This game is challenging, perhaps too much at times, but it’s easy to see why the game was successful. It’s challenging and well designed, and may keep you coming back.  Its sequel would be one of the greatest and most important games ever made. This game is not that, but it is a good game certainly worth playing.  Is this version in specific a must-play, though? Probably not.  It’s neat to have as a Nintendo game on a non-Nintendo console, but there are many versions of Mario Bros. are out there, and quite a few are more arcade-perfect than this.  Newer ports will control better than this, too.  Even so, Mario Bros. for the 5200 is a good game well worth getting if you already have a 5200.

Arcade port. This version is also on Atari 8-bit computers. This game is on many formats, including the NES, Commodore 64 (two different versions), Atari 2600, Atari 7800, NEC PC88, Sinclair XZ Spectrum, Apple II, Amstrad CPC, Game Boy Advance, and in arcade-perfect form on the Nintendo Switch.  Multiplayer-focused adaptations of the game are also present in other Mario games, most notably Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES and in all of the Mario Advance games on GBA. The game has only one true sequel, Mario Clash for Virtual Boy. That is a pretty good game.


Moon Patrol – 1 or 2 player simultaneous. Developed and published by Atari in 1983. Licensed from Williams, the original American publisher. The original arcade game was developed by Irem.

Moon Patrol is another port of an arcade classic. Moon Patrol, one of the early Japanese scrolling shooting games, is a side-scrolling platform shooter where you drive to the right while jumping over obstacles and shooting enemies coming your way. The arcade game is simple, but plays well and was apparently one of the first with parallax scrolling backgrounds. The game has background music too, unlike many early arcade titles. This 5200 version is a lower resolution but very accurate port. Just like the arcade game, this version has parallax scrolling backgrounds and music in addition to the sound effects! The backgrounds are really nicely done. Your tank here is a somewhat funny-looking blob thing, but that’s alright. Having music is particularly great, this system can do music but often games don’t have it. The music is a simple loop but is catchy.

In the game you control a moon tank. This is kind of an early auto-runner or shmup-on-wheels game, as you can’t stop moving, only go a little faster or slower. This version both looks and plays great. It has nice graphics for the system with parallax scrolling, the controls are responsive, and it contains all the content from the arcade game. The controls are digital and not analog, but work well — forward and backward on the stick make you go a little faster or slower to move your tank forwards or back, while one button shoots and the other jumps. Yes, jump is on a button. Take note, James Bond 007… but anyway. When you shoot, one bullet goes upwards to the top of the screen, while the other goes only a short distance forwards. Jumping, meanwhile, gives you good control of your jump. Your tank’s hitbox is large though, so some later jumps are tricky. This is close to the arcade game and is worlds better than the extremely tricky, tight jumping of the Atari 2600 version. Nearly impossible jumps there are easy in this version. To make things even easier, this game has something very rare for an early ’80s console port of an arcade game: continues! And infinite ones, at that. That’s right, when you get game over you can start right off from close to where you died. Your score does reset when you continue, though. When you get a game over your time does NOT reset, however, and if you finish a level with a fast time you get a point bonus. The game rewards not dying.

This game has two difficulty options, Beginning and Championship. Beginning is a single, easier run through the game. After you beat it you move on to the Championship course. Championship is harder and endlessly loops, so each time you finish a Championship course you start again. Every loop is very similar, though. Each loop of the game is broken up into five areas. You start at letter A. After you get to letters E, J, O, T, and Z, you get a screen showing how you did for that part of the game. In the game, you go to the right through 26 sections, each noted with one letter from the alphabet. In some waves flying enemy ships attack you from the skies, and you’ve got to shoot them down or avoid them until you get through to the next letter point. Some drop bombs that can blow holes in the ground you will need to jump over. In other waves, your main obstacles are rocks and pits. You need to jump over the pits and shoot or jump over the rocks. Because of your short forward shot distance, you need to really watch out for those rocks on the ground. Enemies in the air can be deadly, but it’s the rocks and pits that often are the greater threat here. Eventually you will face more threats and some variation on the formula. The game starts out easy, and finishing Beginning mode won’t take long. Championship is more challenging, but with the continue system it’s beatable fairly quickly if you don’t care about your score. Of course the game loops infinitely so you can always play for more points, though each letter’s stage is always fairly similar.

This is a simple but fun game. It’s a game of quick reactions, as you try to avoid the obstacles coming at you while shooting down your enemies. It does not have the depth of a newer shooting game of course, but this is a very fun classic that is well worth playing. The game has very good graphics for the time, good music, and well designed and balanced enemies and obstacles to work your way past. Really my only issue with Moon Patrol is that it won’t last all that long unless you get into playing for score. The game has quite a bit of variety, but with the static stage structure, between the good controls and continue system, unless you want to play this game for score it probably won’t last all that long. Still, however long you play it for some version of Moon Patrol is a must-play for classic game fans and this is a great version of it. You can see how Irem would become one of the ’80s better arcade game developers.

Arcade port. This same version is also on the Atari 8-bit computers. Other ports are available on Atari 2600 (with very tough jumping controls), Apple II, Commodore 64, PC (DOS), Sord M5, Commodore VIC-20, TI99/4A, MSX, Atari ST, Game Boy / Game Boy Color (packed with a port of the NES version of Spy Hunter), and in perfect arcade port form on the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. There are likely more versions of this game out there than that as well. There is also an improved homebrew hack / remake of this 5200 version of the game called Moon Patrol Redux. I haven’t played that one.


Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns – 1 player. Developed and published by Activision in 1984.

Pitfall II is a very ambitious game. A groundbreaking platformer when it released in 1984, Pitfall II has a large world to explore and a very modern-feeling continue system with infinite lives that send you back to the last checkpoint. It also is fairly open-ended and, I would say, extremely frustrating. This game was first released on the Atari 2600 and this is a port of that version with moderately upgraded graphics. The 2600 version used an added chip in the cart to get more out of the system, but nothing like that is needed here. The graphics have more detail, but it is clearly the same game. Controls are identical, so this is a digital-control game with one jump button and that’s it. It would control much better with a digital controller than the standard analog pad I have, control in this game can be frustrating with the regular controller. As with the Atari 8-bit computer version of this game and only that version, though, Pitfall II for the 5200 has one major advantage over all other versions: it has a significant amount of exclusive added content! If you manage to get to what is the end of this game on any other platform, there is a whole second half of the game, full of more treasures to find and obstacles to avoid, that is just as big as the first half of the game, waiting for you. If you can get to the end of all that, this version has a much more satisfying ending than the 2600 game. Yes, this is one of the few 5200 games with a real ending. These are very cool additions which makes this almost certainly the best console version of this game, if you have a good controller for this kind of game. I do not, the standard 5200 controller has issues with this game.

As for the game itself though, Pitfall II is a nonviolent exploration platformer. The world is a rectangular maze of screens, and you move around as Pitfall Harry, running, jumping, climbing, and swimming as you try to avoid all of the many enemies, save several people you need to rescue, and collect as much of the gold as you can find. Oddly, the game scrolls when you go up or down, but flips from screen to screen when you go between screens horizontally. Huh. Your goal is to rescue your niece and cat, get the rat, find a diamond ring, and then escape. Along the way, you want to try to collect as much of the gold as you can. This task will be more challenging than it is on the 2600, though, since you have twice as much game to get through to finish it. As with the first Pitfall, this game is set in a jungle. The map is dramatically more complex than before, though; where before the game was made of 265 nearly identical screens in a straight line, this time there are perhaps fewer screens but each is totally unique, and they are, again, in a rectangle instead of a line. There are also water areas you can swim in which add some variety as well. There are also many ladders to climb up and down. These are very frustrating to use though, as you need to walk up to them while holding UP [or down] and forward to grab on to the ladder; if you just press forward you will fall into the hole the ladder is in, falling straight down until you hit a floor, water, or, frequently, an enemy who of course kills you instantly. The ladder controls are finicky stuff and really should be better.

The ambition is obvious here, and a lot is accomplished. However, I find this game maybe more frustrating than it is fun. First, I mentioned the controls already. Those digital and one button-only controls are limiting and are not a great fit for the 5200 controller. I badly wish you could duck; that would make this game much better, I think. Also, this game is sometimes considered to be a proto-Metroidvania game. It does not have items which unlock areas, but it does have exploration. Compared to later titles in this genre this games’ exploration is relatively straightforward once you get used to the game, as the game has a mostly linear path to follow with dead ends and smaller side areas along the way that may have gold in them for you to find if you want, but exploration still is a significant part of the game; it’s up to you to figure out which are the side paths and which the main one. Again this game is fairly mild in this respect, but still, I do like some exploration in games but strongly prefer to know where I am going; I hate wandering around lost in a game! You can’t get too lost in this game, but you can wander around aimlessly in some areas and that gets frustrating. You move slowly in this game so going to a dead end and back can take a while. Also, I know the treasure is optional, but I wish that it told you how many treasures you have. Figure it out yourself. It does have a score on screen, which increases each time you get a treasure, but this score will also go down so it’s not a great measure of progress unless you aren’t dying.

At first I disliked how open the game feels, I want to know where to go. It made me want to not play the game, a common reaction I have to open-world games. However, once I realized that the game is actually fairly linear, I started to like it a bit more. The music is catchy, graphics decent, and some of the exploration is fun. However, while exploring and finding your way can be fun, as you remember which paths to take and where the gold is, the controls are slow and avoiding the enemies is very frustrating. Avoiding enemies requires very precise movement, you must be at the exact right spots to not get hit. And you will often be hit, and you die with one hit.

So, even when I am starting to have fun exploring, the constant deaths get in the way. This game introduced the innovative concept of checkpoints in an open world, and they work. The issue is that they are quite far apart. Getting from one to the next without dying over and over and over will take a lot of practice. And when you die yet again and are sent all the way back to the last checkpoint it gets very frustrating. Trying to avoid the enemies and not die on the ladders or such can be really tough. All you can do is walk or jump, no ducking, no fighting back, and enemies are placed to run into you unless you do the exact right movements at just the right spots. For instance, bats fly just at head level, edging just barely higher at certain points so if you stand at the right spots you won’t die. Frogs hop back and forth over ladder entrances, killing you if you slightly mess up your timing. And more. Many enemies were placed in order to make getting past them frustratingly hard. And every time you get hit it’s all the way back to the last checkpoint for you. When you get hit, you watch Pitfall Harry float back to the checkpoint while a sad song plays while your points reduce down until you get back. The sad version of the song continues playing until you collect some gold. I often wish I could just fight the enemies to get them out of my way to get to some of the gold, but you can’t. All you can do is just memorize where to jump that gets you over them. When you do finally work your way to a hard-to-get-to gold bar or person it is quite satisfying and may be worth the hassle, but this game has some definite drawbacks.

Overall, Pitfall II is a classic, but you will need a great deal of patience and memorization to get very far in this game. A lot of people love this game, and I recognize the games’ ambition and innovation, but between the design, controls, and controller, a lot of the time I find this game much more frustrating than fun. This is a game of exploration and avoidance, and is both simple and yet complex as you try to find out where to jump from and where to go in order to find all of the gold. So far I have not been dedicated enough to it to finish the game, but it is certainly well worth trying. Objectively, Pitfall II probably is a very good to borderline great classic. Subjectively, it’s a very frustrating game I don’t know that I want to play much more of.

Expanded Atari 2600 port. Also on Atari 8-bit computers. Remember, only the 5200 and A8 versions of the game continue on with a second half after finishing the original game. Unexpanded ports of the 2600 version are also available on other platforms, including the Colecovision.


Ratcatcher [Homebrew] – 1-3 player simultaneous. Homebrew game developed by Average Software (now Phaser Cat Games) and published by AtariAge in 2016.

Ratcatcher is the first original 5200 game from Average Software’s Ryan Whitmer, and I think it could be said that his inexperience shows here. His newer title Magical Fairy Force, which I covered last time, is a mostly pretty good game. This game, however, I find much more, well, average. Ratcatcher is a single-screen arcade style game, though this game is far too complex to have made a good arcade game; until reading the manual I didn’t have a good sense of what was going on. Once you figure it out the game is alright, but has some design issues. First, though, I should mention that control here is entirely digital. Other than using two buttons this game does nothing with the 5200 controller. You could play the game with one button, but it would make an already hard game even harder. I should also say, perhaps the most interesting thing about this game is its three player simultaneous play. You will, of course, need a model 1 5200 to play with three players, but if you have one this is one of the few games to take advantage of those additional controller ports. As a solo game it definitely loses something, versus having other people on screen; this game feels better balanced for multiple people working together than for a solo player. You can play a single player game, though it will be harder.

Anyway, in this game you play as one of three ratcatchers in a sewer. The graphics are seviceably decent and audio is basic. This game is about gameplay, not flash, though it looks alright. You need to avoid deadly obstacles, most notably a massive plague of sewer alligators, while doing as the games’ name suggests and grabbing as many rats as you can. Each level has ten rats in it, and you get only one chance at each one. You must grab five rats before the level ends or you lose a life. Getting all ten sends you to a bonus stage full of points to collect before the next regular level returns to normal. You also lose a life if you touch a deadly obstacle such as a live alligator, a cloud of sewer gas, or electrified water. You get rats simply by touching them, unlike in reality they cannot hurt or attack you. They will run away from you when you walk towards them, though, so some strategy will be required.

Indeed, strategy is the name of the game here. Ratcatcher takes place on a five-floor screen. Enemies will fill the lower three levels, while the top level is generally safe, at least at first. You can move left and right, but cannot jump; your only interaction is to turn some switches. There are several sets of these, water-wave switches in the center and gate-selection ones along the sides. For those side switches, if you stand in front of the switch by the sewer gates on either side of the screen, the two buttons will move selection lights up and down. One button moves the indicator up, and the other down, for quick selection of any of the four floors. If you walk through that gate, you will come through onto the selected floor. Walking in again will only send you back out that same gate, though, so you’ll need to move the indicator again to go back to the floor you came from. You can have different floors selected on each side of the screen though, of course, and doing so is important. You can only change the selected floor at the correct side’s gate switches, though, so thinking ahead is important. This can be frustrating though, as enemies will ambush you right after you go through a gate and there’s nothing you can do, there’s no way you’ll be able to change floors and get through before that enemy gets to you.

You do have some defenses against the hordes of alligators and other threats, however. First, there also is a water meter which rises over time. Two switches on the center of the top level will, once the water meter is full enough, send a wall of water across the screen, one switch for each direction. This wall of water will go out of the floor you have selected with the gate switches on the side and push anything on that floor as far over as it can. If you let the water meter overflow, it will set off a wall of water in one of the directions even if you don’t hit a switch, also. The water will wash away all foes, though washed-away rats are lost and not captured so watch out for that. And last, there are six gates on the lower three levels that you can move up and down with switches on levels two and four. The gates are always there, you can only choose which floors they are on. For both the waves of water and the gates, your ratcatchers are affected; the water will wash you to the side of the screen, and you can’t walk through those gates any more than the enemies can. So you need to plan ahead, though with the random nature of the way enemies appear from the sides of the levels this is difficult. You start with “only” having to deal with rats and alligators, but once sewer gas, electrified rats, and more, are added in this game gets tough.

And really, that complexity is this games’ downfall, I think. This kind of game is best when it is easy to understand and play, but while somewhat interesting, this game is definitely not easy to understand or play. You need to consider which floors to block with gates, when to use the walls of water, and most importantly which floors to set each sides’ portals to, while trying to grab those rats and avoid everything else. And if you miss too many rats, you lose a life, and three lives lost and that’s Game Over. Ratcatcher is a decent game once you learn how to play it and it certainly presents a good challenge, but it is probably a bit overly complicated and frustrating. It is far too easy to die without feeling like you did anything wrong simply because of unfair enemy spawns in a game where you can’t always easily get away from foes. Due to its complexity and challenge Ratcatcher makes a poor first impression. You will lose, quickly, for some time. If you keep going and learn how to play it gets better, though, so if it sounds interesting it may be worth putting some time into, particularly if you have interested other players you can work with, so, say, one person can flip a gate switch while someone else gets the rat without being killed by an alligator right behind it as you would be in single player. This game feels better balanced for multiplayer than single player; as a single player game it is too hard and frustrating. Ratcatcher is, overall, an average game that may be worth a look if it sounds interesting.

Atari 5200 homebrew game. This was first made for the 5200. An Atari 8-bit computer version also exists, I believe. The developer also made a PC version.


RealSports Baseball – 1 or 2 player simultaneous.  Has analog controls. Developed and published by Atari in 1983.

In the early ’80s, Atari started up a new line of sports games and called it the RealSports series. These games try to be more realistic than the early Atari 2600 sports games. There are RealSports games on the Atari 2600, 5200, and 7800, but of the games in the franchise this one, RealSports Baseball for the 5200, probably has the overall best reputation. And after playing it, I get why! RealSports Baseball for 5200 is a great game, and is easily the best pre-crash sports game I own that isn’t a tennis/pong game. This game has some flaws, most notably in how hard it is to score runs, but it is very good and holds up great. Baseball is my favorite sport, and this is a good baseball game.

For reasons why, first, most early sports games were two player only. This game, however, has AI opposition to play against. The game has four difficulty levels too, to cover many skill levels. Even on the easiest setting beating the computer is difficult because of how hard scoring runs is, but there is still a nice skill gradient here. The game even allows an AI to play against an AI, if you want. Fun stuff. The game has a voiced umpire calling the balls, strikes, and outs, too, for a very nice touch. Voiced speech was rare in games at this point and it’s a fantastic inclusion here. Now, this title does only have single games and not a season mode or such, but for this era that is to be expected. There also aren’t named players or teams, just a red team and a blue team, and there is just one stadium. That’s fine, the game has what it needs. For the time, AI and voice make for a pretty good feature set.

As with most baseball games of the pre-crash era, RealSports Baseball for the 5200 is a single-screen game. Later on, baseball games would zoom in and have you basically field on a mini-map, while the zoomed in main screen showed just a part of the field. In this game, though, as with earlier titles, everything is on one screen. This means that the outfield is dramatically condensed down in size; outfielders look like they are standing right behind infielders. The game accounts for this by having the ball take a lot longer to be thrown from an outfielder to an infielder than from one infielder to another, so the real distance is taken into account even if visually it doesn’t look that way. There are plusses and minuses to this approach. On the positive side, I have never liked the zoomed-in-field style of baseball games; I want to be able to see on the main screen where the ball is going. My favorite baseball game is Hardball III, which uses a single screen to show the whole vertical distance of the field. That game is newer and higher resolution and has a much more accurately-scaled field than this one, though, so the distances appear correct on screen in a way they don’t here. So I kind of like this, but on the negative side, the small outfield makes getting balls to drop for hits much harder than it probably should be! Batting is one of the hardest things in sports, and this game makes successfully hitting the ball pretty hard since fielders almost always seem to be standing right where you hit the ball to. The small outfield here gets frustrating. Still, there’s plenty of fun to be had.

For batting, there is not a separate batting screen. Instead, the pitcher simply throws the ball towards the batter, who tries to hit it. You pitch by hitting the upper button to throw the ball. You then can control its motion with the stick while the ball flies towards the plate, though only along the horizontal axis; there isn’t a vertical axis here for the ball. This makes things a little easier, but batting is still hard. The lower button throws the ball to a base, to try to pick off a runner. If the ball is hit the game automatically selects the closest player. You can change players with the lower button and throw with the upper one once you pick up the ball. The game automatically targets throws to the farthest base that a runner is running towards, which can be annoying at times when you want to go to a much closer base for the out, but you can change your target base with the lower button. Defense works well here and after a few games I wasn’t giving up many runs against the easiest AI.

When batting, you swing the bat by moving the stick on your controller horizontally from left to right. You need to have the stick start fully on the left side in order to properly swing, then move the stick at the right time to hit the ball. Your stick movement is fully analog, as you would expect on the 5200, for good control. This control scheme is kind of strange, but it works well once you get used to it. Atari would use this same control scheme in other RealSports baseball games, but it works much less well on a console with digital-only controls like the 7800 than it does here. Once you get the timing down for batting this game is fun, even if it is frustratingly hard to actually get enough hits to score many runs against the AI.

Overall, RealSports Baseball is a great game. Games against the AI do tend to be low-scoring and victory is difficult, but the effort is rewarding and the controls and gameplay very good and well thought through. With two button and analog both supported here, this game makes good use of the 5200’s controller. The voiced speech lines calling balls and strikes are also great and add a lot. This very much is an early title features-wise, but if you don’t mind that RealSports Baseball is definitely recommended. This is great for its time and still is a lot of fun today. It’s even better in multiplayer, of course.

Atari 5200 exclusive. There are games on the Atari 2600 and 7800 with the same name as this game, but they are different games, neither one as good as this one. I covered the 7800 game years ago and did not have good things to say about it. Reading that summary again, I notice that that game shares a lot with this one, they just did everything worse there.


RealSports Soccer – 1 or 2 player simultaneous.  Has analog controls. Developed and published by Atari in 1983.

RealSports Soccer works much less well than the baseball game above, unfortunately. I do not have nearly as much experience playing soccer games as I do baseball games, though I like the sport well enough, but this one… this is not very good. I haven’t played many other pre-crash soccer games to compare this one to so perhaps it is fine for the time, but still, after a match or two of this I didn’t want to go back. RealSports Soccer is just below average, not awful, but there is little reason to play it today.

As you might expect, features-wise this game has one or two player play with four AI difficulty levels. As in RealSports Baseball, player one is the blue team and player two the red one. It has only single matches and no seasons, as with all sports games of its day. The game scrolls on a three screens long field. It’s not large, but with how slow the characters move, that size is more than enough. The game does have isometric perspective for a more realistic field angle than most older games had and some nice player animation as they run around. The audio, however, is very simple and basic. You won’t find any of Baseball’s speech here! Each of the players, either human or AI, starts by controlling one of the two players at the kickoff. The two controlled players have different shirt colors from their teammates, to distinguish them. The ball and the two human or AI-controlled players are always on screen, along with three other AI-controlled players per team that you can switch to. Movement controls are analog, as you would hope for on the 5200, but I don’t think that’s enough to save this game.

For the controls, when you have the ball, one button attempts a pass, and the other other a shot on goal. You can also aim shots high, medium, or low with the 1, 2, or 3 keys on the keypad. When your team has the ball, you always control the player with the ball. When you don’t have the ball, you can switch between players with the 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 keys on the keypad. Goalies are automatic and are always AI-controlled, you can only play as the other players. The thing is though, while visually this game is three on three, with, again, the ball and the two controlled players always on screen, as for the four AI-controlled players, when they go off screen they immediately come back on at some random location on the edge of the screen. This gives the sense that there are more team members here, but the game isn’t actually keeping track of their locations; it’s just randomly having people appear when one leaves. When one leaves on the right, the next one to enter will often be on the left.  There is no behind-the-scenes simulation of the rest of the field.  And of course the ball and the two controlled players never leave the screen. This results in a very stripped-down-feeling soccer game.

Worse, this game is slow. The pace of play here is very sluggish and cannot be sped up. This makes the game somewhat boring to play. The game is easy, too. If RealSports Baseball is hard, RealSports Soccer is easy. Scoring goals is easy, and stopping the AI’s team from scoring is maybe even easier. Beating the AI takes little effort on any difficulty. Maybe this is a bit better against a human opponent, but it’s not very fun against the AI. The game does play okay — you can run around, pass to your other players, and shoot on goal — and apart from the slow speed the game looks nice, but with gameplay this slow and easy I don’t really want to. Atari tried for some new things here, with the AI opponent, multiple shot angles you can shoot at, throw-ins when the ball goes out of bounds, and more, so it may be a decent effort for the time, but the sluggish pace, lacking simulation, and very easy AI hold it back a lot. RealSports Soccer is a tedious, below average game not really worth playing.

Atari 5200 exclusive. There is also an Atari 2600 game of the same name, but it’s different.

RealSports Tennis – 1 or 2 player simultaneous.  Has analog controls.  Supports the Trak-Ball controller. Developed and published by Atari in 1983.

Tennis was the first sport made into an electronic game. At first you had games like Odyssey Tennis and Pong, simple ball-and-paddle games inspired by tennis, but by the early ’80s things had progressed into a somewhat more realistic simulation of the sport. And that is where this game gets a definitely mixed reception. RealSports Tennis has somewhat bland graphics, with a decent but unexciting isometric court and nicely animated players. As usual in the series, one player is blue and the other red. Yes, this game is singles tennis only, not doubles. You can actually give human players three-letter initials if you want, like in an Odyssey 2 game. Nice. There are no courtside graphics, just the green court on a dark red background. It has challenging AI to play against and allows you to play a full, five-game match of tennis. That’s all okay, though visually and aurally average at best.

The controversy here is about the controls. Well, and also the AI. First, controls. In this game, you don’t just automatically hit the ball like you would in Pong Sports / Video Olympics on the 2600. Instead, you move around with full analog controls. You move with the stick or, if you have one, with the Trak-Ball’s ball.  The trackball is a bit better of course, but either one works.  Either way, the rest of the controls are on the  keypad and buttons.  To hit the ball, you need a well-timed button press.  The button you press may be the regular side buttons or a keypad button, depending; this game makes heavy use of the side buttons.  However, in order to serve you need to press the upper side button to serve.  Having to go back and forth constantly between side buttons and keypad can get a little confusing at times.  Still,  serving is easy and you’ll pretty much always hit it in bounds on the serve. The upper side button will also hit the ball back the way it came on a similar angle. You can also hit a lob with the lower side button. However, if you press one of the buttons on the keypad instead during a volley, you will hit the ball towards that part of the opponent’s side of the court. Think of the nine numbers as aiming at the nine sections. With this you can control where the ball is going to a much greater extent than you can in older tennis games. That makes this game feel much more modern than its 1983 vintage. However, the way you do it is somewhat clumsy, with those keypad keys, and the controls take some definite getting used to thanks to how many buttons the game uses. I like having the ability to aim my shot, though. I think it adds to the game. The game was certainly designed around it, you will need to aim carefully to get the ball past the AI.  It can be a fun challenge.

However, the AI in this game is crushingly difficult! While winning games is possible, the AI gets to the ball almost all of the time. You really need to learn the game to be able to actually win sets. Just hitting the side buttons to hit the ball back the way it came won’t be good enough, aimed shots with the keypad are pretty much required. Some luck would help, as well. This is a somewhat slow-paced game, as the ball often feels like it’s moving slowly, but it does pick up at times. The game can get intense as volleys continue. I wish the AI was fairer but I’m sure that is very hard to do well on a machine from the early ’80s. On the whole I think this game is alright, but flawed. I like the greater control you get from being able to aim your shots, but beating the AI is frustrating and this isn’t the most exciting game. It’s a decent game maybe worth a look, particularly for two interested players. The controls will take getting used to though.

Released on Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit computer. That version looks similar, minus the analog character movement of course. There is also an Atari 2600 game of the same name, but it’s entirely different.

River Raid – 1 player.  Has analog controls. Developed and published by Activision in 1983.

River Raid is a port of the very popular and successful Atari 2600 game of the same name. One of Activision’s biggest hits this side of Pitfall, River Raid was naturally ported to many formats and the 5200 is no exception. This port is, for the most part, a by-the-numbers port, largely identical to the original 2600 game except for improved graphical detail.  The graphics are much sharper and clearer, this is a nice next-gen enhancement of the game.  However, that’s not all.  Activision did an interesting thing here — not only did they improve the graphics, they also made the controls fully analog. It’s a really nice change which has a very noticeable impact on the game. Or at least, movement left and right is now fully proportional and analog. Speed control feels more digital, as instead of gradient speed control you switch between set speeds depending on how much you push the stick up or down.

Other than that, though, this is River Raid. River Raid is an early vertically-scrolling shmup. You fly a plane in narrow canyons over a river, shooting down enemy ships and tanks and destroying bridges at regular intervals. It was inspired by a famous bridge-attack raid from World War II. This is a simple game, with enemies that only sometimes attack you and relatively simple graphics and gameplay, but it is quite challenging and can be addictive. It is very easy to mess up and hit the walls, and that loses you a life just as fast as enemy bullets do. The game also has a fuel system. Your fuel meter steadily decreases as you go, and flying over fuel tanks refills it. Unlike Konami’s Scramble, you cannot refill fuel by shooting fuel tanks; you need to fly over them without shooting them, instead. Running out of fuel is initially rare, but the farther you get the easier it is to run low. You also will face some more aggressive foes as you get deeper into the game.

As mentioned previously, with many 5200 games, this game is a last-gen port, from the 2600.  Everything looks better and higher resolution here, with jagged coastlines with cliff faces along the edges of them and more detailed enemies to shoot, but it does not push the hardware as much as an exclusive would.  River Raid is no match for the best shmups of the later ’80s, since the game is simple and lacks the depth of a Gradius or R-Type.  In this game you just fly up and shoot the somewhat randomly laid out enemies the game throws at you while avoiding the walls.  Still, River Raid is an addictive classic that still holds up fairly well. This game is not as complex as a next-gen exclusive like The Dreadnaught Factor, and I don’t like it quite as much as that game, but it’s still good.  Enhanced last-gen ports have a place as well. The shooting and dodging gameplay of River Raid is timeless fun.

Overall, River Raid is a good enhanced last-gen port.  The game is simple, has held up well, and still is a lot of fun to play.  I do find it a bit too simple to keep me going for longer play sessions, but it’s a good game to play here and there.  I’m not sure if the analog controls make this game better than the 2600 version or not, but they do at least make it distinctly different and certainly are a lot better than the game would feel with digital controls on this system’s analog control stick. I think the results are good and make this version of the game well worth a try, thanks to the controls it’s a bit different from other versions of River Raid. Other than that though this version plays the same as the original. I’m sure more could have been done than they do here.  Some of Activision’s games on the 5200 are more impressive than others, and this one is in the middle on that.  Oh well, it’s still a good version of a great game.

Atari 2600 port.  Other ports were released on the Intellivision, Colecovision, Commodore 64, MSX, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, PC, and, as far as I know always in its Atari 2600 form, on numerous Activision collections for newer consoles from the last 25 years.

Rankings

These rankings are not absolute, but here’s what I am thinking at the moment.

RealSports Baseball > Moon Patrol > Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns > Mario Bros. > River Raid > RealSports Tennis > Ratcatcher > RealSports Soccer

Including the games from part one, The Dreadnaught Factor > Castle Crisis > RealSports Baseball > Moon Patrol > Magical Fairy Force > Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns > Mario Bros. > Blaster > River Raid > RealSports Tennis > Ratcatcher > Decathlon > Frogger > Buck Rogers > James Bond 007

Of these, the game I ranked highest that I like playing the least is Pitfall II. I’m giving it a lot of benefit of the doubt for its ambition, clearly.  Based purely on how fun I find it, Pitfall II would probably go either just above or just below Ratcatcher.

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Four More Summaries of my Latest Mario Maker 2 Levels

Posted on October 29, 2021 by Brian

Yes, I’m back to another one of those. I may be the only one who cares about my descriptions of my Mario Maker 2 levels, but I still think this is one of the greatest games ever made and don’t plan on ever entirely stopping playing it so long as it is supported. I did take a break from it last month, as I played several modern games one of which I will review, but I’m back to Mario Maker again and made another level.

Before I begin though, I AM playing Atari 5200 games and am working on the next update for that summary list. I was too busy with those modern games to get this written this month, but it will happen soon. I played several games today for it, in fact.  I had forgotten about the fully analog controls in 5200 River Raid… interesting.

But on to Mario Maker 2 level descriptions. As I said in the title, I have four. They are from June, July, August, and October.

In June I made The Climb – Versus. Code 124-T1P-XNG (Theme: Mario 1)

This level is a second take on my level The Climb from a bit ago. I thought that the level’s ‘climb as you jump up around dropping ice blocks and donuts’ concept would work great with multiplayer, so I made this level that does exactly that. It’s the same basic idea, but with four sections for multiplayer versus play and more variety as you climb — each of the four routes up the level is broken into several sections, each a bit different. First you climb with static icicles, then with donut blocks, then finally with dropping icicles. There are powerups to give you extra chances, though I put more at the bottom of each path than the top. The level has eight plays and no hearts, though it does have two clears. Disappointingly, it hasn’t been played in multiplayer versus even once. I know it’s hard by multiplayer versus standards, but still, it’d be nice if it was. I think this level is probably overall better than the original version of The Climb because of the added variety as you go up, but with way fewer plays and no hearts I guess players disagree?

Oh — for design reasons, two of the four paths are jumping along the right side of the shafts, the other two on the left side. I wonder which way people find easier… I found it easy either way, though — while working on and clearing this level I played through all four paths, to make sure they worked, and didn’t die even one single time. I’ve clearly played my ‘the climb’ concept enough that I find it easier than most.

In July I made my next level. This one finally continues my super world, at long last! 2-2: Bombardment Hills. Code 43Q-GC6-5JG. (Theme: Mario 3)

For the few of you who played The Castle, don’t worry too much; while challenging, this level is short, not long, and is nowhere near as hard as that level is. This is a one minute long speedrun of sorts. Basically, you’re running to the right mostly at full speed, jumping over spikes as you go, while a whole armada of Lakitus try to kill you from above. If you stop for more than an instant, they’ll get you. So yeah, the level is frustrating and can seem unfair based on Lakitu ‘where are they throwing the spikes’ RNG, but with practice I figured out how to fairly consistently get through. Most of the level is done without a powerup, as I couldn’t think of a way to give you one that wouldn’t make it possible to probably damage boost up and take one of the Lakitu clouds, something that I don’t want to happen until the end of the stage. There also isn’t a checkpoint because I can’t think of a way to have the Lakitu cloud chase work from halfway; I’d need a second Lakitu cloud, and that would hit the enemy limit and then they wouldn’t throw many spineys if the first cloud was still on screen. The level is short enough that it’s very beatable in one shot, though; it is only a minute long, again, and that includes the boss fight at the end. As for that boss, I thought of several things, but ended up going with something that I think works pretty well — it’s a fight in a clown car against a Koopa Kid. Take out the Lakitus as well for some lives, and then relieve yourself of their attack. The fight can be a bit tricky but hit those question mark blocks, they have mushrooms in them!

The other thing I did not do in this level is put a coin trail along the way telling the player what jump heights they should be using. Perhaps I should do that, to save the significant amount of trial and error it takes to get the jumps down since they are NOT all max height, but I chose to leave it up to the player; I don’t like too-heavily-indicated levels really, unless the indicator is necessary. And that’s why there is a coin trail at one point in the level, for one truly blind fall. I had to indicate that, so I did. Otherwise though, learning those jumps is the point of the stage. You either like this kind of level or you don’t. I’d say I’m on both sides of that one; I mean, I like this type of level so long as it isn’t too too hard (I’m no Team Precision player to say the least!), but it certainly can be frustrating, particularly if certain spinies keep killing you. For a small hint, small hops on the uphill slopes are a very good idea. That’s the only way I found to survive one particularly annoying spinie on a steep uphill early in the level, for instance.

Overall I think this level turned out well, it fairly accurately reflects the original design I drew back in the early ’90s — remember the eight numbered Super World levels (of which this is level six) are based on paper designs of mine from my childhood. This level was a ‘run and jump over the spikes while a cloud chases you shooting lighting bolts at you’ concept. I think a bunch of Lakitus stand in well for an angry cloud.

The third level, from July, is a 3D World level about walljumps.  Appropriately, I titled it Walljump Land.  As the name suggests, this level is all about jumping from wall to wall.  Specifically, this level is about walljumps in narrow vertical shafts.  This is all about quickly jumping back and forth between two sides of a vertical path, avoiding spikes along the walls by jumping to the other side as necessary.  The level only took me about a minute and a half to clear so by my levels’ standards it’s on the shorter side, but it’s a fairly intense stage due to how I mix up the jumps.  I change the distances between safe spots on the walls frequently through the level, and have a section late with timed switching block walls as well.  It’s fun stuff, but I found it difficulty. I eventually decided that it was too hard, so I caved and added powerups to the level; I’m not good enough to do this without them, or with only one at the start or such.   I am sure anyone else playing it will also appreciate the powerups.  At the bottom and middle of the subworld I even put in pipes giving out infinite powerups, if you want to drop back down to get a powerup again. As a result, the level is a good challenge but not TOO hard.  I think this is a good level, and there are a few bits which show off why 3D World is unique, including a section where you have to spin jump for extra height; I know this is only my second 3D World level, but I love the 3D World style!  I think this level works well and hopefully is fun.  The level code for Walljump Land is WDC-7N2-0SG.  Oh, yes, this is another level of mine with no regular enemies.  You certainly can die though, it’s filled with spikes to avoid with your wall jumps.

After that aforementioned break, I came back to Mario Maker 2 recently and over the last few days made a new level.  It is the seventh level in the super world numbered levels series, and is titled 2-3 – Ocean Crossing.  This level finally adapts the seventh level of that childhood game concept of mine to Mario Maker.  This one was always going to be the hardest level to make, because the level concept and map are not nearly as polished as levels 1 to 4 are since I didn’t redo it later as I did with those stages.  Additionally, the basic concept of this level is something that you can’t do in Mario Maker 2, so I basically had to make a new level with few connections to my original idea apart from the basic concept of “you’re crossing over water while avoiding obstacles and fighting enemies”.  The original idea was that your characters would be in little boats, perhaps a bit like the Ninja Turtles in Turtles in Time with their little hoverboards in the Neon Night Riders bonus level, fighting against enemies in their own boats and jumping over rocks and whirlpools that would get in your way.  Well, you can’t do a whirlpool in Mario Maker really, there are no water currents in this game.  The original Super Mario Bros. in 1985 has water currents, but this game does not!  It’s one of the things they really should have put in at some point, but never did.  Unfortunate.  You also can’t make little boats that track the player.  However, I can make a level vaguely thematically similar, as there is a level theme with a water surface available at least, the Forest theme, so I can make SOMETHING set on top of the water.  It just won’t be the level I imagined.  This level is the least like its source material of all seven so far, and I’m sure level 8 will not be this different either.  And yeah, I don’t like that; while I do think I made an interesting level, I kind of want to try again sometime at making something more like the original concept, though I have no idea how, with Mario Maker 2’s limitations, you would reproduce it.

Basically, while thinking about what to do for this stage over the course of this year, I had two ideas for this level: either a frog suit level about challenging jumps, or a poison water night forest level about jumping from boat-like platform to boat-like platform and rock to rock.  The poison water concept makes sense because the original idea would not have had you swimming in the water, but considering that my Super World’s numbered levels are all Super Mario Bros. 3 levels, and the frog suit is pretty great, going for the frog suit option was an easy call.  So, this level, 2-3 – Ocean Crossing, is a frog suit level.  There are two parts to this level, challenging jumps on the water’s surface as you try to get over various barriers, and fights on a pair of enemy ships.  I tried to have obstacles appear at roughly the spots I drew whirlpools or rocks on the original level map, but otherwise this is all new.  Having the enemies have some large ships is a new idea too, actually. That seems like an idea I should have had back then, but didn’t.  This level took me about 2 minutes 20 seconds to beat, so it’s decent length.  It has two checkpoints and is pretty tough; it took me a few days of trying to finally complete the stage.  I did edit it as I went though, mostly to make some things easier where I was really having trouble, so it’s not quite as hard as that suggests; I greatly reduced the difficulty of most of the most frustrating jumps.  If you know your frog suit jumping distances, this level should be fun, I think. If you don’t, well, here’s a good time to learn them!  You can take damage in many areas and keep going, damage-boosting your way past some obstacles, but there are a few points, mostly in the second half of the level, where I require you to keep your frogsuit.  This level is all about learning the jumps, and given the very controlled way the frog suit moves and jumps, that is quite doable.  I do not put indicators in the level and I would like to know if people think I really should use them, but… I had to learn these jumps through practice.  Isn’t learning that what a level like this is all about?  Everything is visible, there are no blind jumps here.  It’s just about positioning.  (Yes, I know I’ve been a bit inconsistent with how I indicate jumps sometimes and not other times, but I do put thought into when I use indicator coins and when I don’t.  I just don’t really know whether other people think I should use more or not.)

As for the two ship battles and the boss, I did put a lot of difficult enemies on them, most notably a bunch of Hammer Brothers, but hey, you’re nearing the end of the game, I wanted it to be harder.  I did ease up a bit, though — the final ship now has two good powerups, while at first there was only one regular mushroom.  That was not enough, so I improved the powerups and removed some enemies.  I tried a lot of things for the final battle against Morton (since I used Ludwig in level six, 2-2), and ended up going with a partially submerged one, appropriate to the level.  I strongly recommend killing all enemies above before trying to fight him.  Oh, and story-wise, while making this level I thought up the idea that these two enemy ships are filled with treasure looted from your castle, which you will soon return to.  It’s a nice idea which fits the game well I think.  And yes, there are plenty of coins to get in both ship holds.  Overall, what do I think of this level? I like it.  It’s not my favorite level of mine, but I like the challenge and the frog suit.  The level code for this level, 2-3 – Ocean Crossing, is VCW-1D6-NYF.

On a somewhat unrelated note, here’s a secret… what is the level of mine that I go back and play the most often?  It’s …

Bombardment Hills.  Yes, really.  Despite all of its semi-random nonsense, I keep going back and playing this level over and over… heh.  I’m not sure why but I really like it.

 

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Atari 5200 Game Opinion Summaries Series II: Part I, and the Atari 5200 Trak-Ball Controller

Posted on September 5, 2021 by Brian

Yes, after far far too long, it’s an actual update on this website that people might want to read. (Yes, I have kept making Mario Maker levels, and will have more posts on my levels in the future. But that is for another time.) This is the first of what will probably be three parts of this Atari 5200 Game Opinion Summaries update, covering nine titles and also the 5200 Trak-Ball trackball controller.

Series Table of Contents

In Update One, This Post

Table of Contents
Introduction
The Atari 5200 Trak-Ball Controller

Game Opinion Summaries:

Blaster [Modern Rerelease of Cancelled Game]
Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom
Castle Crisis [PD Homebrew]
Countermeasure
Decathlon (aka The Activision Decathlon)
The Dreadnaught Factor
Frogger
James Bond 007 [1983]
Magical Fairy Force [PD Homebrew]

Rankings

In Future Updates

In Part II
Mario Bros.
Moon Patrol
Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns
Ratcatcher [PD Homebrew]
RealSports Baseball
RealSports Soccer
RealSports Tennis
River Raid

In Part III
Space Dungeon
Star Wars: The Arcade Game
Tempest [Cancelled Game Homebrew Release]
Wizard of Wor
Vanguard
Xari Arena [Cancelled Game Homebrew Release]

Introduction

In this article, I will cover the 23 Atari 5200 games I have bought between September 2015 and the present day in August of 2021. I quite like this system, so I have gotten a fair number of titles considering the small library. Some of these, as noted, are modern homebrew titles from AtariAge, while others are from the original 1982-1987 library. I have also gotten the system’s main controller accessories, the Trak-Ball controller and the joystick coupler. I got another 5200 as well; I now use a model one four-port 5200, instead of the model 2 two-port system I used to use, because I like the auto switching RF box, it is very convenient. And yeah, as I said in my first article about the 5200 years ago, I still like the 5200 quite a bit; it is the pre-crash console I use the most. The controller isn’t nearly as bad as people say and has some pretty cool features, the graphics are good for the time, its game library makes up for with quality what it lacks in quantity, and I like the console’s design and style a lot as well.

Given the number of titles to cover, I will break this up into parts. These games are fairly simple so it won’t take long to get through all of them though. In this article I will cover the first 9. It’s a good mix of titles, covering both new homebrews and titles from the system’s original run.

The Atari 5200 Trak-Ball Controller

The Atari 5200 had a short life, and most software was designed around its standard controller. Atari considered a paddle controller, but did not end up releasing it. No digital controller was offered either, though third-party options do exist, working well with games that are not analog. I like the 5200 controller, but it does not work equally well for all games. A controller perfect for digital games might have been nice, but instead, Atari released a trackball. A trackball is basically an upside-down analog mouse. Instead of moving a mouse around that rolls a ball to represent movement, you roll the ball itself to move something around the screen. Trackballs were popular in early arcade games for titles that needed analog control, and while the 5200 controller is analog, its analog stick is not nearly as good as a trackball is for games designed for this kind of controller. Atari realized this and answered with the 5200’s only first-party controller accessory, the Trak-Ball. It released early in the system’s life, so they are relatively common. I got one complete in box a couple of years ago.

This very large controller, the Atari 5200 Trak-Ball, is perhaps best known for being big, but it’s also amazing. Indeed, of the classic trackballs I have, this one is easily my favorite! It works very well, has decent buttons, and makes the games that support it significantly better. The 5200 trackball may be as large or larger than your average console, but the ball rolls very well and it feels great to use. That heft helps the controller’s feel, I would say.

The Atari 5200 Trak-Ball works by basically emulating a joystick. As great as it is, this is its one fault — it’s not a “real” trackball, acting like a mouse. It’s really pretending to be a 5200 analog stick, which gives control a slightly floaty feel. See this Atari-Age thread for more. I don’t mind this at all, as there may be better trackballs out there for computers, but of the console trackballs of the ’70s or ’80s this is by a very wide margin the best one in my experience.

Despite the way it works, the 5200 trackball’s only other fault is that it only works with games designed to support it. It may be emulating a joystick inside, but the bounds the trackball uses are very different from those used by a stick, and games not designed around the trackball rarely work well, or at all, with it. Atari did not put in a mode that fully emulates the regular controller’s analog stick. The other console trackballs that I have for older consoles work not only with games designed for analog, but also can emulate a standard joystick if you wish to play any other game with a trackball instead of a regular controller. The Colecovision trackball even has indentations in it for you to put controllers in, so you can use the buttons on the trackball base and the stick on a controller, to make a pretty nice arcade stick. That’s really cool. The Sega Master System trackball similarly has both analog and digital-emulation modes. I wish that the 5200 trackball had had something similar, it’d have been nice considering how few games support this controller.

However, what’s not as good about those other trackballs i how well they work, or rather, don’t work. Having multiple modes and more support is all well and good, but that’s only helpful if you actually want to use the trackball as a trackball! And with those other old trackballs I have, I don’t. The SMS trackball is absolutely horrible, with extremely slow movement regardless of game or mode. The Colecovision one has slightly better movement than that, but it’s still not very good. It’s a nice arcade stick but not a good trackball. The 5200 one, however, is outstanding! I love using this controller, and absolutely have bought some games, and some homebrew games, because they support the Trak-Ball controller. I would highly recommend a Trak-Ball to anyone with a 5200, they are fantastic, well-made, great looking controllers well worth the price. Every supported game is made significantly better.

And on that note, from my previous article, Super Breakout, Space Invaders, Centipede, Defender, Missile Command, and Pole Position support the trackball. Of them, Centipede and Missile Command are exceptional. Both are great with the regular controller, but are better with the trackball. These are far better versions of these games than any version relying on a d-pad or analog joystick for controls! Centipede alone might make the trackball worth getting, and there is more. Super Breakout is also better with the trackball than the regular controller, though I still find the game slow and kind of boring. The others work less well, though. Space Invaders and Galaxian are playable, but not better, the loss of precision of knowing where your stick is, as compared to a rolling ball, makes the games harder overall. Pole Position and Defender struggle even more, as you have to constantly spin the ball in an uncomfortable way. Defender is not fun to play this way with how that game controls, and Pole Position is just somewhat odd to control this way, I couldn’t get used to it and kept crashing. I’m sure there are some out there who like it, though. I will cover more trackball games in this series, two in this update. Fortunately both go in the good category of trackball games.

Overall, the Atari 5200 Trak-Ball controller is fantastic. Buy one. This is the best trackball for a classic console.

Atari 5200 Game Opinion Summaries 2021 Update, Part I

Please note: all games use the regular Atari 5200 controller unless otherwise noted.

Blaster [Modern Rerelease of Cancelled Game] – 1 player.  Developed by Vid Kidz / Williams in about 1983. Was to be published by Atari, but was cancelled due to the crash. Released by AtariAge in the 2000s.

Blaster is a rail shooter from Williams. It was developed by their star programmer Eugene Jarvis at his short-lived Vidz company. After making Defender for Williams, Jarvis left in 1981 to make his own company, though all four Vid Kidz titles were published by Williams so he didn’t go far. This game was their last one, before being taken out by the video game crash of 1984. While an arcade version of the game was released in 1983, even though this Atari 5200 version was actually completed first, Williams’ arcade-first priority led to the home version eventually getting cancelled because of the crash. Fortunately completed prototype copies exist and are now available from AtariAge, complete with box if you want. Now, Jarvis is one of arcade gaming’s legends, but Blaster is by far the least well known and least popular of his four pre-crash arcade games. When your first three games are Defender, Defender II/Stargate, and Robotron 2084, though, that isn’t hard to understand; those three are some of the greatest classics ever. Blaster? It’s fun and I definitely like it, but it’s no Defender.

But what is Blaster? It is, again, a first-person rail shooter… on the Atari 5200.  This is a first-person game.  You fly forwards, shooting at enemies coming at you.  You move where you will fire at with the stick and fire with a button.  If you keep pushing the stick in a direction, you will also very slowly nudge your ship that direction along its path, to avoid obstacles and such.  The controls are unfortunately entirely digital and you need to get to the edge of the stick’s range for them to respond.  They work well enough, but analog would have been nice.  Visually, however, this game is a technical marvel and easily has the best graphics I have ever seen on this system!  The graphical style may look like a strange mess at first glance, but play it a bit and everything is identifiable and looks great. Everything “scales” into and out of the screen extremely impressively. It’s probably very well done fake scaling of some kind, but regardless it looks amazing. However, the gameplay here is very simple, without the depth or challenge of Defender or Robotron. While fun, this game is more of a tech showcase than an amazing game. Even so, between its outstanding graphics and good gameplay I quite like Blaster overall.

The game has four stages, and after going through all four it loops back to the beginning but with slightly higher difficulty. After you complete each level, you go to the next one. The game shows your current stage on screen in a status bar along the to, along with your score, number of lives, and energy. Yes, you have a health bar in this game, you don’t die in one hit. It is essential considering how chaotic things get. The controls are good, sometimes slow framerate aside, and work well on the 5200 controller.

The first stage has you flying along a planet shooting enemies and avoiding walls, while flying through gates if you want. Everything on this level is made up of open rectangles. Enemies explode once you shoot them, which is a cool effect. It works once you get used to it and runs fairly well; there definitely is slowdown, but with how much this game is doing I don’t blame the game for it. It’s just impressive this system can pull off pretty good scaling at all! But it can, as Blaster proves. The second stage is essentially a bonus stage. There are no enemies here. It’s a warp zone with a cool ‘warp’ effect in the background where you try to pick up stranded astronauts in a warp tunnel for bonus points. I don’t understand why the bonus stage is the second segment of each level and not the last one, I think it would have been better at the end. Oh well. The third stage is a space battle. This returns to the enemies made of rectangles, except now you’re just fighting them in space, no land or gates. It’s a good level. The fourth and last stage in each level is an asteroid field. Shoot all of the asteroids coming at you before they hit you! This time the objects are rock sprites, not objects made up of those open rectangles. There are also some enemies who shoot at you here, and some stranded astronauts to try to pick up. It’s kind of like first person Asteroids.

On the whole, Blaster is a must-see title for its visuals. It really is amazing that the 5200 can do this, even if it slows down so much the screens full of what sure look like scaling sprites look incredible for the early ’80s! As for the gameplay, again, this is a simple game. You can move around a little, but only a little to avoid obstacles and such; you are mostly locked to your route, hopefully shooting anything that gets in your way as you go. The game starts out easy but does slowly get more difficult as you complete more levels, so there is a solid difficulty curve here, but some hits can feel unfair with how hard things are to make out sometimes. The health bar helps with this, though. Blaster is definitely worth playing, but is it worth buying considering the cost of buying a copy from AtariAge? For me, yes, no question. For others, though? Well, definitely play it, at least. While definitely not Eugene Jarvis’s best Atari 5200 game, Blaster is a solidly good game that is impressive to see.

Also released in arcades. This is the original version, though that one is enhanced over this release. This Atari 5200 version is exclusive, though the arcade version is available in Midway Presents Arcade’s Greatest Hits: The Midway Collection 2 (PC / PlayStation) and Midway Arcade Treasures [1] (GameCube / PlayStation 2 / Xbox / PC). Unfortunately it is not in the newer Midway Arcade Origins collection for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.


Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom – 1 player.  Has analog controls.  Developed and published by Sega in 1983.

Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, or Zoom 909 as its original Japanese arcade game was titled before they added the Buck Rogers license to the Western release, was one of Sega’s first super-scaler style games. This game is a behind-the-ship rail shooter, and in arcades and on Colecovision it has many different stage types along the way through each loop of the game. It’s a good title and I like the various ways enemies come at you in the different ‘stages’, though determining 3d depth can be hard, you will often miss enemy ships you think you are lined up with. This flaw applies to all versions of the game except for one, the Atari 2600 version.

However, this is not the Colecovision version, or the 2600 version. It is the Atari 5200 version, and as with all versions other than the Colecovision, the game is dramatically reduced in stage count. As with most non-Colecovision ports, this version of Buck Rogers has “five” stages per level: first three parts on the planet, as you go through gates and fight enemies. The game calls this multiple rounds but it’s basically one, you just go through gates in the start then fight one type of enemy and then several before you leave the planet. Once you leave, first you fight a formation of enemies and then a boss before you move on to the next level. It’s a decent formula, but it is hard to forget that the Coleco version has something like twice as much stage variety, or to get over both versions’ common flaw, how hard hitting enemies can be with the 3d perspective. The audio is also extremely basic, with no music and only simple sound effects for your gun and engine noise. The analog controls help slightly, compared to other home versions of Buck Rogers, but not enough to make me want to play this.

Worse, I also can’t help but to compare this game to the outstanding Atari 2600 version of the game, which I covered in a summary years ago. I absolutely love that game, it’s one of my favorite 2600 games! While the key design is mostly the same as this 5200 version in terms of it stage layout, the 2600 makes one major change, probably due to lesser hardware power it makes the game play on a flat plane. Removing the ‘where is the enemy actually?’ problem is a huge help, and as a result the 2600 has easily my favorite version of Planet of Zoom. It has the best audio by far as well, with some really cool sounds that you won’t find in this 5200 game. Yes, the 2600 both plays and sounds better than the 5200 version of this game. This is probably the only time I will say that, but it’s true here. Overall, Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom is an average game at best, and is deeply disappointing compared to the Atari 2600 version. Probably don’t buy this, get the 2600 version for the best version or the Colecovision one for the one that is the most faithful to the arcade game. I got this game knowing it wasn’t the best but wanting it anyway because I like this system, but it probably wasn’t really worth it.

Arcade port. Many versions of this game were released, most notably on the Colecovision, but also on Atari 2600, Sega SG-1000 (note, this is NOT the same as the Colecovision version despite near-identical hardware!), PC, ZX Spectrum, TI-99/4A, Commodore VIC-20, Atari 8-bit computer, Commodore 64, Apple II, MSX, and Coleco Adam. The arcade version is pretty good, but of what I have played I think I actually like the simple, 2d Atari 2600 version the best.


Castle Crisis [PD Homebrew] – 1 to 4 player simultaneous.  Has analog controls. You can use the regular controller, but the game also supports a paddle controller if you have a prototype or homebrew one. Homebrew title published by AtariAge in 2004.

This game is a Warlords clone for the 5200. If you know the Atari classic Warlords, you know this game; it is Warlords, with a few additions. Warlords is one of my favorite games on the 2600 and the 5200’s analog controller is a great fit for controlling a paddle, so it’s fantastic that a fan decided to do waht Atari didn’t and make a 5200 version of this classic. This game is based on the arcade version more so than the Atari 2600 game.

Warlords, on the 2600 or arcade, is a four player block-breaking game. Instead of just breaking a wall like Breakout, here there are four forts made of blocks in the corners of the screen, with a paddle protecting each one. The game starts with one ball, or fireball rather. You must protect the warlord inside your fort. One of the buttons holds the ball, so you can launch it off from the point you choose. You defend your fort while trying to bounce the ball around the enemy paddles and destroy the warlords in the three other forts. Each time one of the four players is knocked out, another fireball is added to the field. The game will also add a second fireball early on if nobody hits anything for a while. It’s a fantastic game with great controls, a paddle might be neat but the analog stick works extremely well here. This is a challenging, fast-paced, and frenetic game that can be incredibly fun. The game has absolutely no slowdown and gets the feel of the arcade game down exceptionally.

For game modes, there aren’t many. The single player has only a single difficulty level, and it’s tough. The game keeps a score in this mode if you want to write down best scores, and if you win a game you go right into a new one until you lose. One loss and it’s game over. The two player mode is like the single player, but with two people. It’s co-op basically, and you don’t get game over until both players lose in the same level. Three and four player games are single-round versus only matches which don’t have a score or progression. All of these modes are just like arcade Warlords. In any mode, all non-human players are filled with some pretty tough AIs. More options might be nice, but they aren’t really needed. Really, the only negative is that this is an extremely faithful unlicensed clone of an Atari game, but at least they changed the name, most homebrew conversions like this don’t even do that. AtariAge and Atari may have some kind of deal anyway, AtariAge uses Atari’s logo and such without issue.

There is one issue however. On the 2600 four player play is easy, since 2600 paddles come two to a cable. On the 5200 it is trickier however, as controllers are one to a cable and only the first model of the console has four controller ports, the second model dropped to two since Atari released basically nothing using more than two controllers, Super Breakout excepted, but it’s just an alternating mode there anyway. Had they released games like this back then perhaps the model two would have kept four controller ports, because this is a fantastic time! I wouldn’t call the controls better than the 2600, since paddles are a really good fit for this kind of game, but the analog joystick works just about as well.

Overall, Castle Crisis is great. This is a fantastic conversion of one of the best pre-crash games. Whether it’s worth the money or not is up to you, as it’s a full-price game on AtariAge and as great as the single player is the multiplayer is a huge part of the fun and you’ll need a 4-port system to get the most of it, but even just for single player play it’s a great, great game which I definitely recommend. That it isn’t an original idea, but a homebrew port, is really my only criticism here.

This game is only released on the Atari 8-bit computer and Atari 5200, but it is a very faithful port of the arcade game Warlords, which has been released on many formats, most notably the Atari 2600. Warlords has modern remakes as well.


Countermeasure – 1 or 2 player alternating. Released by Atari in 1982.

Countermeasure is an early 5200 game from Atari, and it is their only released 5200 game that is exclusive to this system, this game wasn’t released on arcades, 2600, or Atari 8-bit computer. Control here is not analog, but it does have eight-direction shooting and aiming. The game does make full use of both action buttons and has some complexity to it. Reading the manual is highly recommended before playing this game.

Countermeasure is a decent, but perhaps overly difficult, overhead tank action game with some complexity to it. The game scrolls upwards vertically, infinitely so I believe, though each level has a timer and you move slowly so you will usually only get a few screens up if you are playing well. Along the way you will find enemy turrets that rotate and shoot at you when you are in their line of fire, towers that contain clues to the code you need for this level, rocket silos to touch if you know the code and wish to end the level, and terrain obstacles which slow you down and block your fire. You slowly drive upwards in your tank, shooting enemies and trying to save the world.

For controls, you move with the stick. One button shoots, and the other, when held down, will rotate the turret to the direction you press. So, turning your turret is easy here, which is pretty nice. The very slow movement speed can make the game frustrating, though. The controls are responsive, but while this game is solid it often feels unfair, the enemies often seem to be able to shoot farther than you and hit you when you can’t hit them. Again, your slow movement speed also makes avoidance tricky. Staying alive in the main levels is hard, those towers are merciless! Still, the way that your movement speed and fire distance vary depending on terrain is pretty cool, and advanced for 1982. The graphics are alright, with solid sprite art and recognizable terrain. The sounds are good, though there is no music, a far too common issue on this console.

As I suggested in the previous paragraph, your main goal here isn’t just to get to the end of each level. Instead, as the game’s name suggests, you need to find the countermeasure code to stop an oncoming enemy nuclear attack. You need to find the three letters of the launch code that will save America from the enemy nukes! Each launch code is three letters long, and there are three letters that can go in each spot, O, L, or E. Letters can repeat in multiple spots though so you do want to find the clues and not just guess. Each clue tower will tell you one of the three letters of the code.

Once you get the code, or enough of it, or are running out of time and have no choice, go to a tower. The enemy helpfully waits to launch their nukes until you get into the tower to stop them. Once you touch a tower you CANNOT leave and must enter the code before the tower’s countdown ends. Note, this is a separate timer from the one in the level before. If you fail to input the code, it is Game Over and a skull appears over the world map on the screen. Ouch. If you succeed, it’s on to the next level, where the colors may change to give the game some variety. As with most games of the time the game never ends, every time you save the world you just start again on the next, slightly harder, stage until you eventually run out of lives. Each level is short, and the game starts out easy. There are ten difficulty levels available, which adds some replay value. The launch code on each stage also randomize so you can’t just memorize them.

Overall Countermeasure is okay. This game can be fun and definitely is a tense and challenging experience, but the frustrating difficulty and slow gameplay hold it back. I like overhead vehicular action games and was hoping for something great for one of Atari’s only 5200 exclusives, but this game is a slow and bland game that is above average, but not one of the system’s best. Atari’s best 5200 exclusives were never released, unfortunately. Still, with a low price and decent gameplay Countermeasure is probably worth picking up if it sounds interesting.

This game is officially a Atari 5200 exclusive, though I believe that a homebrew Atari 8-bit port exists.


Decathlon (aka The Activision Decathlon) – 1 or 2 player simultaneous. Developed and published by Activision in 1984.

Decathalon is a port of the Atari 2600 game of the same name. As with many of Activision’s 5200 ports of 2600 games, it is a graphically enhanced version of the game that changes almost nothing in terms of gameplay other than making the game harder to control. The audio isn’t much improved either, expect only very basic sound effects and minimal start and end music. So, there is very little reason to get this game on the 5200 specifically versus the 2600 version unless you really like this system. That said, Decathalon is a decently fun olympic sports game that can be fun, so for cheap enough it’s worth a thought despite how similar it is to the original version.

As with the original version, this game has only one mode, the decathlon, and you don’t really have AI opposition, only one or two humans. You do get points based on your performance, though. There is an AI racer running on screen with you in the track running events, but their times are not recorded anywhere after the races and they do not compete in the jumping or throwing events, so this really is just a score or multiplayer-only game. I wish it had more full AI opposition, that would add to the game.

As with most Olympic sports games, Decathlon is, at its core, a button-masher, or stick-twister in this case. Konami’s Track & Field used two alternating buttons to run, but this one uses alternating between left and right movements on the stick to run. You have a meter on the screen for each player showing your current pace, and can affect it with proper stick-movement rhythm. You will also use a button for jumping or throwing in those events. As you might expect, the 5200 controller’s loose analog stick makes running a bit trickier than it is on the 2600 with its tight digital stick. This game is playable, but the constant stick-waggle gameplay is tiring and gets old fast. Playing this a lot would be bad for your hands, I would say.

As the name suggests, there are ten events in this title as you go through the ten parts of a decathlon track and field event. You’ll run the 100, 400, and 1500 meter track races and a hurdles race, jump the longjump and high jump, throw the discus, javelin, and such. Most events are simple to control, but getting the timing right for the jumping events can be challenging and will definitely require practice and perhaps a read of the manual. The graphics are nice and are enhanced over the 2600 version. This game is far from essential even on the 2600 but is an amusing enough game once in a while. The controls on this version do hold it back a bit, but it’s alright. This game has definitely aged, with its very short runtime and lack of AI opposition, but even so is an above average game on the edge of good. This game could have been a lot better but is okay.

Atari 2600 port. Also released on Atari 8-bit computers. Other ports of the game were released on Commodore 64, MSX, and Colecovision.


The Dreadnaught Factor – 1 player.  Has analog controls.  Released by Activision in 1983.

The Dreadnaught Factor is one of Activision’s few console games of the early ’80s that isn’t a port of an Atari 2600 games. This game is an early scrolling shmup. The game was only released on the Intellivision and 5200, and the two versions are quite different — this one is vertical scrolling, while the Intellivision version, as you might expect, has worse graphics and is horizontal scrolling. This game is one of those titles which shows what the Atari 5200 can do, and it is impressive. The graphics here are really good, with nicely-drawn sprites and some cool effects as the enemy ships approach you. Audio work is also great. This is the kind of thing this system can do when it wasn’t just getting last-gen ports!

The Dreadnaught Factor is a shmup where you fight against a finite fleet of enemy battleships. Yes, finite — this is one of those rare pre-crash games that you can actually beat and last more than a few minutes! The game has different difficulty levels, each with more battleships than the last. The easy modes are quite simple to complete, but the 100-dreadnaught hardest mode will be much more of a challenge; this game does have limited lives and no continues. In the game you fly upwards, facing off against the dreadnaught one at a time. This game has full analog control, so your side-to-side and forward speed are proportionally controllable. You cannot stop or turn around however, only slow down to a crawl. One action buttons shoots lasers that hit turrets, fighters, or bridges, and the other drops bombs that go in exhaust ports or engines. Yes, this game makes good use of the 5200 controller’s strengths.

Your main objective is to blow up all of the exhaust ports on each ship. Destroy those and you will blow up the ship. In order to do that though, you will need to destroy many turrets, bridges, and engines on the ship in order to slow the ships down and make them shoot at you less. The game has some nice strategy to it as you consider what to attack. Now, I mentioned speed control, but you can’t stop, so each time you fly over the dreadnaught without dying you will automatically fly back around for another pass. Dreadnaughts advance after every pass however, and if you take too many passes and a dreadnaught reaches your base, it’s Game Over. You can get shot down many times and keep going as you have many lives, but the game ends if they reach the base. The game doesn’t have a lot of variety, but makes up for it with its quality. Sure, you just fly up, avoid enemy fire, and shoot targets on the various types of dreadnaughts, but with good graphics, good controls, and well designed, high quality action that pushes its genre forward in ways rarely seen at the time, The Dreadnaught Factor is a pretty impressive game for the pre-crash era.

How great is this compared to the top shmups of the NES, though? Well, it’s no Gradius and it is a more limited game in some respects, with less graphical variety and a slow difficulty curve, but it makes up for it with great gameplay. There is challenge eventually, there are different styles of dreadnaughts with different designs so you aren’t just shooting the exact same ship every time, and challenge the loop is a lot of fun, though, so I don’t mind the pretty minor flaws much at all. I also really like that you can actually beat this game. This is a standout game for the 5200 and one of the best shooters of the pre-crash era.

Also released on Atari 8-bit computers, without the analog controls there of course. The game was also released on the Intellivision, though that version is fairly different; it is a side-scroller instead of vertical.


Frogger – 1-2 player alternating. By Parker Bros., 1983 (licensed from Konami).

Frogger is one of the early arcade hits and it has been ported to dozens of platforms, past and present. The Atari 5200 version is a solid port, but this game is a very poor fit for the Atari 5200 controller. I mostly like the 5200 controller, but certain types of games don’t work well with that analog stick and a precise digital-control game like Pac-Man or, here, Frogger is at the top of that list.

I imagine most people know how Frogger plays, but I should describe it. This is a single-screen arcade game. You are a frog and need to get across a road and a river in order to get to the other side and score points. You move space-by-space, trying to avoid the oncoming cars in the first half and then trying to stay on the logs and alligators in the second half so as to not fall in the water. For some reason this frog can’t swim, which is quite silly. The game has nice graphics that well represent the arcade game. It is a simple but addictive arcade game.

The game looks and sounds nice and plays correctly, just as Frogger should. the issue is the controller. You have two control options here: either you can use the stick and a fire button, or the keypad. For the stick option, you use the stick to choose which direction you want to move, and a fire button to jump. The stick is more comfortable to use, but its drawback is how much you have to move it to make Frogger change directions. This delay makes quick reactions very difficult, and it is the controller’s fault and not the game. The keypad option is simpler, hit # to go into keypad mode and then you just push the 2, 4, 6, and 8 keys on the keypad to move in the four directions. A complete copy of the game comes with an overlay that leaves the 2, 4, 6, and 8 digits exposed, though it is quite unnecessary once you remember that those are the directions. The keypad is a quicker and more reliable way to move, but these sunken-in rubbery keys were not meant to be main action buttons, just supplimentary ones, so I find this less comfortable. I’d almost rather use the stick honestly, even if it makes the game harder. The four buttons are also far apart from eachother.

So, both control options have good and bad points. Parker Bros. did the best they could with the controls in this game, but as good as the 5200 is its controller is not equally suited for all kinds of games. As I have said before, this issue is why modern controllers have both a d-pad and an analog stick on them, each one has its own advantages and disadvantages depending on the type of game being played. The 5200 controller was highly innovative and I like it, but this game shows that it is better for some kinds of games than others.

Arcade port. This version was also released on Atari 8-bit computers, there with simpler digital controls. Other versions of Frogger have been released on dozens of platforms. Frogger is surely one of the most-ported games ever.


James Bond 007 [1983] – 1 or 2 player alternating. By Parker Bros., 1984.

This is one of the many Atari 2600 to 5200 ports on this platform. This game is generally unpopular on the 2600, and unfortunately this is an accurate port. Parker Bros. made some great 5200 games, but while this game has improved graphics and sound over the original 2600 version, the gameplay is the same and that is the main problem here. While not bad, this is, unfortunately, a below average game.

What is the game, though? Well, James Bond 007 is a side-scrolling vehicular action game. Each of the three levels is loosely themed after scenes from different James Bond movies, but they all involve you driving in a car, car-boat, or such. The game tells you the movie name and your number of lives before your car takes off and the next stage starts. This game kind of plays like a much worse, more complex take on Moon Patrol with mission objectives that it doesn’t tell you except in the manual. You can move forward and back a bit with the stick. You jump by pushing the stick up, which is awful and very hard to control. If you hold the stick up you will keep jumping as soon as you hit the ground, so watch out. The game uses one fire button, which fires your two kinds of shots, anti-air missiles and bombs/depth charges, to hit enemies above or below you. Both attacks go diagonally forwards and you cannot turn around so if you miss an enemy it can be a problem, some will shoot you from behind. The game badly needed either separate fire buttons for the two attacks or a jump button, but no, it’s just a lazy 2600 port controls-wise. Oh well.

For graphics and sound it’s a mixed bag. While there are some nice graphical details here, particularly in the animated Bond waving and getting into his car in each level’s intro, this game both looks and plays worse than Moon Patrol on the 5200. The game does scroll smoothly, as expected on the 5200, but don’t expect any parallax here. There is a nice rendition of the James Bond theme on the main menu, but as sadly usual on the 5200 there is no in-game music.

Anyway, in each stage, you drive to the right. You cannot stop so you will need some good reflexes to survive. You need to jump over pits and shoot enemies as you try to accomplish the objective in each level, which generally means reaching the end of the stage. You do need to know what to do in order to complete each mission though, so read the manual. You should try to shoot the diamonds in the sky in the Diamonds are Forever level, for instance, and must jump onto and land on a specific oil platform in another level. You will do a lot of jumping here but cannot control your car in the air, so if you’re shot midair there isn’t much you can do, you lose a life. Similarly, you can also dive under the water in some areas, but only in a jump-style automatic dive which you cannot really control while underway. This game gets very frustrating far too often, as dodging enemy far is a huge pain. Practice pays off, but is it really worth the hassle? There are also three difficulty levels, with the easiest as the default.

And that’s the game. The graphical differences and moderate complexity of each mission is interesting, but the flawed, slow controls and sometimes very frustrating gameplay make this game much harder than it should be. Like most people, I haven’t finished all three levels yet and don’t know if I will. It probably loops afterwards, though. This is a below-average game that probably isn’t worth playing. If you do, get ready to memorize everything and die constantly. I don’t regret getting it, but can’t recommend this one to anyone other than serious James Bond diehards or 5200 collectors.

Released on Atari 2600 first, then also Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit computer (this version), Colecovision, Sega SG-1000, and Commodore 64.


Magical Fairy Force [Homebrew] – 1-2 player simultaneous.   Has analog controls.  Supports the Atari 5200 Trak-Ball controller or a regular 5200 joystick. Homebrew game developed by Average Software (aka Phaser Cat Games) and published by AtariAge in 2021. The game was completed and released digitally in 2020, but due to production delays the physical cart was not released until 2021.

Magical Fairy Force is an original homebrew title, something quite rare for the Atari 5200. I was looking forward to this game for some time before its release and it’s awesome to finally have a copy! It is from the same developer as Ratcatcher, which I will cover later. The game was loosely inspired by the versus Neo-Geo shmup Twinkle Star Sprites, but is its own, entirely original game. It isn’t as good as Twinkle Star Sprites, but it’s a 2KB game for much older hardware, it does what it can.

The primary influence Magical Fairy Force takes from Twinkle Star Sprites is that it is a two player splitscreen versus shmup. Unlike that game though, probably for technical reasons the split here is horizontal instead of vertical, so one player is on the top half of the screen and the other the bottom. Both players shoot towards the center of the screen, so they face eachother but cannot hit eachother due to a status bar between them. The game has two modes and no difficulty options, either one player versus a computer or two people against eachother. The game was mostly designed as a two player versus game. The single player vs. AI side of the game fortunately exists, but was not the focus. Sadly, I have no one to play against so I can only judge the single player here. The single player mode is a story mode where you fight against all of the other characters and then get an ending text screen for that character. It’s cool that each character gets an ending, that adds some replay value. The two player mode is a basic versus mode, it does not keep track of wins and losses. The game is fun but there are no difficulty options and the game is mostly somewhat easy, though this does vary depending on which character you play as and whether you use controller or trackball.

The core gameplay here is to move around your side of the screen, charging your super meter by shooting enemies and then using those super attacks once the meter fills. This game has fully analog movement. The joystick works well, but if you have a Trak-Ball controller as I do it is highly recommended! With the trackball, control is basically perfect. Anyone with a 5200 trackball really should get this game. Anyway, one button shoots your normal shots, and the other uses a special attack. Each match ends when one player runs out of health. Each match is one round long, and the single player game has eight matches, against the eight characters. Multiplayer is strictly a single-match affair.

On screen, on each player’s end of the screen a status bar has a character portrait, health which is made up of four blocks, and the super meter. In the middle of the screen in a black bar are two timer bars, if one runs out that player loses. Also in the black section along a bar on the top or bottom edge of each player’s half of the screen, small wisps appear. These wisps are your main targets as shooting them fills your super meter. They will shoot bullets at you sometimes, shooting straight at you, but can’t move and only appear in this bar. Below/above that is the blue area you can move around in. Here you have your character sprite, and each of the eight characters has a custom sprite, and a few obstacles, most notably clouds and fairy dust, along with wisp bullets and enemy super attacks. Touching clouds drains your timer quickly, so shoot them if they are getting in your way. I have almost never run out of time though, so the threat of the timer is rarely an issue so long as you shoot the clouds in your way. The graphics are pretty good for this system and have an impressive amount of detail. Audio is extremely minimal, however; there are only very basic sound effects and that’s it, there is no music.

My other criticism is of the core gameplay loop, that is, of shooting those small, immobile wisps. The gameplay, as you move mostly left and right trying to hit those wisps while shooting or dodging lightning bolts, bullets, and super moves, is fun and rewarding when you do well, but it lacks the excitement of its inspiration. Twinkle Star Sprites is a dynamic game full of enemies attacking in wave-based patterns. You don’t really have any of that here, you just shoot the wisps while dodging or shooting any other obstacles or enemy supers in your way. For the 5200 this is a fairly complex game, but I can’t help but wish for more dynamic action than this target-shooting-focused title. I would never expect the equal of Neo-Geo gameplay complexity on the 5200 of course, but it’s too bad that something more like the pattern-based waves of Twinkle Star Sprites aren’t here. I know you couldn’t do too many patterns in a playfield this horizontally wide and vertically narrow, but maybe something could have been done. On the other hand though, while a bit dry the game is fun. It requires good skill, and matches get tense as health dwindles. The game also shows off the Trak-Ball well.

Bullets can be dangerous, but most damage in this game is done by special attacks you charge by shooting those wisps. You have two abilities, a weaker one for about half of your super meter which sends a couple of lightning bolts at your enemy, and a character-specific super attack for a full, blinking meter. Enemy lightning bolts are easy to shoot down and fill up your super meter a nice amount if you shoot them, but if you miss one and it gets past you that player does take a hit. Still, I think they’re probably too easy to dispose of, taking damage to lightning is rare as far as I’ve seen in this game so far. They add some tension as you have to get over to them to shoot them down, but I almost always make it. The full-bar supers are another story though, they are definitely dangerous. I like how each character has a custom move, that’s impressive for such a small game. I don’t think all eight are equally balanced, though; some are MUCH easier to hit enemies with than others, and while the different characters’ meters do charge at different speeds, still I get the strong sense that this game isn’t balanced. At least against the AI, I think some characters are significantly better than others. It all depends on how easy it is to hit the AI with your supers. Oddly, the final boss’s super is not the best one, I would say. I know balance is hard, but this is one of my main issues with the game. Things may be quite different against a human, but I haven’t been able to play that way so far.

It may sound like I am criticizing this game a lot, but I do like this game and enjoy playing it. It is simple and yet has depth, the graphics are good, and the controls are spot-on. I do wish it had more polish and balance, and more features such as music, difficulty options for single player, and a win-loss record for multiplayer, but I know the game creator said that they couldn’t fit more features in this cartridge size, the largest the system natively supports. Unfortunately, while having a larger cartridge with bank switching is possible on the 5200, it is not currently available much at all. I hope that that changes, this game could use the space. What’s here is good but a few more features would be great and the balance is questionable. When I first played this game, I lost my first match, won my second, lost my third, and then went back to read the manual more thoroughly. After that I easily beat the game without losing a single round. Yeah. I seem to have happened to select a character with one of the best supers, and got lucky in that few full-bar supers were used against me during the game; the AI sometimes uses full-bar super attacks and other times just throws that mostly useless lighting at you for long stretches, for some reason. When that happens you win easily. I had fun despite how easy it was, though, so I decided to play again with a different character. I found it much harder with them, I died many times. Overall, the difficulty is a little easy but is balanced reasonably, most of the time I do get a few game overs before winning. Fortunately you have infinite continues in this game, so you will win so long as you keep trying. That’s good design.

Overall, Magical Fairy Force is a good game. It doesn’t quite reach greatness, at least in single player, but it is good and can be a lot of fun to play. The graphics are great, challenge reasonable, and the action fast and a good mix of skill and luck. I also love that it’s an original game and not just another conversion or port! It is also great to see another Trak-Ball game, the 5200 trackball is an amazing controller and needs more games. The core ‘shoot the little wisps in a line on top of your half of the screen’ gameplay isn’t as exciting as I wish it was, audio is minimal, and the super attacks seem quite unbalanced, but the game is much more good than bad. If I had another human to play against, instead of the sometimes iffy AI, I probably would like the game more, too; again, it was designed first and foremost for multiplayer that I can’t often try these days. I can imagine multiplayer matches being pretty tense at times, as you go back and forth. This indie game has some issues, but it’s pretty good overall and absolutely is worth buying.

This game is a 5200 exclusive so far, though the developer is working on a PC (Steam digital download) port/remake with added features.

Rankings

If I was ranking these games against eachother, I would put them in this order:

The Dreadnaught Factor > Castle Crisis > Magical Fairy Force >> Blaster > Countermeasure > Decathlon >>> Frogger > Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom > James Bond 007

The top three of these are very good games I definitely recommend, and the fourth is at least worth a look for sure. Overall none of these games quite match Defender, Centipedeo, or Galaxian, games I covered in my original 5200 list, but The Dreadnaught Factor is close. As for those last two, though… well, James Bond and Buck Rogers are, currently, my two least favorite games of the now over 40 titles I have for the 5200. Ah well. If that’s the worst a system has, we’re talking about a pretty solid console.

Posted in Atari 5200, Classic Games, Game Opinion Summaries, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

On My Super Mario Maker Levels – For Both Mario Maker 1 and 2

Posted on May 20, 2021 by Brian

What, it’s an actual… update on the site?  Why yes it is.  Once I started not updating the site for a while, I started worrying more about it and that led me to do what I usually do in such situations, ignore the issue.  Of course this doesn’t solve most problems, but I do it anyway.  For pretty much the whole last year and a half I have been meaning to make a bunch more posts about Mario Maker on this site — one about the “final update” when Nintendo abandoned the game less than a year after its release, one about my levels once I started making them for MM2 in mid 2020, and more.  And today I finally wrote one of those updates, about my levels.

Before I begin, I will be using a lot of Super Mario Maker terminology in this article.  Sorry about that, for those not familiar with the terms.  I will try to describe what things mean.  Please also read my previous Mario Maker 1 and 2 articles on this site for more on how these games work.

And well, I’ve finally gotten to making that second one, about my levels.  I started making levels for Mario Maker 2 in June 2020, right as Nintendo abandoned the game with the “final update”, and have made nine levels in the eleven months since then.  Additionally, I made three Mario Maker 1 levels in the month before uploading to that game was shut down in March.  They aren’t entirely original — I took a VERY long MM2 level I made (that remains uncleared) and broke it up into three reasonable-length levels for the first game — but I had a lot of fun making those stages and they aren’t the exact same as the MM2 original, so they certainly count.

My levels come in two types, the numbered levels for my Super World, and other one-off stages I make.  So far I have five super world levels and four other stages.  The numbered super world stages are all Super Mario Bros. 3-themed, while the others have a variety of themes — two are SMB1, one SM3DW, and one SMW.   The Super World is basically a series recreating the levels from one of the games I designed on paper as a kid but never had been able to actually play before.  It’s a really cool project that I will complete; there are three more levels to go to make the full eight of the original design.  I went with the SMB3 theme for them because it seemed the most appropriate given what Mario I’d played the most back when I thought up those levels in the early ’90s, and it was definitely the NES games, I had limited access to the SNES that decade.  For my other levels I use other themes.  The themes are different in looks but also in gameplay, as each one has different features that only exist in that theme, so it’s nice to make levels in a variety of themes since they definitely play differently.  The most recent level I just uploaded today.

How good are these levels?  I won’t say that they are the best levels ever, but I like them.  I think most of them are good, and I hope others do as well.  Whether you like them or not depends entirely on what kind of Mario levels you like to play.  I’m only moderately decent at the game, but like to challenge myself by making levels that I find hard.  My goal was to make Expert-difficulty levels, but I guess most of the levels ended up above that because they have low clear rates.  I can’t do the tricky techs like shell jumps and such, though; they’re challenging but normal levels anyone should be able to clear with enough patience.  For context, in the Ninji Speedrun competition levels that Nintendo made themselves, I usually ended up either at the top end of the two-star times or the bottom of the three-star time.  The three star time is Nintendo’s top rewards bracket, but the best players got times far better than that.  As in, I’m okay at the game but no match at all for the top players. I’m fine with that as this game is great for Mario players of any skill level.

Lastly for the introduction part, all 12 levels I will mention in this article still are up and playable.  My first MM1 level got quickly deleted because not enough people played it, but I have not had this problem in MM2 or with my three late MM1 levels; between more people playing MM2 and that I advertised the stages slightly more, they thankfully have stayed up.  I hope it stays that way.

With that said, my first Mario Maker 2 level, in June 2020, was a port of my old Mario Maker 1 level that I wrote an article about several years ago on this site.  Yes, I made a Mario Maker 2 version of Airship Attack.

Game: SMM2. Level: Airship Attack. Code: VMG-62B-9XG. This SMB1-theme level is an adaptation of my one 3DS/Wii U Mario Maker stage, with some improvements based on a few comments I got from when the SMM1 version was available. I really like the stage, other than that I messed up the screenshot that shows with the stage… bah, that bugs me every time I see it! The level is a Mario Maker level for sure, I made it challenging and kind of annoying in that classic Super Mario Maker way.  It’s not a troll level or such though, this is a legit platforming stage with a series of setups to get past.  I think it’s a pretty good and well-balanced stage overall.  The hardest part of the level is about halfway through, where you have to use a moving platform to get through a small hole in a wall of spikes.  This part is tricky due to numerous fireballs to avoid on top of the spikes, but I like it quite a bit anyway.  I like all of the changes I made to this stage versus its original version; I made a few rookie mistakes in the SMM1 version that are fixed here.  If I ever remake this level yet AGAIN, someday, in addition to fixing the screenshot location, I’d also add a second checkpoint right near the end.  If you die at the end you go back a long, long way, and I should have put in that second checkpoint.  But it’s a good level as it is, and I’ve had fun with it each of the three or four times I’ve remade the level now across different versions of the game.  This version of the level has clears and likes, which was great to see.  This is still overall maybe my favorite Mario Maker level that I have made, probably due to it being my first one.

Game: SMM2. My Super World Code: 2D4-L46-SJG This incomplete Super World has five main levels now, consisting of the first five of the eight levels of that game I mentioned earlier that I “made” as a kid, plus several of my other levels added in as optional stages.  Each level has a bossfight against a Koopa Kid at the end. All numbered levels use the SMB3 tileset.  The basic story here is as follows.  The original game as I said above, was called “Castle Siege: Knights of the Golden Sword”.  It has eight levels and gameplay-wise is a cross between Mario and a beat ’em up like Golden Axe with an ’80s to early ’90s Castle Lego-inspired set of weapons and such.  Which would it have ended up as back then I’m not sure, but elements of both are clearly present.  These Mario Maker levels obviously are all Mario and no Golden Axe, since this isn’t a beat ’em up.  It changes the gameplay but that’s fine, my goal with this Super World is to make a Mario version of Castle Siege. It fits well, and I’m glad I started this after the “final update” because the Koopa Kids and Bowser are a perfect fit as bosses of the eight levels, much more so than just the three bosses of the base SMM2 game would have been or some creations of my own or such.

Super World Stages:

Game: SMM2. Level 1-1: Volcano – 7N5-3JC-V2G – This is my easiest stage by a lot, it’s fairly short and straightforward: go up, then go down. That’s not to say that the level is easy because there are a lot of enemies here who are trying to kill you, but your task is straightforward and the level is not especially long.  Apart from the boss, which is the first of the Koopa Kids, this is quite faithful to the original design.  Just make sure to dodge the hammers at the start… heh. A decent number of people have cleared this level and it has some hearts.  If I made more level of this difficulty maybe my levels would be more popular, but no, my other stages are mostly quite a bit tougher than this one and you can see the results in clear percentages and number of plays.  This one is the highest in both counts.  This level may be Normal difficulty, I’m not sure where the dividing line is in terms of completion percentage.

Game: SMM2. Level 1-2: The Mine – VD5-Y7T-6XF – This level is a simple maze in an underground mine. I made this harder than the original concept by requiring that you get three coins in various corners of the stage. I can see why some people would find that annoying, but I like the change because the “maze” is pretty simple, the level needed something to make it more interesting and substantial. This is supposed to be an eight-level adventure, and that requires trickier stages than it was on paper.  There’s a reset door at the end if you didn’t get all three that goes back to the beginning. The three coins are in some corners of the map. You CAN get all three in one pass through the level if you take the correct route, the reset door is not required. Here’s a hint to the sequence if you want it:  The first coin is in the first pit, and the other two on the upper route. Avoid the lower route where the screen in the level-image screenshot is.

Game: SMM2. Level 1-3: The Lake – M0Y-WKB-SJG – This is an underwater frogsuit level. It’s kind of long I guess and is mostly a ‘keep moving and dodge the stuff’ stage, but the frog suit is so much fun to use that I liked making it for sure. Just try not to lose that frogsuit.  Versus my original design this level has the same basic layout, but I made the later two thirds of the stage have spikes for walls in order to increase the challenge a bit.  The boss fight at the end is also original, and I like it.  However, other than my very long level The Castle, this level has the fewest clears and the fewest likes of any of the levels I have made, which… really, is wrong!  Sure, the level is a bit long and you do mostly just hold right or left while avoiding oncoming enemies, but I really like the challenge of trying to not get hit.  The frog suit is a fantastic powerup which makes for some fun avoidance-based gameplay and that is what you do here.  I think this really show the bias people have against water levels, but come on, with the frog suit they can be pretty good!  I would honestly rank this as one of my favorites of my levels.

Game: SMM2. Level 1-4: Enemy Camp – FWD-PNJ-84G –  In this stage you come down out of the mountains, fight your way through an enemy camp, break through their siege lines, and enter a captured castle at the end.   Yes, it’s a key part of your journey! So, back in the mid ’90s, I redrew the first four levels of this game to add specific enemy counts to the stages, make everything look better, and such. I did not redraw the later four levels, though, so adapting them will require a lot more new content than these do. So, this is a perfect stopping point for world one. Of course a lot is new due to Mario Maker 2’s mechanics and stuff I added to make the levels a bit tougher and more interesting — there are new machinery parts mid-level for instance, more enemies, and such — but still it’s much more faithful than the later ones, levels six and seven particularly, will be; those will need a lot of work. The level is rough around the edges and some of the machinery parts could be refined for sure, but it’s good enough for a one-day Mario Maker project so I’m publishing it. Once made, I had to clear check it, though, and that was the hard part, this level took me a couple of hours to clear. Other players won’t have as many problems of course because you get to use that checkpoint. The level has some clear and likes, and that’s great, I really like the end moment of the stage particularly as you reach the castle, so it’s nice that some people have experienced it.

After that level in about November, for a December level I took a break from the Super World to make a new level that isn’t one of the Castle Siege remake stages.

Game: SMM2.  Level: Piranha Castle. Code: XS5-V6R-WKF  What did I make?  After some thought, I decided to make a challenging but short platforming level with a more intense pace than most of my stages.  This is a short level, but every bit of it requires precise commands to get through as you avoid lava, piranha plants, and fireballs.  This is no elite precision level, it is approachable, but it’ll definitely take practice to complete!  It uses the 3D World theme, which might be my favorite theme in the game. You’ve got to get through a fireball and piranha plant-infested castle, good luck! This is another level that’d be much easier if you could use the checkpoint than when I had to clear it from the start, that requirement is kind of cruel. But anyway, the level’s a fun challenge. There is a coin trail to help, follow it! I have just one note to help players,  you need to walljump immediately at the exit of all clear pipes so hold back in the pipe then jump. Make full jumps after each clear pipe, cutting the second one off slightly early so as to avoid the spike wall. In a creation note, the fireballs after clear pipes can’t kill you if you make a full, correct jump; if they could it would be random chance and I thought that would be unfair. I put thought into this.  One interesting thing about this level is that it has dramatically more attempts than any of my other stages, but has a similar number of footprints, likes, and clears.  This shows that some people really got into it and died a lot but kept coming back.  The mark of a good difficult level indeed.

My next level after that, completed in late January 2021, is one anyone other than me clearly considers much less good.  Well, I at least like it, sorry about that.

Game: SMM2. Level: 2-1: The Castle. Code H19-G58-WQG.  So in the original Castle Siege “game”, level five was the longest and most challenging looking level of the eight. I put off starting work on it for a while because I knew it would be that, but in mid January finally got started.  It really probably should be the last level of the Super World, but I put it at level five so here it is, surely the longest and hardest level of my Super World in the middle of the world.  Oh well; I want to stick to the order and layouts of the original designs, and I’m doing that.  This level took a lot of work — I spent several weeks in January working on and tweaking this level.  Unfortunately, with how long it is very few people have seen almost any of that.  It wasn’t deleted, but only got eleven footprints and no hearts or clears.  I’m not surprised by that but it is kind of too bad, there’s some cool stuff in this level if you get far enough… and some pretty challenging stuff, but hey this is Mario so that should be expected.

Anyway, after a lot of tweaking I finally managed to make the level something I could upload.  Versus my first design, essentially I left most of the section up to the first checkpoint unchanged (apart from some alterations to make the first screen a lot easier), but kept adding in powerups and such to the later two third of the level. So, really the hardest part of this stage is the first third. Once you get to that first checkpoint it gets a lot easier, I think. There are definitely hard parts later on, but a few things are cheesable and there are regular powerups so with a bit of practice it’s not too bad. After finally clearing from the start last night, I cleared from both checkpoints pretty quickly.

I am thinking about making a harder remake of this stage without the compromises — fix the things I know you can cheese, put back in that one really annoying enemy at the beginning, make some of the jumps later one harder that I eased up on, maybe get rid of the checkpoints, and such. Perhaps. That would take forever for me to upload though so I’m not sure if I will.  So far I have not.  I did do something else, though — I made three levels that break this level into parts, with a full level for each of its three checkpoints.  I made those three levels in Super Mario Maker 1, though, and have not ported them back to SMM2 yet.  I will probably do that eventually.  More on these levels soon.

I also broke one part of this level out into a dedicated stage — after coming up with a pretty cool idea for how to do a tower0climbing section that’d be a lot more interesting than ‘just go up a vine or platform’, I decided to  make a full level dedicated to just that idea.  More on that below.  I quite like that part of this stage and I’m glad I thought to make a much more accessible version of it.

But yes, this level is hardest in its first third. I know that having a level be hard at the end is best in a normal game, but honestly for Mario Maker this way is a lot more tolerable for the creator — after all, it’s easy to restart a clear attempt when you keep dying at the beginning. But if you keep dying at the END of a hard level, over and over and over again? That would be incredibly frustrating in a much worse way. If they make a Mario Maker 3 I’d love to see them come up with a solution to fix the “levels are way way harder for the creator than anyone else” issue, if indeed it can be solved.

As for the level, the first third is somewhat precise platforming, as you jump over enemies and between vines over spikes.  The second third has you traveling through the great hall, kitchen, and first tower of the castle.  The kitchen and each tower room has a little puzzle in it for you to solve in order to proceed.   Two parts in his section gave people trouble, so while I changed them in the SMM1 remakes, so far I have chosen to not re-upload this stage so instead I should put a few hints here.  First, one of the tower rooms has an off-screen thwomp.  Pay attention to the arrow made of coins over a switch on the floor you need to hit at the end of a room, it is a warning.  And second, in the kitchen, keep moving!  If you stop in the middle of the meat grinder — that is, underneath the munchers only being kept away from you by P-switch blocks — Boom-Boom may hit one of those P-switches.  You are supposed to keep moving here, that’s what I always did while uploading, so do so and make that second jump.  With that done, it’s on to the last third of the level.  Here, in probably the easiest third of the stage, you travel over the top of the castle, up the second tower, and then down into it to fight the boss.  You can cheese some of this section of the level.  I think I came up with a great room for a battle against Roy Koopa; this is one my best boss fights for sure. My clear check time was 5 minutes and 31 seconds, and you could finish it faster than that but it’s going to take a long time regardless.  I hope there is someone out there takes on the challenge of clearing this stage in full; the parts are cleared, all three of those SMM1 levels have clears, but not the whole thing here!

In February I made a shorter level.

Game: SMM2. Level: The Climb.  Code: NPV-G19-V5G.   This is that level that breaks off the wall-climb portion of The Castle into its own level.  This version is longer than the equivalent portion of The Castle, as you have a full-height vertical sub-world to climb up instead of just three or four screens as it is in the original.  This is a simple and focused stage — you learn the tech, and then repeat until you reach the top. The tech in question is going up a vertical wall using alternating alternating donut blocks and falling icicles. It’s a neat trick.

I think it is a good level, though it’s not as thematically interesting as my past stages, I think, except for some theoretical existential meaninglessness if you want to read way too much into a Mario level. While making this level, I was thinking about the journey you take in the stage.  You see, you basically just go up this wall until you hit a pipe which spits you out near where you started, making the whole thing pointless except for the knowledge you got past this wall, but sometimes that’s just how it is. Maybe I’ll made a third version of this idea where you go up a wall like this then reach the top and jump down off the other side, but for now it’s a somewhat pointless, if entertaining, endeavor…

Anyway, the level is only a bit over a minute long and is pretty easy once you get the rhythm of the jumps down. I think it’s fun, if unchanging, as the spacing stays the same throughout. Versus the version in The Castle, this version is kind of harder and kind of easier. One the one hand, it’s longer — The Castle’s version is four screens of climbing, while this one is twelve screens. There also isn’t the blooper that The Castle has, so you can’t skip a jump by hitting it instead. There are no regular enemies this time, unlike the one of the Castle’s version. However, this version is also easier because there is a midway checkpoint and I put the Link powerup in at the last minute, which gives you an extra hit; in The Castle you just have regular powerups which make you larger, and I find it impossible to not get hit when large when climbing these walls. Plus you don’t need to deal with the sometimes tricky jump at the top of the tower in The Castle, much less the rest of that stage.

So, this level, The Climb, should be fairly simple, as I said, once you get the jumping rhythm down. Hopefully it’s fun, though.  The level has four comments, which is more than most of my stages, so a few people found it interesting at least.

How to play hint: I find you can make two small hops on a donut, most of the time, before the next icicle respawns.  Hop-hop-jump.  One of the comments on this level is someone pointing out this technique.
After that, in March 2021 I made three levels, the three Super Mario Maker 1 versions of the three thirds of The Castle.
The Castle Trilogy for Mario Maker 1

So, one way to tweak The Castle would be to put a few fixes into the stage. It would still be a very long level with only two checkpoints, though, so I decided to take a second path — make three levels based off of each third of the level.  However, since I only have one Switch I can’t really do that easily, I need something to recreate it from after all. I guess I could film the screen or something but haven’t done that.

Instead, I started remaking it in three pieces in Mario Maker 1 on the Wii U. I have now completed and uploaded the first two parts, and I would very much appreciate it if people gave them a try.  I’ve had fun with this and challenged myself with tweaking levels, and hope others can experience them as well.

My main takeaway is that I hadn’t played MM1 in a while, and this effort has reminded me of how much better MM2 is than the first game. I mean, making these levels is fun, but I keep running into ‘I wish I had that in this one…’ moments. Sure, creation is a lot better on the Wii U Gamepad than it is on the Switch, but the vast number of things you can put in your levels in the second game that don’t exist in the first one much more than outweigh that. I had to change a lot of things in these levels, this second one particularly, because of all the things MM1 doesn’t have. I made it work, but overall I like the experience better in MM2. The biggest loss are on/off blocks and P-switch blocks, I think, not having those really makes a lot of things harder. I miss Boom-Boom way more than I would have thought, though, along with Spike, slopes, vertical levels, and more.  Hammer Bros. are also MUCH more aggressive in the first game than the second, which makes getting past them much much harder in these stages than in the original SMM2 version.  Despite how tedious making levels with a controller can be, overall SMM2 is a better game even for creation because of how many more items are available to you.

Remember, these are both Mario Maker 1 levels, not 2.

Game: SMM1.  Level: The Castle, Part One – 28C1-0000-0424-6ACF

This level gets to the first checkpoint of the Switch stage. This is a stage full of somewhat precise jumps. In parts you move quickly and in others slowly, but either way it’s all about learning the jumps. It’s mostly the same as the original version, apart from slopes being replaced with stepped blocks and a Spike having to be replaced with a second Hammer Bros. I uploaded this stage quite quickly and definitely had fun with it, without the rest of the level this part’s a fun level, I would say!

The one thing I didn’t do is make the boss at the end mandatory, you can still run right by him. In a standalone stage maybe it should be required though, I’m not sure… oh well.

This makes a good standalone stage I hope people like.  I should have put a midway checkpoint in this level, and if/when I make a SMM2 port of this level I will do so, but it’s a challenging but doable stage as it is, you just need to learn the jumps.  It will probably take a while because this level demands some precision, but you can do it!  At least one person has finished this stage, maybe more.  Naturally a lot fewer people play Mario Maker 1 in 2021 than Mario Maker 2, but at least a few people went back to the game in its closing weeks to play the many new levels like mine that released before the shutdown.

Game: SMM1.  Level: The Castle, Part Two – 8C47-0000-0424-940C

As in the original level, this one is a stiff challenge. You go through the great hall and kitchens and then up and down a tower. It took me a while to upload this one, but it’s up now. I had to make a LOT of changes to this level, as anyone who’s played the Switch version would understand — replacing missing enemies with other ones, figuring out how to make all of the on/off and p-block sections at least kind of work without those things, deciding what to do about the vertical sections without a game that allows vertical levels. The on/off and p-block sections have been replaced with various things – key doors, P-switches, and a spring, specifically. I had to mix things up in order to keep the level flow mostly the same, where in the second half of the stage you have to go across each tower room, activate something, and then return back to where you started to proceed. It works now, though it’s not quite as smooth as it is in MM2 on Switch due to having to use P-switches and what that does to the coins. The vertical fall section’s not as good now of course, but there’s nothing that can be done about that. There are now two two-screens-down jumps instead of one four screen one. It’s probably even easier than it was in the Switch version though, just jump over and you’ll be fine.

I did make one change to this level that players will like — I added a midway checkpoint. I can’t do this in the full MM2 level since you can only have two checkpoints per stage, but here it’s separate levels, so I put one in at the halfway point. Clearing the level from the checkpoint is challenging because you have to fight a Hammer Bros. as small Mario, and yes that killed me a lot while uploading the stage, but still I think it’s a great addition which definitely makes the level a little bit easier; sure that enemy is tough, but that’s less frustrating than having to start over every time!  Maybe I should have put in two checkpoints, but one works well I think for a level this length.  The level did get a completion eventually, though I think it was the last of the three to be finished.

Game: SMM1. level: The Castle, Part Three: Final – E186-0000-0424-F18D

This level had to be fairly heavily modified from the original final third of The Castle, but I made it mostly work. I did a few things to make this harder than the original, but more to make it easier so overall this is probably easier than the SMM2 version. On the harder side, you can’t skip the first section of this level anymore; you’ve got to work your way over the battlements. This is challenging, but with practice I figured out how to get through well. On the easier side though, I put two checkpoints into this level. And yeah, that sure makes this level a lot easier! This one shouldn’t be too tough to clear really, there is a Bowser fight at the end but it’s fairly straightforward. I put a message at the end before the goal congratulating the victorious.

As for changes I had to make because of parts that aren’t in the first game, they are pretty significant. The largest changes are that vertical levels aren’t in SMM1, and there are no icicles either. Both of these things really hurt this stage, but I think the solutions I came up with work. It’s not quite as good a level as it is in SMM2, but this is still a solid level I think.

This level almost immediately got three footprints and one completion. No star then, but a quick completion was a surprise, that’s nice to see. It’s obvious a lot fewer people play SMM1 than the first game, which is understandable.  A few more people have played it since.

Then, I didn’t make any Mario Maker levels for a few months.  I kept meaning to but just didn’t get around to it.  Yesterday however I changed that and made a new level for Mario Maker 2 for the Switch.  It’s not the long-delayed sixth Super World level though, it’s an original one based on an idea I was thinking about.
Game: SMM2.  Level:  The Desert of Regret. Code: Q77-LXD-7MF 

It’s been a few months, but yes I finally made another Mario Maker 2 level. It’s a pretty tough level but definitely beatable, just learn and make the jumps and you’ll be fine!  My original concept was ‘a super annoying troll-ey level full of softlocks where you can’t die but will have a hard time winning’ but I didn’t follow through, fortunately for anyone who plays the level.  Well, I did follow through, except not for the “softlocks” or “troll-ey” parts.  “You can’t easily die but may have a hard time winning”, though?  Yes, that describes this level well.

What I made is a fairly precise platformer level with small platforms to jump between, including note blocks, donut blocks, timed P-switch sections, and lots of required use of momentum to make jumps.   There is also one puzzle near the end, and there are two checkpoints.  Below you is not death pits, but ground that lead to reset doors or paths that send you back to the last checkpoint.  At first the level didn’t have the reset doors but while working on the level today I changed course and added them in order to have a much more fun and playable stage, instead of an intentionally bad one.  I had some fun with the level once I added the reset doors, it’s frustrating but in that good ‘I want to learn this jump’ way that Mario’s controls make so special.  There are three or four jumps in this level that gave me more trouble than the rest of the stage, but it didn’t take too long to upload really, you can just keep trying so long as time remains after all.

As with many of my levels I think getting to the first checkpoint is one of the harder things in the level, though what I would call the hardest jump is late in the second checkpoint’s section.  I used coin trails to show where to go for a few off-screen jumps, so if you miss them first try lining them up without the coins can be hard.  It’s definitely possible though, I’ve done it without the coins for all of them.

There are no enemies in the level other than a couple of tornado things which cannot hurt you because the concept was ‘you shouldn’t be able to die’.  However, I did have to add a spike in the sub-world to let you die because of one puzzle near the end that irreparably breaks if you get certain coins.  I decided on keeping the puzzle over keeping the total no-die thing.  On that note, the levels’ description text is “Live. Jump. Repeat.” which is a reference some may some may recognize.  I think it’s fitting.

You can definitely do better than my clear check time, I got through the first section really quickly but did fall down a bunch in the middle section.  You can also do worse, though — I had less time left on the clock in the time I cleared the level from the first checkpoint than the time I cleared it from the start.  Heh.  The level only was uploaded hours ago and it already has a like and clear!  Pretty cool. It took the person quite a while, almost 24 minutes (versus my clear check time a bit over 3 minutes), but that’s the kind of level this is so that is to be expected, the level took hours to make and upload.  It’s really cool to see a quick like and clear, I wasn’t expecting that so soon.

Conclusion
That is all of my Mario Maker levels so far, though I will certainly be uploading more as time passes.  I am far from done with this exceptional game and series, that’s for sure!  With the best controls and gameplay of maybe any game ever and endless variety, Super Mario Maker 2 is one of the very best games of all time.  It’s also a frustrating mess, but that’s one of the reasons I love it.  Both the good and bad of Mario Maker is reflected in my levels, I will admit, but whether it is my levels or others Super Mario Maker is a compelling, engrossing game I continue playing frequently, making levels for on a regular basis, and watching people better than me play daily.
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On My Setup – Classic and Modern Gaming on both Old and New TVs with Good Image Quality

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Brian

I would say I am sorry for not having posted anything for so many months, but… it’s been a very bad year for this world, I haven’t been able to get myself to write a post in a while.  I have been spending a lot of time upgrading my setup, though, and as a result decided to finally get back to the site with this, an article explaining how my setup works, and some basics of running consoles on modern TVs with good image quality.  This is not a full explanation of how to do that, other sites and Youtube channels do that well, but I felt I should cover the fundamentals at least.

INTRODUCTION

For the last several years, my main television was a 46″ Sony rear-projection CRT set from 2003 which I got for free. It’s a great TV for anything up to the ’00s, but that 720p (actually 480p internally somehow)/1080i set doesn’t cut it for current-gen systems, the image quality is noticeably lower particularly on the Xbox One. Still, for its good quality with older systems I was very happy with it. Sadly, in spring 2020 it broke and I had to make a choice for what to replace it with. My SD CRT still works, and is a nice consumer SD CRT with component input and everything, but that is only for classic systems.

I chose to get something nice for myself, and got a 55″ LG C9, a somewhat high-end 4K TV set. With that I had to upgrade my setup, because a modern TV requires upscaling for classic systems to look decent. So, I spent a bunch more money on switches and cables. Soon after I spent even more on the cables needed to upgrade the systems I easily could to component cables for better RGB image quality.

These all added up to some pretty major upgrades, and while I am not entirely done — I need another upscaler, so I don’t have to switch cables to output stuff on the 4K TV and also need a new cable for my Xbox because the thing isn’t working at all on the 4K TV with component output for some odd reason — but it’s close enough to make this article explaining how my setup works now. I’m sure it may interest someone. This is not the best way to do a setup, but it mostly works.

My primary goals with my setup are threefold: to allow me to use any console simply by turning it on and going to the correct input; to have all classic consoles output to both my 4K TV and my CRT without cable switching required; and to have as good video output as each system natively supports, if the cables are available. I only have one console modified (modded) for better video output than it natively supports; otherwise I stick with what they support out of the box, which is usually sufficient.

With that said, here is how my setup works.

So as I said I have two televisions in my living room. They are in the same room but in different parts of the room, with the SD CRT above my classic consoles, and the 4K TV in front of the modern ones. With my previous setup, only the classic consoles area systems output to the SDTV. However, my PS2, which I also use for PS1 games, and original Xbox are in the modern area, which means that I can’t use my lightguns for those consoles, or play the games on a CRT, which for the PS1 and PS2 definitely looks better than a HDTV will. I decided to solve this problem by adding some more switches to the setup and sending all of the signals to the modern area before they go to both TVs, so my NES, for example, goes through a whole lot of cable before it reaches the TV just above it, probably up to as much as 50 feet of cable depending on the system. That is not great in some ways, for potential impedance, interference, and lag issues, but it works and gets everything to both screens so for now it’s what I am doing.

VIDEO GAME CONSOLE OUTPUT TYPES

I am going to break the rest of this down by which switch each system is connected to, organized by which type of connection(s) the box uses. The video output types that my systems use are as follows:

– RF – This analog input is the lowest-end option, which I only use for old consoles that only support it. It sends the whole signal, audio and video, on one cord. The output is on a coax cable line cord also known as an F connector, or, alternately, a single RCA plug also known as a phono jack; generally the cord from a console uses the phono cord, which connects via an adapter to your cable or antenna line input. This may look like a regular composite input cable, but it is not; in most cases you need a compatible switchbox for your system or a phono to F adapter and need to connect it to a cable (F connector) port somewhere, most easily on a VCR. A few systems use required external RF units instead.  For lower-end CRT TVs cable-line RF is the only graphical option you have, too, but I don’t use one of those TVs anymore. [NTSC] Resolutions supported: 480i (interlaced, drawing every other line) or 240p (progressive scan, drawing every line but with half as many total).  These are the output resolutions of standard television and remained the same for decades.  A TV screen is 640×480, but the image must either alternate lines — interlaced — or have half the resolution in progressive scan mode.  Game consoles may use resolutions other than these two, but the actual TV output scales that to these.

– Composite – The most common input in the US through the ’90s and ’00s, this form of analog input is one step above RF since it separates audio and video. This is also known as AV, A/V, or RCA; it is the once-omnipresent red, white, and yellow phono plugs. The image from composite is decent but not great, with plenty of blurring and image quality issues like wavy lines and such. It was designed for CRT televisions and looks significantly better on a CRT than it does on a flatscreen television.  With a flatscreen TV, an upscaler such as the Retrotink or OSSC is VERY highly recommended if you want your systems to look close to how they would on a CRT.  I used composite on CRTs for a long time — I only started upgrading to anything better than this for classic consoles last year, really — and it looks fine for consoles of the day, but since I can get better options now I decided to. I am not a serious videophile though, so I have no problem with using composite for any classic system today, on a CRT or with an upscaler… except for the Sega Genesis, that one badly needs RGB. Anything else looks fine on composite though. Composite’s blurrier output is how most classic games were intended to be viewed, after all. Resolutions supported: 480i or 240p.

– S-Video – A definite step above composite, S-Video is noticeably sharper than composite since its video cable has four small wires in it instead of only one. It also uses the same two-plug RCA audio leads as composite. S-Video never was commonly used in the US, but some TVs and a lot of systems and equipment do support it and it’s a great option for those that do but would be hard to get full RGB out of. S-Video graphics are quite a bit sharper than composite, but still have some of that analog blur that was how graphics looked to most people in the ’00s and before. Modern flatscreen TVs do not have s-video ports on them anymore, so you will need an upscaler to use this type of cable on recent TVs.  Resolutions supported: 480i or 240p.

– VGA – While almost always used exclusively for computer video output – this was the standard PC video cable of the ’90s – a few consoles do support VGA, most notably the Dreamcast.  The DC released before component became popular, so in order to get progressive scan for a video output option above regular television, they decided to go with VGA.  A few other consoles also have VGA cables, such as the Xbox 360.  VGA supports a lot of resolutions, but on console it goes up to 480p.  Adapters exist to use VGA on modern televisions.

– RGB  Output Types: RGB Cable, Component, SCART – RGB is the best form of analog video output for classic consoles from the ’80s and ’90s. Some systems natively support it and others require modification to use RGB, but either way, RGB will get you an extremely clean and sharp signal, with none of the blur that was the way we all saw images on TVs back then. That is both a good and a bad thing, as some systems such as the Genesis rely on that blur, both from the cable and a CRT TV, putting colors right next to eachother to make something appear to be a different color, but the sharpness is impressive and usually an improvement. As for cables, there are several ways to get RGB signals — via component cables, the five-cable phono RCA cable system with red, green, and blue video cords and white and red audio ones. I got HD Retrovision’s component cables for four of my classic consoles. Alternately, people in Europe or other PAL territories, or people willing to import all of their hardware to the US, can use SCART for this. I have never used SCART and it has some complexities, so look up tutorials for how to do that before just buying cables. In Japan only there is a plug called JP21 which looks like SCART but has a different (and VERY incompatible) pinout, and also a smaller, more VGA-looking RGB cable, which some things use. And lastly, there are modern homebrew cables which adapt classic console outputs to HDMI available for many systems.  The results should be similar no matter which way you get your RGB to the screen though, which one you use just depends on what systems support easily and how you have done your setup. Modern flatscreen TVs do not have any of these types of ports on them anymore (unless there is something in Europe with a SCART port still on it? I don’t know), so you will need an upscaler to use this type of cable on recent TVs.  Most modern TVs also do not support 240p RGB as a resolution, so an upscaler really is required to see anything on screen; a cheap component to HDMI adapter will only work with 480p consoles such as the  PS2 or newer, not older systems.  And even with the PS2, a cheap component to HDMI adapter will only work with PS2 games and not PS1 games, which output in 240p when using a component cable.  Unfortunately a more expensive option is required to even see anything on your TV.  There are many now, for many consoles, and the list grows all the time; I will not try to list them all.  Resolutions supported: 480i or 240p.

– Component –  I know I just covered component above, but running RGB over component is only one use of this cable, it has others.  This is the best form of analog video cabling used. Modern component cables exist for RGB usage for some classic systems, as covered in the above category, but this five-plug cable was originally popularized for higher resolutions such as 480p, once TVs that supported that resolution were released.  But while component was mostly used for EDTVs and HDTVs and systems which support 480p or better, SD CRTs that support component, for sharp RGB 240p output, were also sold; I should know, my SD CRT is one of those. Having to deal with five separate cables can be a pain, since they can be hard to tell apart and it’s a lot of cables to keep track of and keep plugged in correctly, but when set up correctly you get great results, if everything works.  I use component both for RGB on some classic consoles, and for progressive-scan 480p or better output on some modern ones for the ’00s that do not natively support HDMI. Recent TVs don’t have component outputs.  Also see above for more on how most modern TVs do not support 240p RGB so an upscaler and not just an adapter will be required for classic systems on component cables, or to play PS1 games on a PS2 using component.  So, an upscaler is unfortunately required if you want better than composite.  Resolutions supported: 480i, 240p, 480p, 720p, 1080i.

– HDMI – HDMI is a much simpler standard than any of the above — you simply plug in the cord and go, it carries both audio and video, is fully digital, and supports up to 1440p resolutions I believe. After dealing with the many, many issues regular RCA analog cables have given me, going to the simplicity of HDMI is very nice. HDMI supports all resolutions component cables do, as well as 1080p.  It is simple and works well.

– Ultra HDMI, aka 4K Ultra HDMI – This high-speed variant of HDMI looks the same as regular HDMI, but carries a lot more data. It is required for resolutions over 1080p, such as the “4K” resolutions the newest consoles support, or 8K for people who have one of those very high-end sets.

MY SETUP

So with that out of the way, it’s finally to the main event here, the list of how my stuff is actually laid out. I will start from the top, with the RF systems.

RF SYSTEMS

Archer Video Selector Switch, model 15-1261:

For RF systems, I use an Archer manual switch. This early ’80s switch does not number the inputs but instead names them. The first four inputs are phono (cable line) plugs, and the last an RCA (F-connector) plug instead. So, for classic consoles, you won’t need a phono to F adapter for that last input, which is nice.

I recently got this early ’80s Archer manual switchbox to solve my ‘I need to regularly swap cables behind my VCR to use some of these systems on the HDTV’ problem, and it’s a great answer! Any RF switchbox you get will be from the ’80s, but fortunately the tech in these is very simple and should still work fine. This switch from Archer, an ’80s Radio Shack brand, has two dials on the front to set which input you want to go to each output, and is not powered. It has five input and two outputs, and in a design you will see often from Radio Shack products, locks out one of the inputs from going to one of the outputs, so if you’re recording from a VCR that is also connected to the unit you can’t create a feedback loop. This limitation frustrates me at times, but oh well, that’s how it is. Amusingly this box uses the early term”VTR” instead of the later standard “VCR”, but they mean the same thing.

My RF switchbox is sitting on top of my VCR, which it connects to. The easiest way to get RF consoles onto a modern TV is to use a VCR. Mine is a VCR/DVD combo unit, which are great.

Inputs: 4 RF coax F-connectors, 1 phono plug.

– ANT – Texas Instruments TI 99/4A (first silver model) (when on RF; I also have AV cables for thie system). This system uses a manual RF switchbox which is required to output RF, so it outputs on a cable line plug.

Connected to the output line on the TI99/4A’s switchbox is my Atari 2600, which I rarely use since I have a modded 7800 I will get to later, but I keep the 2600 plugged in for compatibility reasons; some games do not support the 7800. I need to slide the switch on the box to change these inputs but that is easy enough. The 2600 requires a manual rf box or phono to F adapter and a dedicated connection. I use the latter for image quality reasons.

– CABLE – Magnavox Odyssey 2. This uses a phono-to-F adapter. This system also requires a manual switchbox or phono-to-F adapter.

– VTR – Mattel Intellivision (Sears Super Video Arcade model). This uses a phono-to-F adapter. This system also requires a manual switchbox or phono-to-F adapter. If I had a second output from this box, which I do not, this wouldn’t go to output 2 (see below for why).

– AUX-1 – Atari 5200 (model 1). I have both models of 5200, but use a model 1 5200 as my regular console. Its unique, and first-of-its-kind, automatic switchbox still works perfectly, so it connects to the F-connector directly.

Connected to this is an automatic switch I connect to my NES 2, the small NES. I usually use my original-model NES since it has AV output, but also have this one that I now only really use for large-sized Famicom carts. I use a NEC-branded auto switch that came with my TurboGrafx-16 since it is the best-made auto RF switch I own.

Finally, connected to that is a line from a splitter for my cable TV signal, for if I want to view TV on my SD CRT. I do not often use this but the input was free, so why not?

– AUX-2 – Coleco Colecovision. This input is the phono plug, so the system connects directly to the switch. This system also requires a manual switchbox or phono-to-F adapter, or native phono jack of course.

Outputs: 2 RF coax.

1 – Connected to VCR/DVD Combo unit.

2 – Not used.  Input 3 (VTR) won’t go to this.

COMPOSITE SYSTEMS

Philips VCR/DVD Combo:

The Archer RF switch outputs to my ’00s Philips VCR/DVD combo unit, as I said above. So, I will cover this next. This is a VCR/DVD combo unit from the ’00s, and I do have the remote for it thankfully. One of these is an extremely handy thing to have! I rarely watch DVDs on this since I rarely watch DVDs and I don’t have this hooked up with component outputs for the DVD side so the image quality is quite a bit worse than it would be on my consoles, but it’s nice to have the option available. Note that in all VCR/DVD combo units, component output is ONLY for the DVD player; VCRs are designed for composite and only output that signal. Naturally, both A/V inputs on this player are also composite.

Inputs: 2 composite AV, 1 RF coax.

– AV 1 (Rear) – Texas Instruments TI 99/4A Computer (when using composite, which is usually the better choice for clearer picture). Composite is the best signal a TI99 natively outputs so use it.

– AV 2 (Front) – Currently unused. A front AV jack is convenient sometimes though, it’s much easier to get to than all the rest of the inputs I have.

– RF 1 – Archer model 15-1261 RF switch listed above.

Outputs: 1 composite AV, one RF coax.

– RF – Not Used. I used to use this for a rotated TV but now do not.

– AV – This is connected to S-Video / Composite Switch 1.

Composite / S-Video Switch 1 – Philips Master Video Switching Center, model PH61153

This automatic switch has four inputs and one output, and supports S-Video or composite. This thing has a bunch of features, though many have limited use. This is an automatic switch wit hthree modes, auto, manual, and scan. Yes, you have a scan function to scan for inputs to automatically switch between; I am not sure why this is required, my Radio Shack switches and component switches don’t need this. It also has an RF phono cable port and apparently will output anything over cable as well, for older SDTV support, though I haven’t tested this. It has a stand to put it vertical, though I am not using it. Additionally there is a single RF cable input jack, but it won’t upscale that to composite or s-video, it only outputs it in the cable output port, so this is a largely pointless, 1-in-1-out thing. It’s just an extender. On a more positive note, in addition to being an auto switch it claims to support generic remotes, if you want to change inputs from a distance. This is a decent switch with some features.

As far as inputs go, from the instructions I got the impression that this switch will not upscale composite to s-video. I have not tried that myself so I can’t say for sure, though. I decided to use this for some composite systems, so that’s not a major issue since my other switches do convert between them. Unfortunately however, even though I got this switch new old stock earlier this year, sadly both audio ports on input 1 are totally broken, so I have to use it as a 3-in-1-out switch.  I’m sure this could be fixed with some soldering.

Inputs: 4 AV / S-VIdeo, 1 RF.  The RF input will only output to the RF output, NOT the composite/s-video output, so it is not very useful.  The other four inputs support composite AV or S-Video, though I am only using composite in this box currently.

– AV/SV 1 – Not Used since both audio ports for this input are broken. 🙁

– AV/SV 2 – NES (composite). The NES does not support above composite without an internal mod. It looks good on composite.

– AV/SV 3 – VCR/DVD Combo Unit (composite). VCRs only output composite.

– AV/SV 4 – TurboGrafx-16 CD (composite). This is the best output a Turbo CD natively outputs and it looks very good.  This system has very dark RF but great looking composite.

– RF – Not Used. This will only output to RF.

Outputs: 1 composite or s-video, 1 RF coax.

– AV/S-Video – To S-Video/Composite Switch 2 (S-Video)

– RF – Not Used.  The RF input will only output here.

S-VIDEO AND COMPOSITE SYSTEMS

Radio Shack Auto-Sensing A/V Switch, model 15-314 – three in sequence

Next in my setup, the automatic switches continue with three more chained automatic S-Video/composite switches. All three of these are from Radio Shack. Radio Shack made this 5-in 2-out auto AV/S-Video switch in the ’90s and ’00s, and I mostly love these things, which is why I have so many. I should mention the downsides first, though. I have heard that these slightly degrade image quality, and while I can’t say I have noticed that it may well be true. Worse, I have had ports on these fail or become much touchier. Everything works on the three of these I’m using, but a few ports, most notably the audio output jacks on one of them, are really touchy. I also have a fourth one of these I can’t use because its audio output has totally failed. I am sure this is fixable with some soldering, but it’s still unfortunate.

Still, I love this model of switch for its ease of use and features; there are not many options for automatic AV/S-Video switches and of them I like this the most, issues and all. The Phillips above is the only other one I know of, but it supports one less input and one less output.  That ones’ additional features are not things I use, either, and it has more distracting lights on the front.  This just has one on top per input, plus one on top if auto mode is on.  A switch on the back disables auto mode if you are having issues with it with an input.  Unlike the Philips there is no option to use a remote with these, but I’ve never needed one, the automatic switching works very well.  Additionally, the Radio Shack one will internally convert between S-Video and composite, so you can take in composite and send out S-Video, and vice versa. This is quite useful; sure, it may affect image quality slightly, but it’s more than worth it in my opinion for what I get. S-video definitely looks better through these switches than composite, it is not just turning s-video into composite or such.  Oh, and like the Archer RF switch above, one input won’t go to one output so as to not let you create feedback looks while connecting it to a VCR for recording.  This limitation is annoying for how I use them, but oh well.

Two of these switches are in my classic consoles area. They then connect with a long 15′ cable to the modern area, where one last one of these takes in several more inputs and then outputs to both TVs, via another 15′ cable to the SDTV and with a much shorter cord via the Retrotink 2X Pro to the 4KTV. These boxes take a second to recognize that a signal has been turned on, so it takes a few seconds for the image to appear on the screen after turning on a console with these, but it’s worth it for me.

Note, these switches only have text labels on the front, but numbers for the inputs on the back. They also come with various alternate labels and cable labels when you buy one of these new, but I just use the defaults since they don’t have ones actually named for consoles. Below I list each input with both its number and the default name on the front. Oddly the numbers go backwards here, so 1 is the input on the right.

Composite/S-Video Switch 2, a Radio Shack Auto-Sensing A/V Switch, model 15-314

Inputs: 5 composite or s-video.

– 1 (AUX) – N64 [standard black model] (S-Video). This is the best output you get out of an N64 without an internal modification.

– 2 ( GAME) – 3DO [FZ-1 model] (S-Video). The 3DO FZ1 has composite and S-Video ports on the back.

– 3 (DVD) – Input From S-Video/Composite Switch 1 (the Philips switch above). (composite)

– 4 (CBL/SAT) – Atari 7800 (S-Video). This is my one and only system modded for better video output, and it makes a huge difference! The 7800 by default requires a manual switchbox and has poor image output quality, but this modded system fully fixes those issues. I’d recommend a modded one if you get this system.

– 5 (VCR) – Laserdisc player (Pioneer model). (S-Video). The player has composite and s-video ports on the back. This is a movie player, not a game machine. Oddly laserdisc players only send out an image, unlike a VCR they can’t be used for inputs. Too bad. This input will not go to output 2 (which I’m not using anyway here).

Outputs: 2 composite or S-Video.

– 1 – To S-Video / Composite Switch 3 (S-Video)

– 2 – Not Used. Input 5 won’t go to this output.

Composite/S-Video Switch 3, a Radio Shack Auto-Sensing A/V Switch, model 15-314

Inputs: 5 composite or s-video.

– 1 (AUX) –NEC PC-FX (S-Video). The PC-FX has composite and s-video ports on the back.

– 2 ( GAME) – Atari Jaguar (S-Video). The Jaguar supports RF, composite, s-video, and RGB via SCART. A homebrew adapter to use component cables exists but are very hard to find and sadly I do not have one. There are also adapters to use an RGB cable with that VGA-ish port, but I’d have no way to use that in my current setup so for now it’ll be on s-video. The image output is pretty good.

– 3 (DVD) – Not Used. Yes, it’s a free input!

– 4 (CBL/SAT) – Input from S-Video/Composite Switch 2 (the first Radio Shack switch above) (S-Video)

– 5 (VCR) – Philips CD-i (composite). The CD-i model I have, the DVS VE-200, is great in some ways (no battery-in-a-chip design for the saving!), but only has composite outputs on the back so that is what I use. Some other CD-i models have S-Video output but you will need a save chip solution for them ASAP. This input will not go to output 2 (which I’m not using anyway here).

Outputs: 2 composite or S-Video.

– 1 – To S-Video / Composite Switch 4

– 2 – Not Used. Input 5 won’t go to this output.

Composite/S-Video Switch 4, a Radio Shack Auto-Sensing A/V Switch, model 15-314

This switch is in my modern consoles side of the room, instead of the classic one. Modern consoles for me are ones from the sixth generation and beyond, so it’s systems Dreamcast and newer – systems designed for progressive scan most of the time and higher resolutions.

Inputs: 5 composite or s-video.

– 1 (AUX) – Input from S-Video/Composite Switch 3 (the second Radio Shack switch above) (S-Video)

– 2 ( GAME) – Sega Gamecube (S-Video). I usually play Gamecube games on my Wii, which has a component cable, but I set this up as well because I can so why not? This is also my only way of playing GBC and GBA games on a TV since the GC does have a Game Boy Player attached. The Gamecube supports component output for 480p in many games, but while I may get that sometime for ease of use (not having to use a Wiimote to get into the GC game, etc.), this s-video output also looks pretty nice. It’s not progressive scan but is sharp. It’s a great output choice for the SD CRT, with component or HDMI cables it’d be quite a hassle to disable progressive scan for one TV and enable it for the other one…

– 3 (DVD) – Sega Dreamcast (composite). I mostly use my Behar Bros. DC to HDMI adapter box with the system, but for games that do not support VGA and thus won’t work with the HDMI adapter I need this option. For the DC I could get s-video cables, but so far I have not. This HDMI adapter is good, but I may get HD Retrovision’s Dreamcast cable once they release it; the HD Retrovision cable will have an easy ‘switch to composite’ switch, saving the cable switching this method requires with games not VGA compatible.  Additionally, when I want to play original Xbox games in composite, on my SD CRT, which is a good option for certain titles, I plug it in to this port since neither is used much.

– 4 (CBL/SAT) – Sony PlayStation 2 (composite) As with the GC, DC and Xbox above, this is a system I mostly use component with, but I have two PS2s, one American fat one and one Japanese slim one, and chose to connect one with composite and the other with component. Many PS2 games look less bad with composite than with any other output option because of how the system was designed. Right now the Japanese PS2 Slim is the one on composite but this changes depending on what I am playing.

– 5 (VCR) – Not Used. This input will not go to output 2, my SD CRT, so nothing is attached to it.

Outputs: 2 composite or S-Video.

– 1 – To Retrotink 2X Pro (S-Video) which then outputs to the 4K TV (via HDMI).

– 2 – To SD CRT TV (S-Video) Input 5 won’t go to this output.

COMPONENT INPUTS

That completes the RF, Composite, and S-Video chain — from this last box finally everything goes to a TV. Next is the component chain, which is newly greatly expanded and caused me a whole lot of problems in the last few days. Other than the aforementioned issue of the Xbox not working at all on component, though, I’ve diagnosed and solved all other problems.  Some of them were compatibility issues, others issues with me plugging things into the wrong places or cables coming out; with so many cords, remember every connection here has five separate plugs everywhere other than on the consoles themselves, there are a LOT of cords to keep track of. So, here goes!

Component Switch 1, a Philips PH61150 HD Automatic Video Switcher (in Classic Consoles Area)

The Philips automatic component switches are similar to their composite one, and also are 4-in-1-out switches, but are a bit simpler than that one. These has only two modes, auto or manual, first. That’s all that is needed anyway. They also do not come with a stand if you want to put the switch vertical like the composite/s-video one does, so I guess they are for horizontal use only. Fine with me. The box supports component or composite, but I only am using component with it. The Philips HD switch also doesn’t have the RF passthrough or RF output. No big loss there. All inputs work correctly on both of these boxes, which is great.  These are quite nice, other than their output being seriously incompatible with distribution amplifiers; see below for more on that annoying problem.

Inputs: 4, all with component, composite, or s-video.  I am using component with everything below.

– 1 – Sega Saturn [model 2] (via HD Retrovision Genesis component cable, with Saturn adapter) I also have composite and s-video cables for the Saturn, but RGB does look slightly sharper.

– 2 – Sega Genesis 2, with Sega CD 2 and 32X (via HD Retrovision Genesis component cable) The Genesis has infamously horrible RF and composite v ideo output quality, and does not support s-video, so SCART or this HD Retrovision cable are the only ways to get nice-looking video output out of a Genesis. This system is the reason why I went for this classic component upgrade, it’s expensive but worth it to finally for the first time see Genesis games actually looking sharp and clear on a television. The Genesis has the worst composite and RF output of any console I own, hands down. Get RGB out of it if it is at all possible to do so!

– 3 – Sega Master System (via HD Retrovision Genesis component cable, with SMS/Genesis 1 adapter). The SMS is surely the first console with RGB output support, nice work Sega! (As with most American SMSes, mine is just a console, it does not have a built-in game.)

– 4 – Super Nintendo / SNES (via HD Retrovision SNES component cable). How good SNES RGB looks depends on the internals of your Super Nintendo, they vary, but it does look better than composite or s-video, at least, on mine.  It’s an earlier model 1 system I believe.

Output: 1, with composite, component, or s-video.

– 1 – To Component Switch 2 (Component)

Component Switch 2, a Philips PH61150 HD Automatic Video Switcher (in Modern Consoles Area)

Inputs: 4, all with component, composite, or s-video.  I am using component with everything below.

– 1 – Microsoft Xbox (component).  This is the original Xbox.  There are some games that look better on a SD CRT and I can switch the system over to that (see above), but for the vast majority of titles on this console component is the way to go, it has a lot of games with progressive scan support.

– 2 – Sony PlayStation 2 (component) I use this for both PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 games, and the results look great for PS1 games, which output over component in 240p RGB. With the PS2 it varies depending on game though, most look pretty much the same as composite while a few do support 480p. PS2s are known as the last console designed for CRT screens first and foremost. Right now my US PS2 is connected here but I sometimes swap the cables with the composite cable now on the Japanese one. The two systems are placed one on top of the other so it’s not hard.

– 3 – From Component Switch 1

– 4 – Nintendo Wii [black model] (component) This is the best output a Wii outputs natively. HDMI adapters exist now I believe but I don’t have one, yet at least. I also have used this for Gamecube games a lot. It is best for the ones that support progressive scan 480p, since I don’t have a component or HDMI cable for my GC.

Output: 1, with composite, component, or s-video.

– 1 – To Radio Shack component switch model 15-316, a manual with remote component switch, and from there to a Ce labs AV400COMP distribution amplifier, and from there to the three destinations. So, this gets complicated.

From this component switch, I need to send the image to three places, one for 240p systems – a Retrotink; one for 480p or higher – a cheap HDMI adapter; and one for the CRT TV.  So, to split the signal, I need to send the image to a component distribution amplifier. This device takes in an input and sends out multiple copies of it at full quality, without any degradation in image quality that you would get otherwise with things such as cable splitters. The amplifier then outputs to the three sources listed below. So I tried this but had a problem: when I directly connect the Philips switches to a distribution amplifier, it badly messes up their colors! All shades of color vanish, and only red, blue, and green colors appear on screen for everything. It’s a crazy glitch to say the least, and it’s an issue with the Phillips switch, not the amplifier.

After testing a lot of things I eventually found a workaround — I hooked up my old Radio Shack 4-in-1-out manual component switchbox, model 15-316, again. I got the Philips switches because the Radio Shack is a manual switch and you need to put it line of sight with the remote in order to change inputs, which is a problem. setup location-wise.  It only has one input used on it now though, from the second Philips component switch, and then sends its output to the distribution amplifier. It’s too bad this is required since it wastes more of my very limited power outlet spots, but at least it works! … Well, for everything other than the Xbox, but that’s some other issue.

Outputs: from the CeLabs AV400COMP distribution amplifier: (all component):

– 1 – To Retrotink 2X Pro (which then outputs to the 4K TV over HDMI). This is for systems that output at 240p or lower, so it will NOT work with the original Xbox or Wii unless you set them to SD output. As I described in the outputs section above, this will work with the PS2, but not with games that natively support 480p progressive scan, only for PS1 games and the large majority of the PS2 library that do not support progressive scan.

– 2 – To SDTV (via component, 240p only this is not a 480p TV)

– 3 – To a cheap, no-name Component to HDMI adapter that I have (via component), and from there (via HDMI) to my 5-input HDMI switch, which output to my 4K HDTV. This is for progressive scan systems that support 480p or better, so the Xbox (if working), Wii, and PS2 (the few supported titles).

To simplify this setup, I could get an OSSC instead of the Retrotink for component inputs and use the Retrotink only for the S-Video chain. (The OSSC only natively supports component, RGB, or SCART. There is also an addon for the OSSC called the Kouryu that adds s-video support to it, but as I have a Retrotink I don’t know that I will buy one.) This would have the benefit of supporting SCART for systems which support it but I can’t really get component inputs for, eg the Jaguar, and the Neo-Geo if I get one someday. The OSSC also supports 480p inputs, so I could drop the need to use two HDMI inputs for one chain of devices, which would be nice. OSSCs are expensive though so I have not done this yet after spending so much.  I will probably get one eventually, or the upcoming OSSC Pro.

HDMI INPUTS

5-in-1-out Automatic/Remote HDMI Switch 1: – this thing says IIIP on it so maybe that is the brand name?  It says 5×1 Enhanced HDMI Switch and 4Kx2K on it, as its model name / features list.  There are a lot of generic HDMI switches out there and this is one of them.

This switch is nice — it’s small, has five inputs, will automatically switch to devices when they turn on, and has a remote extender so if you need to use the remote you can put the sensor in a visible spot; this is key, you want to put a switch like this hidden well behind stuff, not visible in range of the IR remote.

Inputs: 5, all regular HDMI.  This thing claims some form of 4K Ultra HDMI support but I think it is limited.

– 1 – Nintendo Switch (original model)

– 2 – Nintendo Wii U (black 32GB model)

– 3 – From HDMI Switch 2 (below)

– 4 – Sega Dreamcast (via Behar Bros. HDMI adapter box; most games support this, but some do not and need the composite cable instead.)

– 5 – Microsoft Xbox 360 (Slim)

Output: 1 HDMI.

– 1 – To 4K TV

HDMI Switch 2, a NewBEP 4-in-1-out Manual/Remote HDMI Switch:

This basically noname but NewBEP-branded switch says 4K ARC HDR HDMI 2.0 and 4 IN 1 OUT Switch on it, so it should support all those things in some form, though 4K support is probably limited.  This second switch works well, but it doesn’t have the nice features of the other one.  Sure, it makes more claims about HDMI 2.09 and 4K, but I wouldn’t want to attach a 4K console to this, it’s probably 30fps only or such.  The downsides are much more significant – there is one less input, and no automatic switching switch here so you need the remote or button on the device to change inputs. And there is no remote extender either, so you’d better find somewhere to put it where it will have a direct line of sight to its little IR remote.  So, I have it on the top of the back of my Xbox One S.

Inputs: 4, all regular HDMI with some 4K support which I am not using.

– 1 – Sony PlayStation 3 (HDMI)

– 2 – Steam Link (HDMI)

– 3 – Not Used

– 4 – Not Used

Output:

– 1 – To HDMI Switch 1

The TVS THEMSELVES

So, the result is this, the inputs on the TVs themselves:

LG C9 4K TV (55″)

Inputs: 4 HDMI, all fully Ultra HDMI 2.1 compatible, and 1 composite AV via adapter.  There are also four USB ports, though those are mostly for powering devices.

– HDMI 1 – XBox One S (with 4K-compatible Ultra HDMI cable)

– HDMI 2 – Retrotink 2X Pro (HDMI)

– HDMI 3 – HDMI Switch 1 (HDMI)

– HDMI 4 – the cheap Component-to-HDMI Adapter (HDMI) Again, this is mostly for PS2 and Wii games now that the Xbox has an issue and isn’t working on the 4K TV. PS1 games will NOT work here, my TV does not natively support 240p; for PS1 games an upscaler like the Retrotink is required.

– [Composite] AV 1 – Not Used  I have tried this input and as expected it makes everything look horrible.  An upscaler is pretty much required on a TV like this, unfortunately.

Output: Audio output only. Boo!  It is optical at least.

PHILIPS CRT TV (from the early ’00s)

I am have had this TV since the mid ’00s, but am not sure what model it is exactly because unfortunately before I was given it the label on the back was mostly torn off.  It is a flat-screen CRT, instead of a curved screen CRT like earlier ones are.  It has better image quality for older consoles than anything you can get on a modern television.  The audio is mediocre, far behind a modern flatpanel display, though.  Oh well.

Inputs: 1 RF coax, 1 AV or s-video, 1 AV or component.

– [Composite] AV 1 / S-Video – From S-Video/Composite Switch 4

– [Composite] AV 2 / Component [aka CVB as it says onscreen] – From Component Switch 2. Remember not to output 480p here, it will NOT look good to say the least; this is a SDTV.  This TV looks great with 240p component, though!  It is a noticeable improvement over S-Video.

– RF 1 – Not Used

Outputs: 1 composite AV.

– Composite AV – Not Used

INTERNET SETUP

Older consoles were not online. Modern systems, however, require the internet. Wi-fi is not reliable however and I have a bunch of systems, so I use a mixture of wi-fi for some systems I use online less often for anything other than downloads, and wired internet for ones that I use online more.

Wired Internet via Ethernet: I have two wired internet lines going to my console area from my router.

– 1 – One goes directly to the Steam Link, for the best possible speeds while streaming PC games to the TV.

– 2 – The other one goes to a Linksys ethernet switch. This is not a wi-fi router as my main router is, but is only a 1-in-4-out ethernet splitter, effectively. So, it’s perfect for what I am using it for. Its output are as follows:

– 2-A – Nintendo Wii U (via a third party Wii LAN Adapter) This system works on my wi-fi, but it drops sometimes so online play can be bad. The switch to wired is well worth it.

Note that if I want to use the Wii online for whatever reason, I just need to move the USB cable with the LAN adapter on it from the Wii U to the Wii. They are on top of eachother so this is easy.

– 2-B – Nintendo Switch (via official Switch LAN Adapter) – This system drops wi-fi CONSTANTLY and is pretty much unusable on wi-fi, so wired internet is essential. It’s too bad the dock doesn’t have a built in ethernet port! Of course, the same goes for the Wii and Wii U.

– 2-C – Microsoft Xbox One S (via ethernet) – This system hates my wi-fi and pretty much can’t see it at all, so I have no choice other than to use wired internet for this system. I would anyway, but it is annoying.

– 2-D – LG C9 4K TV. Wired ethernet is key here for the best possible streaming video speeds.

Wireless Internet via my wi-fi router:

– Xbox 360 Slim – The X360 doesn’t work perfectly with my wi-fi as it drops sometimes and rarely connects correctly when you turn the system on, but it does function well enough for downloads and such. I used to use wired internet on it but have less need for this online since I got an Xbox One so this works.

– PlayStation 3 – The PS3 seems to work just fine with my wi-fi. Nice.

– Additionally, my Sony PlayStation Vita and Nintendo New 3DS XL handhelds connect to my wi-fi, both with no issues at all. My Windows 8 tablet also connects via wi-fi, again with no problems.  The original DS, Wii, and PSP support wi-fi – but only with very basic security that I do not use, I use better security than that.  There is no reason today to have a DS or PSP online, anyway, and with the Wii the LAN adapter works.

– As for other systems, the Dreamcast, original Xbox, and PS2 have modems, a phone modem for the DC, phone or ethernet for PS2, and ethernet for Xbox, but I’ve never used them. I may get a DreamPi sometime to be able to play Dreamcast games online though, that would be interesting.

POWER

For powering all of this stuff I use surge protectors from the brand APC.  I wanted quality power supplies and got them.  There are five of them, each directly plugged into a different outlet, in different parts of the room — two in the modern area, two in the classic area, and one near the wall behind the chairs.  Three are ones with 11 inputs, 6 transformer size and five regular plug, and two USB ports.  One has the same inputs, but has cable line protection instead of USB ports and a cord one foot longer.  And the last is a smaller one with only five regular and four transformer inputs, and two USB.  These all work well, you don’t want to overload circuits.  On that note, helpfully, the modern-console area surge protectors are on a different circuit from the other three.  I am running very low on outlets, though ; in the modern area I think I have only one free transformer plug,. In the classic area, everything is full plus two things are directly plugged into wall outlets even though I do keep a few system’ power supplies not plugged in, such as the Colecovision and its giant and notoriously unreliable power supply.  I do not turn everything off when I’m not using them, but do turn off the surge protectors sometimes, it’s not good to leave things running all the time.

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Consoles Opinion Summaries, Part 3: The Fourth Generation

Posted on March 30, 2020 by Brian

Yes, it’s finally here, my long-delayed fourth generation console opinion summaries article! I’m sorry I had nothing last month, but it has been a somewhat anxious time. That is only getting worse with the virus outbreak, but I finally spent a day finishing this article, so here it is. Enjoy.

Note for sources: Most of this is written from memory, though for getting correct release dates and sales numbers I did check Wikipedia’s articles for the systems, Gamasutra’s Stalled Engine article about the Turbografx https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/225466/stalled_engine_the_turbografx16_.php?page=6 , and the NeoGAF Retro Sales Age Thread https://www.neogaf.com/threads/retro-sales-age-thread.981407/. I wish I didn’t have to link GAF considering what kind of awful far-right site it has become, years after that thread mostly ran its course, but unfortunately I do not know of a better source on the internet for all of that information there.  ResetEra or Retro Game Boards do not have similarly comprehensive classic sales threads and neither do anywhere else I know of.

Note: as always, this list is in release order.

Fourth Generation: Table of Contents

Fourth Generation Overview
TurboGrafx-16, TG16 – 1987 (1989)
Genesis, Gen – 1988 (1989)
TurboGrafx-CD, TCD – 1988 (1989) (TurboGrafx-16 addon)
Game Boy, GB – 1989
Phillips CD-i, CDI – 1991 US (1992 JP/EU)
Game Gear, GG – 1990 (1991)
Super NES, SNES – 1990 (1991)
Sega CD, SCD – 1991 (1992) (Sega Genesis addon)
Sega 32X, 32X and Sega 32X CD, 32X CD – 1994 (Sega Genesis addon)
Fourth Generation Consoles Ranking

 

Fourth Generation Overview

The NES changed the world with its success. Establishing Japan as the leader in video game console development, and resurrecting the console market in the US, the system is probably the most important system ever released. As with all consoles, though, it aged. In 1987, four years after the Famicom (NES) released in Japan, Hudson and NEC partnered together to compete against it with a new, more powerful system, the PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16). A year later, Sega made its third attempt at releasing a console, this time to much greater success in America. Nintendo, however, decided to wait, as the NES continued to sell extremely well into 1990. As the system slowed down in sales, though, Nintendo finally got in to the fourth generation in late 1990 with the Super Famicom. The generation also saw the first successful handheld video game systems, a major advance indeed. Handheld gaming technology had come a long way. This generation also saw the first CD-based gaming platforms, another major advance. It took a while for games to figure out what to do with all of that space, but early CD gaming experimentation led to some fascinating results, both good and bad.

Each console is different, but what all of these systems have in common is that they are all systems are Japanese. Indeed, all systems in the fourth generation, excepting only the Atari Lynx handheld and some minor, extremely unsuccessful handhelds I do not have and will not be listing here, were Japanese. This was a time of Japanese dominance in the console industry. At the time this generation began, most major American developers focused on making computer games instead of console ones. This, however, would change. Several American home consoles would release in the fifth generation, and while they would not succeed, Microsoft’s entry to the console market the generation after would finally break the Japanese lock on hardware. In software, American developers did not switch en masse to consoles until Microsoft, and the need for greater revenues as production costs increased, encouraged studios to move over to consoles in the ’00s. However, the fourth generation saw the beginning of that change. Where the NES and Master System had very Japanese-dominant libraries except for a very small number of studios, the fourth generation’s systems saw many more Western console games. Electronic Arts, particularly, would rise to prominence on the strength of its console game library, but there were many more. Important changes indeed.

In terms of hardware, the fourth generation was a time of refinement and experimentation. Where the third generation started inventing new genres and dramatically changing the way games were designed and played, the fourth generation refined 2d gaming, as developers used the more powerful hardware, larger game storage sizes that were now available, and more to make more complex and, often, better games. After a new technology is introduced it is often later systems which best shows its advances, and that was the case here. And it was very much the case for 3d gaming as well, as while 3d took some steps forward during the fourth generation, particularly in arcades, a field I mostly do not discuss here, it was not until the next generation that polygonal 3d games would dramatically improve at home.

Overall the fourth generation is many classic gamers’ favorite, and I can absolutely understand why. It certainly is a generation I have a great deal of nostalgia for, as I was a kid during this generation and, unlike with the NES, was old enough to remember the generation from the beginning. My parents would not get me any of the TV consoles during that generation, but we did get a IBM-compatible PC in early 1992 and I got a Game Boy for Christmas that year, so I was finally able to really play games at home from then on, instead of only at friends’ or the very rare times I could go to an arcade. So, those two systems, plus the Genesis which is the system I had the most experience with outside of home during the ’90s, are the ones I have the most nostalgia for. The Super Nintendo looked amazing and I read Nintendo Power magazine almost every month, but I was only rarely able to actually play one before the ’00s, when it was the first classic console that I would buy. But now I have all of the major fourth-gen systems apart from the Lynx, and I will try to cover them all fairly. Most of these systems are all-time greats that rank very high on my list, as anyone who looks at my ‘how much I like my consoles’ list should know! And they should be high on anyone’s list also, really. So, on to the summaries.

 

TurboGrafx-16, TG16 – 1987 (1989)

Release and Sales Info: Designed by Hudson and released by NEC, released December 1987 in Japan (where it is known as the PC Engine) and August 1989 in the US. Last cartridge (HuCard) games released in 1993 in the US and 1994 in Japan. CD Games for the CD addon unit released until early 1994 in the US and in 1999 in Japan, with 1997 seeing the last year of real support there. 7 million sold total, though it’s complicated due to many models and revisions of the hardware. Cart-only systems sold 3.92 million in Japan; in the US, 750,000 cart-only systems were manufactured for the US market, but not all sold, though many were eventually resold in Korea. Dual cart plus CD “Duo”-line systems sold a further million systems in Japan, but only a few tens of thousands in the US. CD addon systems which require a cart system to play games sold 900,000 systems in Japan, but only ~20,000 in the US. So the sales figures are complex, but add up to 6.67 million worldwide as a starting estimate, though real totals for all revisions are unknowable. I purchased a TG16 in February 2009, a broken CD unit later that year, and finally got the CD system repaired in summer 2013.

History: Hudson Soft was an early third party supporter of the Famicom. After a while, though, they decided to try designing their own console to compete with it, while also supporting Nintendo’s. They eventually convinced Japanese electronics giant NEC to manufacture and support the system. Inspired by the small credit card sized games Sega released for their Card Catcher addon for the SG-1000 and Master System, NEC and Hudson decided to use similar small cards for PC Engine games. These games, called HuCards in Japan and later Turbo Chips in the US, are pretty cool looking really, with painted labels and an impressively small size for console cartridges of the ’80s. The system shell was made similarly small for a console, much smaller than any other home TV console for a long time.

The PC Engine released in Japan in late 1987, and ushered in a new generation of consoles. The system was a response to the NES (Famicom), as its hardware design and library makes clear. With a powerful 8-bit CPU and a 16-bit graphics chip, the PC Engine was much more powerful than the Famicom and, with its CD and RAM addons, can mostly hold its own graphically against the later consoles of the generation. The biggest exception to that is that it does not have hardware parallax scrolling support, but some games do pull it off in software. The system got off to a good start and outsold the Famicom in Japan for several years in the late ’80s, taking advantage of Nintendo’s choice to not release a next-gen system until 1990. The system amassed a good game library, particularly of space shooter (“shmup”) games.

One year after its release, NEC and Hudson released the very first consumer CD-ROM gaming platform, the PC Engine/TurboGrafx CD, in late 1988 in Japan and somewhere between late ’89 and mid ’90 in the US, the date is inconclusive. It was an amazing hardware accomplishment for the time and has quite a few great games. It did moderately well in Japan, but failed disastrously in the US.

The problems started when it came time to release the system overseas. NEC started making mistake after mistake, starting with a decision to redesign the tiny little PC Engine in favor of a case twice as large, based on the theory that Americans like things large so they should make the system bigger. Because of this and other delays, the renamed TurboGrafx-16 did not release in the US until the aforementioned mid 1989 date, shortly after the cheaper and in some ways more powerful Sega Genesis, a system which under its Japanese name Mega Drive had released in Japan in late 1988. Letting tiny Sega get ahead of them on both price and date was a big mistake, and Sega capitalized. They also capitalized on NEC’s choice to put “16” in their console name while the CPU is only 8-bit, resulting in the TG16 being maligned for not being “really 16-bit”.

Meanwhile, in Japan, NEC and Hudson released an upgraded console called the SuperGrafx in late 1989.  It is fully backwards compatible with PC Engine games and is essentially a PCE but with additional memory and a second video chip so that it can do native parallax scrolling.  This system looks cool but has only five games which released over its nearly two-0-year life.  Yes, five.  It was a disastrous failure and they quickly went back to the base TG16/PCE.  The SuperGrafx did not release in the West.

Here in America, NEC fell behind from launch, but the TG16 was somewhat competitive for its first year thanks to its great early game library.  However, the long release delay hurt badly, and the system never got off the ground here because the NES continued to dominate the US market until 1990 in a way it was not doing anymore in Japan. The hole the system had filled in Japan, being a new system at a time when people wanted one and the market leader wasn’t releasing one, did not exist for long here.  And worse, Sega’s Genesis quickly started outpacing the TG16 in sales despite NEC having the better 1989 game library, a gap that would turn into a rout after 1991 and the release of Sonic the Hedgehog, a title Hudson couldn’t match.  And some genres the system was best at in Japan were not quite as popular here as there, such as shmups.  Before its release NEC produced 750,000 TurboGrafx-16 systems for the US, but did not sell all of them during its life.  At some point probably in 1993 or so, the last hundred thousand plus were rebuilt for sale in South Korea as a Korea-only model which actually plays American games. Sega, meanwhile, sold over 20 million Genesis systems in the US, a stunning result compared to initial expectations and the TG16’s better early library.

And then, in late 1990 in Japan and mid 1991 in the US, the Super Nintendo (Super Famicom) released, and almost immediately destroyed all comers in Japan. The PC Engine managed to hold on to second place, but it was a second place at like a ten-to-one margin behind the leader.  In the West the SNES and Genesis split the market, while the TG16 and Turbo CD, despite surviving until 1993 and 1994 respectively, were largely forgotten.  In Japan NEC leaned heavily into often anime-focused CD software after this in order to try to hold on to some niche in a market mostly controlled by Nintendo, and they had some success in this niche, as software continued steadily until the end of 1995, with a few releases after that.  HuCard releases in Japan stopped in 1994, though; after that it was only CDs.  Hudson, meanwhile, gradually moved their more popular franchises such as Bonk and Bomberman to the Super Nintendo, after a gap of several years focusing mostly on PCE, followed by other platforms after that, while focusing more anime enthusiast-focused stuff on the PCE and its successor.  On that note, NEC and Hudson’s last system, the PC-FX, was very anime FMV-focused, and failed as the market turned to 3d instead. Hudson survived on making games on other formats, until being bought and later shut down by Konami.

Aesthetics and Design: I have only ever seen TurboGrafxes in person and not the PC Engine, but regardless I like the look of the TG16, and I’m sure I’d like the look of the tiny little PCE as well. The PCE and TG16 are extremely ’80s in design, but it’s a charming kind f ’80s to me. When it comes to the addons, the Japanese CD addon is a “briefcase” unit, with a CD drive the same size as the PCE itself and a base unit that holds them both next to eachother. In the US, however, we got a larger unit which puts the TG16 below, and then has the CD drive on a pedestal behind the TG16. It looks kind of ridiculous, but I like it anyway and this is the Turbo CD setup I use. The later Duo line of consoles have sleeker, more ’90s stylings and I can understand why many people prefer to use them, and based on pictures they do look nice, but I like my TG16+CD setup great.  I’d never swap it for a Duo-R.

NEC additionally had many other models in Japan and a few in the US, including one that looks like a space shuttle, a handheld portable model we did get here, recolors of the base system which add more modern video output options, and more. NEC released a LOT of models of PCE hardware, both in terms of consoles, addons, and accessories. Trying to make sense of it all is confusing and I have made multiple articles about this before. Still, in terms of design stylings NEC always did a good job. In terms of marketing they did fine in Japan but horribly badly elsewhere, though, of course.

In terms of reliability, TG16/PCE models are a mixed bag. Base TG16 and PC Engine systems are mostly quite reliable. However, the Super CD addon drive (only released in Japan), the portable TurboExpress (PC Engine GT) and the first PC Engine/Turbo Duo (but not the later, Japan-only Duo R and RX) systems have bad capacitors and usually need capacitor replacements in order to work correctly. Additionally, the original CD addon drive has a gear which usually strips some teeth, so those need repair as well, both for the gear and often also the laser. The parts to repair Turbo CD drives are fortunately available. Duo line systems have fewer disc drive issues, but they still can break down after so long. The HuCards themselves are reliable, so long as you keep the contacts clean. Fortunately, except for one memory card cart, they do not have sealed batteries in them; instead systems or addons with saving save to a capacitor. Those so far are mostly holding up. Keeping stuff for these systems working can require some effort, but once repaired systems should be reliable for a long time.

Game Library: The PC Engine/TurboGrafx HuCard library is heavy on very NES-styled games in its early, more successful years. As previously mentioned, this systems’ standout genre is shmups. Indeed, the TG16 with its addon and Japanese games is my choice for the very best console shmup library ever! Between HuCards and CDs the platform has at least a hundred shmups, many of them among the all-time greats. And even looking only at the HuCards, the system is one of the best of all time in the genre no question. In other genres the system doesn’t quite match up to the SNES and Genesis, which is a lot of why I do rank the TG16 a little bit behind those two systems, but it is still pretty good. The platformer library is mostly more NES-styled than those two systems, for example, while I prefer more SNES or Genesis-styled platformers overall. Bonk’s Adventure is the TG16’s showcase platformer, and while quite good, it is a much more NES-ish game than Mario World or Sonic the Hedgehog. The later CD title Castlevania: Rondo of Blood on CD is exceptional, but that is the system’s one all-time-great platformer, while the other two have many more, and that requires an expensive addon not everyone got. Still, with a large library of games, the TurboGrafx-16, just as a cartridge system, is a fantastic system that places high on my list of the all-time best consoles. Many of its games are Japan-only to be sure, but this is a system well worth getting a lot of imports for. Playing the many Japanese adventure games, strategy games, RPGs, anime games, and such will require Japanese knowledge, but the plethora of shooters and solid variety of titles in other genres make this a system that really is a must-own for anyone who likes classic games and can afford the now somewhat substantial costs related to it, both for hardware and games.  The US library includes a lot of great games, too.  Prices are high, but many of the games are good.

As for CD versus HuCard, the CD addon is more important to the TurboGrafx than addons are for most consoles. You absolutely can have a lot of fun with only a base TG16 or PC Engine, though! The HuCard library is large and contains many, many fantastic games. Later CD titles are often more famous and flashier, but a lot of HuCard games deserve just as much attention.

 

Genesis, Gen – 1988 (1989)

Release and Sales Info: From Sega, released in October 1988 in Japan (as the Mega Drive) and August 1989 in the US. Games officially released until 1995 in Japan, 1997 in Europe, 1998 in the US, and 2002 in Brazil, with unlicensed homebrew games releasing for it in over the past decade. The total number of Genesis systems sold is controversial given all of the different models involved, but Sega reported 30.75 million sales of their Genesis/MD systems in the ’90s. Additionally, 1.5 million Majesco systems probably sold, plus as much as 3 million in Brazil by the early ’00s. I would not count newer clone systems towards this total myself, but they surely add up in the millions by now, there are many officially licensed Genesis clones available. Because of its great success in the US, even though the system is called Genesis only in North America and Megadrive everywhere else, Genesis systems outsold Megadrives overall. I got a Genesis in May 2006, though this is a system I spent a good amount of time playing during its life as I had several friends and relatives who had one so it is a system I knew well during its life.

History: Sega was founded in the 1940s by an American living in Japan who started a business to import what we would call arcade games to Japan during the post-war American occupation. It eventually became a Japanese-run company, making arcade and pinball games. Through the ’80s and ’90s, Sega was an arcade game developer first, and console game developer second. Despite this, in 1983 they got in to the console business, and though that first system, the SG-1000, had only limited success it was enough for Sega to keep trying. Their second system was the Mark III, aka the Master System in the West. It did quite well in Europe and Brazil, but struggled badly in Japan and the US. Sega didn’t give up, though, and in 1988 they tried a third time. This system, the Sega Mega Drive or Genesis here, was Sega’s one breakout hit, a system that would end up selling several times better than any other Sega console. Here in the US, the Genesis is by far Sega’s best-known and most popular console, and I entirely agree with that assessment. The Genesis is a fantastic system which places near the very top of my list of my favorite video game systems ever!

The Genesis hardware is powerful for the time, with a fast 16-bit CPU and good graphics. Hardware-wise, it builds on the SG-1000 and Master System’s TI-based graphics and sound chips by once again adding another graphics mode, like the Master System did before it. The system is backwards compatible with the Master System with cartridge adapters, though not with the SG-1000 as it is missing some hardware needed for those games. Despite that, the Genesis is kind of the final evolution of the TI99/Colecovision graphics and sound chipset. The fast-for-the-time CPU is one of the Genesis’s best points compared to other consoles of the generation, and helps it do things the others can’t. The new audio chip is also fantastic when programmed for well. Genesis audio is not as consistently good as SNES audio, but the best sounding games are just as good or better than anything on SNES. I particularly love the soundtrack to The Adventures of Batman & Robin, it is one of the generation’s technical masterpieces!

While mostly great for the time, the Genesis does have two hardware issues I want to discuss. Sadly the system does not support hardware scaling and rotation. This is entirely understandable as it would have been far too expensive for a home console in 1988, but is a real issue because many Sega arcade games heavily use scaling; indeed, Sega was famous for their “Super Scaler” games like Outrun and Space Harrier. This made for some rough ports to the Genesis. Otherwise, though, the only other hardware issue the Genesis has is its color limit. While the TurboGrafx and Genesis both have a 512 color palette, the TG16 can put most of those colors on screen at once, while the Genesis is limited to just 64 at a time. The system does have a shadow function which sort of doubles the colors, but even so colors are limited on the Genesis and developers often had to come up with clever ways of dealing with this issue. The color limit is unfortunate, but with a powerful CPU, good parallax and sprite support, and more, the Genesis is a powerful system for its time.

Good hardware doesn’t necessarily sell, though, and in Japan once again Sega failed to sell much. The MD was yet another failure in Sega’s home market, unfortunately, as the PCE (TG16) won early on and then the SFC (SNES) crushed all comers later. In America, however, Sega scored a surprise upset win early on, as NEC badly stumbled out of the gate while Sega made some (sadly rare) good decisions. With strong marketing pushed by their “Sega Does what Nintendon’t” ad campaign, ports of popular arcade games, and licensed sports titles, the Genesis took an early lead. And while the 1991 release of the Super Nintendo was a big deal that threatened Sega’s place in the 4th-generation market, Sega released its own killer app that year in Sonic the Hedgehog, and the new Sega of America head Tom Kalinske convinced Japan to let him bundle the game with the console. This decision sold a great many Genesis systems! Additionally, Electronic Arts’ decision to get into console game development with the Genesis would prove to be a very important move indeed. The first Genesis version of John Madden Football helped change the whole industry, really. Combining all that, the Genesis had several very good years in the early ’90s in the US. By ’93 Sega had half of the overall US console game market, which was the largest console market in the world at the time.

Unfortunately, Sega’s propensity to make stupid decisions started springing up immediately afterwards. The Sega CD, a CD addon to the Genesis, came first. It did okay, particularly in the US, but did not sell up to expectations. After that, though, Sega really fell apart; the second Genesis addon, the 32X, was an infamous failure, as was Sega’s next console the Saturn, as Sega of Japan and Sega of America started having more and more difficulties working together. The rumor is that Sega of Japan was jealous of how successful Sega had been in the US, and was determined to make their next console one that would succeed in Japan, no matter what the US thought. So, over many objections from Sega of America staff, Sega designed a far too expensive and hard to program for box in the Saturn, and also approved that second Genesis addon to release at about the same time in late 1994. It did not go well. And at the same time, they started winding down first party Japanese game support for the Genesis, a very foolish move given that in the US the 4th-gen market still had several more good years to go. Sega would release over 125 games in 1995 across many platforms, and it was too much; between the massive hit title Donkey Kong Country and Sega’s mistakes, the SNES closed a lot of the gap in ’95-’96. Sega of America did what they could to keep the Genesis supplied with new games into fall ’97, but their early lead had fallen into an effective tie. Both systems would see successful late ’90s bargain-priced re-releases, and the Genesis one from Majesco probably outsold the SNES one, though, so the Genesis did go out on a good note sales-wise. It is a fantastic system that well deserved its success here.

Aesthetics and Design: There are three official models of Sega Genesis. The first is a relatively large, and very 1980s, design. It looks great, and the very first revision has some minor advantages in graphics over later models. The second model Genesis is the one I know best, though, and it probably sold the most. This is the model I have, and I thnk it strikes a good balance of design and size. This time the design is much more ’90s, with some nice curves and a smaller size. The plastic is not quite as sturdy-feeling as a NES or SNES feels, but the Genesis is fairly reliable. Genesis systems do fail, but most are still working. Sega CD systems have many more reliability issues, thanks to its disc drive and a few other often-failing parts, but I have been lucky; mine still works flawlessly. The Sega CD adds nicely to the Genesis, too, and also has two models. The first model goes below the system and fits the first model Genesis well, and the second goes beside it and looks better with the second. I have a model two Sega CD, and I think it completes the look of the Genesis. The 32X, unfortunately, is a bit more awkward-looking; it has been compared to a mushroom growing out of the top of your Genesis, and that’s probably an accurate comparison. A full Genesis+CD+32X combo unit looks good enough, and I keep my 32X always plugged in so I can play its games when I want, but just on looks I’d probably go for Genesis 2 + SCD 2 only, with no 32X, as the best-looking unit. I know model 1 Genesis fans would disagree here and that system does also look great, but I do really like the model 2.

Game Library: The Sega Genesis has a large and diverse game library. It is particularly strong in platformers, sports games, and shmups, though its in genres such as RPG, strategy, and more are quite good as well. With a library this large, any fan of classic-style games should find plenty of games to love here. The Genesis does have many very difficult games, though; Genesis games are less likely to support saving than Super Nintendo games do, as Sega’s arcade sensibilities carried over to the home, and are more likely to be hard. There are Genesis games for everyone, but there is a lot here for the tough-games fan, that is for sure. The system’s premiere series is one of its more approachable, though, as the Sonic the Hedgehog games are a perfect balance of challenge and fun that anyone can enjoy. All of the Genesis Sonic games are titles which still place high on my list of the best platformers ever. The Genesis has a whole lot of great games, but I have to agree with the consensus that the Sonic games are best. The Genesis has one of the best game libraries ever. Many titles have been re-released in various re-release collections and such, but it’s often just the same games re-released over and over, lots of fantastic classics are only on the Genesis.

As for the addons, I like the Sega CD quite a bit and enjoy 32X games, but neither addon is anywhere near as essential as the TurboGrafx CD is. I didn’t know anyone with either addon back in the ’90s, and as much as I like them, anyone now who has only a Genesis can play most of the format’s best games. Still, both addons, the Sega CD particularly, are well worth it if you like the system.  The 32X is a bit less worth it, but still is an interesting thing to have if you really like Sega.

 

TurboGrafx-CD, TCD – 1988 (1989)
(TurboGrafx-16 addon)

Release and Sales Info: From NEC, released in December 1988 in Japan and sometime between the end of 1989 and mid 1990 in the US, a precise date is unknown. The Turbo CD lasted from 1988 to 1999 in Japan (though no games released in 1998 and only one in ’99, so ’97 was the last full year), and 1989 to 1994 in the US. In Japan stand-alone CD addon drives sold 0.9+ million systems, and then combined “Duo” HuCard + CD systems sold about a million, for a combined CD sales base of 1.92 million there. That is a good attach rate compared to 3.92 million HuCard-only, plus those 1 million Duos for a total HuCard base of 4.92 million. It was the leading CD game format in Japan for years. In the US, however, while NEC claimed to sell, or at least produce, a hundred thousand CD and Duo systems combined, a better guess (as per Working Designs CEO Victor Ireland, who as one of the few Western third party developers on the platform would be in a position to know) is more around 20,000, plus another 20,000 for the Turbo Duo. I would probably believe Victor Ireland over NEC on this one because they also wildly overestimate overseas PC Engine/Turobografx sales.  The Japanese sales figures are more likely to be credible from NEC, it’s the overseas ones which are questionable.

History: The PC Engine CD was the very first CD-ROM-based home gaming platform to be released. Crazy-advanced technology for 1988, Hudson had a hard time even running games in development at the time, as hard drives were smaller than the amount of data they could fit on a CD and CD-Rs had not really been developed yet. Burning a disc to test was thus extremely expensive. The system thus is just a CD drive attached to your PCE or Turbografx, with a small amount of RAM and no other hardware. It does not have dedicated FMV and enhanced graphics chip hardware like the later Sega CD would. In Japan the system did decently well, selling to a solid percentage of PC Engine users. A majority of PCE owners did not upgrade, but the PCECD has a higher attach rate than most other addons. The system was expensive, but sold well enough to catch on and its sales slowly grew. Once the Super Famicom (SNES) released several years later, HuCard game sales collapsed as people moved over to that system. NEC coped by focusing more on CD games. This is when they started releasing the RAM expansion cards, and moved most game support over to CDs. Indeed, HuCard game releases ended in late 1994, three years before CD releases dried up. The PC Engine CD has a large game library full of classics. It can be a confusing format because of the sheer number of hardware versions and addons NEC released — see some of my old articles on my site on that mess for example — but it’s a great one. NEC eventually messed things up badly with their two failed attempts at successors to the PC Engine, but what they had on this system is worth remembering, and going back to.

However, while the TurboGrafx-16 had done badly in the US, it did at least sell somewhat decently in certain parts of the US, such as in NEC America’s home base of Chicago, for its first year or so, and sold somewhere over 500,000 systems (and under 750,000). The Turbo CD was not so lucky and, as I detailed above, sold abysmally. With a $400 price at launch and very few games NEC knew it wouldn’t sell well, and it did not. The problem was, the Turbo CD’s strengths, in action games with partially-animated cutscenes with voices, digital novel adventure games, and such, were often games that weren’t well suited for the American market. Looking at what sold best on the Sega CD it was not that kind of thing, it was the FMV, which this system didn’t have nearly as much ability to do well, as the Turbo CD can’t just stream video off of a disc like the Sega CD can. Late in its life, after a lot of work, Hudson would show off a few games with “HuVideo” actual anime FMV on the PCECD, but it was not above Sega CD levels of video quality, and released years later. And because of the need to pay for English voice actors, porting over Japanese games was much more expensive than it would be for a cartridge game. The system sadly struggled here, and NEC responded by releasing very few games for it. This cycle spiraled down.

In 1992, NEC gave up on the Turbografx in America and sold it off to a new company called TTI. In late ’92, TTI released a system called the Turbo Duo, an American revision of the PC Engine Duo system. TTI put a big ad campaign behind the Duo using the infamous Johnny Turbo comic-ad series and more, and released quite a few games over the next year and a half, doubling the Turbo CD’s library versus what had released over the first three years. Even so, NEC Japan was still very stingy with approvals, and many titles TTI wanted to release here never happened because of that. It was not enough, unfortunately, and sales were as I said earlier — in the low tens of thousands, just as bad as they had been for the Turbo CD. The Duo got more market attention than the Turbo CD had and I remember its advertising, but very few people actually bought one. That some of the best games stayed in Japan did not help, but many released late anyway; Rondo of Blood is exceptional, but as a late 1993 release in Japan it probably would not have released here before spring ’94, and TTI was heading towards bankruptcy at that point. TTI managed to release three games sometime in early to mid ’94 before shutting down. After that, one more game released to mail order only late that year from a company which bought up TTI’s backstock, and the system was dead in the US outside of importers buying Japanese games.

Aesthetics and Design: There are quite a few different PCECD and Turbo CD designs, as I mentioned previously in the TurboGrafx-16 section. There may be less than there are PCE systems, but there are still quite a few. As I said before, I have the original TurboGrafx-16 with CD addon drive, modified to play either US or Japanese HuCard games. My CD drive broke and had to be repaired as is common with those drives, as they have a worm gear that is a common failure point, but it has worked fine since. As I said the TG16+CD is a somewhat ridiculous, extremely ’80s unit, but I love it for that. Sure, the PCE Duo R or RX is a sleeker, early ’90s system which looks pretty nice, but I like my system a lot and wouldn’t swap it for one of those. Both styles exist and look great for the time, though, depending on what you prefer. Not so good is the SuperGrafx + Super CD addon drive combination, but oh well; no SuperGrafx games are on CD anyway.

For reliability, the Duo R and RX are certainly the best. They can have laser failures, but that is their only major failure point so far. Original PCE/Turbo CD drives usually have a broken worm gear and maybe also the laser; these are repairable, but get a fixed one if you buy one. The first PCE/TG16 Duo has bad capacitors, as does the addon Super CD drive, so make sure you get one with replaced capacitors if you get that model. Considering we are talking about old moving-parts systems here, reliability is okay overall.  There are problems but they all can be fixed.  Replacement lasers for these systems are available easily on the internet today.

Game Library: Despite selling slightly fewer systems overall, the Turbo CD has many more total game releases than the Sega CD. It has particular strengths in the shmup, RPG, and adventure game/digital comic genres, but has a pretty good library regardless. It does have some weaknesses, such as platformers apart from the all-time classic Castlevania Rondo of Blood, but it’s a good library with great game variety. With its large library loaded with traditional games in genres people like, and not FMV like most of the best-selling Sega CD games are, the Turbo CD is a highly regarded system now and I would agree with that. Indeed, I would say that the Turbo CD has probably the best library ever for a console add-on. In terms of sales the Sega CD did edge it out worldwide because of its FMV-fueled success in the US, but the PCECD has a better overall library and as much as I like the Sega CD for its fantastic traditional games, which it very much has, since I got a Turbo CD I haven’t gone back to it nearly as often as I did before. I like both addons a lot, but this is better. Rondo, Ys, and shmups are the highlights for English-speaking gamers, but there is a lot more out there, particularly if you’re willing to deal with some Japanese.

 

Game Boy, GB – 1989

Release and Sales Info:  Nintendo’s first cartridge-based handheld console, the Game Boy, released in 1989, in April in Japan and July in the US.  It released in Europe in 1990. The Game Boy had exclusive releases until 1999 in the West and 2001 in Japan, and “black cart” (aka “dual mode” as I have often called them) games that support both the black & white Game Boy and the color Game Boy Color until 2001 in the West and 2002 in Japan. There are some modern homebrew releases for it since as well. The Game Boy and GB Color combined sold 118.69 million systems, though it had a big dip in between its early success between 1989-1992 and the later, Pokemon-fueled years of 1997-2001. As of fiscal ’97, the original GB had sold 64.42 million systems. Thanks to Pokemon and the GBC, that number would end up almost doubling. I got an original Game Boy for Christmas in 1992; it was my first console. I looked at both the Game Boy and Game Gear, and chose the Game Boy because it was cheaper and seemed to have better games.

History: The Game Boy was designed by Nintendo’s R&D1 team, led by famous Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi. This handheld was designed with a balance of portability and power, and an emphasis on one of the most important things for a handheld, battery life. With a Z80 CPU, four-shade black and white graphics, and some pretty good audio, the Game Boy has more than enough power for games of the day and also gets very good battery life, 20 or 30-plus hours for later models. The Game Boy gets many times better battery life per battery than any of the major competing handhelds from the late ’80s to mid ’90s; only in the late ’90s did other handhelds that are as battery-efficient finally release. Some people dislike the black and white graphics this console uses, but this has never bothered me; you can do some nice visuals with four shades of grey, and it was a compromise necessary for the good battery life. The original Game Boy’s screen does have a lot of motion blur, as with all handhelds of the time, but some other handhelds are worse and later models improve on this, each better than the last.

Three things led to the great success that the Game Boy would see. One was the good hardware, again designed for portability in a way the Sega Game Gear and Atari Lynx were not. Nintendo also had a lot of market presence because of their NES console, which dominated the console gaming industry by far in the US and Japan. This meant that a lot of people would pay attention to Nintendo’s next console project. It also helped with the Game Boy’s third success point, its game library. When it first released the Game Boy was packed in with Tetris, an all-time classic puzzle game hit which sold many a million systems. And with a Mario platformer and games from top NES third party publishers on top of that, the Game Boy’s success was assured.

And for several years the Game Boy rapidly shot up in success. However, after about 1992, the system slowed down. Sales declined, and particularly in Japan the number of releases did as well. Nintendo kept supporting the Game Boy, but for several years most Japanese third parties gave up on the system for a while, in favor of focusing mostly just on home consoles. American third parties did continue to support the Game Boy with titles for the mostly-young audience who owned the system, but several years after I got it I could tell that the Game Boy had seen better days. Nintendo kept selling the system and waited a long time on a replacement, to not help matters. The turnaround was just around the corner, though: in late 1996 in Japan, a game, developed by small studio Game Freak after a long time in development and published by Nintendo, called Pocket Monsters released in Japan. It soon caught on, and led to a handheld renaissance soon after. The game finally got a Western release in 1998 as Pokemon and the rest was history. I’m no Pokemon fan, but I was, and remain, a fan of the wealth of new handheld games that released in the sales boom that followed.

Later in 1998, Nintendo finally released a new handheld, the Game Boy Color, which is kind of a Game Boy times two power-wise, with color support but the same screen resolution and audio. Nintendo considers it to be a revision of the Game Boy and counts both together for sales, but as it allows for incompatible new color-only games, I’ve always thought that it really is a new console, though certainly one closely related to this one. Regardless, since the Game Boy Color allows for games that run in both black & white or color things are a bit messy as far as categorization goes, but it did mean that the original Game Boy kept getting game releases for some time into its successors’ life. For the first year of the GBC’s short life, most games are black-cart games which support btoh platforms. After that most games went color only, but until ’01 in the US and ’02 in Japan a few games here and there continued to support the original model. As a result, the Game Boy had a thirteen-year lifespan, making it one of the industry’s most successful systems. Many people discount handhelds but I very much do not, and the Game Boy ranks high on my list of the best consoles ever.

Aesthetics and Design: The original Game Boy has been likened to a grey brick, and it is not an unfair comparison, as it is a rectangular system of medium size. The system uses four AA batteries. It is a good-looking for its time and comfortable system which is, for the most part, very durable and well-made. There is one exception to this, and that is the screen, which is liable to have its screen’s connecting cable start to come loose and cause lines on the screen to fail. Mine is no exception and has a pair of dead horizontal lines near the bottom of the screen. This is a fixable issue though and rarely ruins the image, and otherwise this system is legendarily durable. When I was a kid I remember dropping my Game Boy onto a dirt road while it was running, and it didn’t even reset! With just about any other handheld that would never have happened, it would have at least reset and might have broken. The Game Boy’s buttons are among the best in any handheld, as well, as its larger size allows for larger and better-feeling buttons and d-pad than those that you find in any following models.

On that note, the second model of the Game Boy, called the Game Boy Pocket, released many years later, in 1996. This model uses AAA batteries and has much worse battery life than the original, but is a lot smaller and has a better, much less blurry screen. The smaller buttons and d-pad are not quite as comfortable, though. With the same-sized screen as the original in a much smaller case the screen is the focus of this system, and it’s pretty nice apart from the battery life. I already had a Game Boy so I did not get one of these until 2019, but it’s a solid system if you find one. There was a third version only released in Japan with a backlight called the Game Boy Light, but they are expensive and rare so I don’t have one. Then, the GB Color I mentioned previously released in late ’98. All of the Game Boy systems are nice looking systems with good designs. Which I think is the best depends on what I prefer, though – do you want better buttons? A better screen? One system which can play games from all of the Game Boy systems? Each of these questions has a different answer, from the original Game Boy, to the GB Pocket, to the Game Boy Advance or Advance SP. My overall favorite in terms of looks is probably the original, but when it comes to playing, I often use the SP for its compatibility and backlight. Regardless of what system you play them on, though, each one is different enough to be worth a look, both from design and features standpoints.

Game Library: As I have mentioned, the Game Boy has a very large and diverse game library which I rank highly compared to home consoles. Game Boy games are often smaller-scale than home console titles, as budgets were lower, cart sizes smaller, and games often made easier because of an assumed younger audience, but I think the library is fantastic regardless. The Game Boy has one of the best games ever made in The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening; some of the all-time great platformers in titles like Wario Land, Donkey Kong [’94], and Kirby’s Dream Land 2; some of the best puzzle games ever such as the aforementioned Tetris, and many more. The Game Boy’s library is not perfect as its RPGs and strategy games are mostly not my favorite kinds of games in those genres and it does have a lot of half-baked licensed games, but the library’s strengths much outweigh its weaknesses. I know I have a lot of nostalgia for the Game Boy, but this is one of the best game libraries for any console.  See my Game Opinion Summaries list on the system for more.

Also in 1989, Atari released their powerful Lynx handheld. I do not have one so it will not be covered here, yet at least.

Game Gear, GG – 1990 (1991)

Release and Sales Info: From Sega, released in October 1990 in Japan and 1991 in the West. Games released steadily until 1997, with one more game releasing with a short-lived rerelease of the platform in 2000 from Majesco. 10.62 million systems sold, probably not including however not too many Majesco made. I got a Game Gear in 2009.

History: Sega’s first handheld, the Game Gear was Sega’s answer to the Game Boy. Larger than a Game Boy, and with color graphics and a backlit screen, the Game Gear makes a good first impression. As a kid I had a Game Boy, but kind of wished I had a GG, that backlight would have been great; you can’t play a Game Boy in the dark anywhere near as easily. However, those features come at a major cost in battery life. Where a Game Boy gets 20-40 hours depending, a Game Gear will get like 3-8 hours, with that later number for the last model only. This is a very serious limitation from a time when systems did not have built-in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries; instead you had to use AA batteries, and replacing sets of six AA batteries as the GG requires every few hours got very expensive. So, everybody I knew with a GG got some combination of its car adapter and wall power adapter, and maybe also the rechargeable battery pack. The Game Boy has one as well and I got one back then, but the GG one was even more essential. Battery life is a key component of any handheld platform and the Game Boy got this right and the GG wrong.  The Game Gear and its games also cost more than the Game Boy and its games, even though the games were not better.

Anyway, inside, the Game Gear is essentially a portable Sega Master System. The hardware is nearly identical to the SMS/Mark III, except with a much lower resolution but a much larger color palette. So, the hardware is somewhat analogous to a Game Boy, but with color. Like all handhelds of the day the screen blurs easily, but later models do improve on this, the Majesco one particularly. The Game Gear doesn’t come even close to the power of the Atari Lynx, despite having almost as bad battery life, though. The resolution is actually the same as a Game Boy’s, but the GG has a rectangular, close to widescreen, aspect ratio, quite different from the nearly square GB one, thanks to using rectangular pixels on its screen. The GG can, with a cartridge adapter, play Master System games, though how playable they are at the GG’s scaled-down resolution is a mixed bag. A TV Tuner addon also allowed for over-the-air analog TV broadcast listening, though this won’t work since TV went digital. It is still amusing since it has an input jack allowing you, with adapters, to play any modern system on a GG screen.

The Game Gear presented the Game Boy with a competitor, and it did okay at that, but it sold less than the Game Boy and clearly had a lower-quality library. Looking at the games on each system it appears like Sega invested less in their handheld, as almost all Sega-published GG games are outsourced, often made by shadow developers on the cheap, not made internally like Nintendo did with many of its Game Boy releases. You can see this difference in quality if you compare, say, the GB Mario games to the GG Sonics. It is a much wider gap than the small-to-most gap between SNES Mario and Genesis Sonic, I would say!

Like the Game Boy the Game Gear slowly faded as the years passed, but unlike the Game Boy it did not get a late-in-life boost. Instead, as Sega started to have issues in the mid ’90s and the system faltered the Game Gear had its support cut back, as Japanese game development mostly stopped in mid ’95 and Western in ’97. Majesco would re-release the Game Gear in 2000, but the success of its Genesis re-release from ’98 would not be repeated; the GG relaunch was a failure and dissuaded Majesco from continuing on with any more classic system relaunches. Overall, I am a definite critic of the Game Gear, as its battery life is bad and game library questionable in quality. I will admit that the color graphics were nice for the time, though, and it certainly has more than a few good games.

Aesthetics and Design: The Game Gear has a very early ’90s Sega look, and apart from its large size looks decently good, I think. It’s just too big and bulky to be comfortable or easy to hold, particularly with batteries in it. The build quality is alright, but not up to Game Boy standards; you wouldn’t want to drop one of these. Game Gears are infamously unreliable as well, as most use bad capacitors which will inevitably destroy their sound and graphics unless replaced. The Majesco systems have better capacitors than earlier GGs, which is part of why I got one, but even they can go bad. Additionally, almost all games which save use soldered batteries in the carts. The carts themselves are a bit large, being larger than Game Boy games for no good reason. I do like using GG game cases to hold DS and 3DS games, though; they fit eight DS games quite well!

Game Library: The Game Gear has a large game library with some solid variety. The system shines in puzzle and strategy games, I would say, and is clearly better than the GB for games such as Bust-A-Move thanks to the color. The strategy games are better than most anything on GB, as well. But for the top genre of the day, platformers, it is entirely the other way around — Sega went for quality over quantity, releasing a great many games of questionable quality for this system, and I at least much prefer Nintendo’s choice to release fewer but better games. Many third-party games were released for both systems and often are better on the GG thanks to color graphics, but not always; some titles are better on the GB, such as Faceball 2000 which runs a lot worse on the GG. I know the GG library includes many quality titles, but I just can’t get over how disappointing and mediocre I find most of the Sega first-party library, from its numerous subpar Aspect-developed Sonic games to piles of not-very-good licensed games from Sega itself. I don’t know if the GG is really worth collecting for today unless you have nothing else to buy. Watch out for those capacitors, too.

 

Super NES, SNES – 1990 (1991)

Release and Sales Info: From Nintendo, released in December 1990 in Japan as the Super Famicom or SFC, August 1991 in the US as the Super Nintendo or SNES, and in 1992 in Europe. Games released until 1998 in the US and 2000 in Japan, with modern unlicensed homebrew titles releasing in the past decade as well. 49.1 million systems sold, meaning this was the best-selling TV console of the generation. I bought a SNES in August 2005. It was my first classic console and got me into the classic console collecting thing. I played a little SNES during its life since I knew a few people who had one, but I didn’t have anywhere near as much experience with the SNES than I did the Genesis in the ’90s. I did read Nintendo Power almost every month that decade, though, so I learned about it that way.

History: Many peoples’ favorite console, the Super Nintendo was Nintendo’s long-awaited followup to the NES. Releasing seven years after the Famicom in Japan and after all other TV consoles of its generation, the SNES may have been late but it made up for it in features. Unlike the Genesis or Turbografx, the SNES has real hardware transparencies, a color palette in the millions even if it can only display 256 on screen at once, a hardware scaling and rotation layer even if it is only a background layer and not sprites, and more. SNES graphics have a color depth and variety the other systems here can’t match, CD-i and 32X excepted. And unlike the CD-i, the SNES can do great sprite animation as well. The SNES has an advanced audio chip designed by Sony, as well, with a sample-based design much more modern than the classic chiptunes of previous systems. It is easier to make good SNES audio than good Genesis audio, as many games show. It also was designed for add-on chips in the carts, many of which enhance its power further with fast CPUs and such.

However, the power came at a price, and that is CPU speed. The SNES can do great graphics and sound, but the CPU is at most half the speed of the Genesis’s, and the difference really shows in many games. Unless highly optimized or using a powerful addon chip, SNES games often run slowly. Additionally, the standard SNES screen resolution is pretty much the same as the NES or Turbografx, 256×224, which is lower than the Genesis’s standard resolution of 320×240. As a result SNES games often have less forward viewing distance in platformers and such than Genesis games do, which is sometimes an issue.

Additionally, despite two of them getting deep into development, Nintendo never released a CD addon drive for the SNES, unlike their competitors. There was a satellite streaming addon in Japan only, but that only allowed for voiced audio during certain broadcast times. Almost all games are just carts. This situation, with highly different consoles each with their own strengths and weaknesses, made for an interesting time quite unlike that which we have now.

On the other hand, with its new controller innovation of shoulder buttons and four face buttons, the eight buttons on a SNES controller allow for more complex game controls than you can fit onto the four buttons of prior systems’ controllers. Shoulder buttons would be something almost every system afterwards would use, and for good reason, it adds to control options. Shoulder buttons are not my favorite thing, but in games that make good use of them such as F-Zero they show their worth.

Anyway, in Japan, the Super Famicom almost immediately took off into the stratosphere. Absolutely crushing Sega and NEC, the SFC won the generation by a wide margin. NEC hung on to a distant second-place finish on the strength of their CD addon being something Nintendo did not have, but it wasn’t much of a competition. Here in the West, however, it was a very different situation, as the SNES and Genesis/Megadrive fought to a draw. First, Sega took an early lead, with its earlier release date, sports games, Sonic, and better version of Mortal Kombat 1. Over time the SNES caught up, though, as Nintendo made good decisions while Sega was messing up, and got key titles such as the first home version of Street Fighter II. Most important, though, the massive, industry-changing hit Donkey Kong Country in late ’94 brought the SNES to the top. The SNES was the clear leader in the later years of the generation here. After that things got closer, as the Genesis had a successful budget re-release in ’98. Overall, which one sold more in the US is a mystery, it was too close. Things were close in Europe as well, depending on territory, though neither console sold anywhere near as well per capita as in the US or Japan, as most people played games on computers there and not consoles; it was the Playstation that brought console gaming to prominence in Europe. Meanwhile, while the SFC faded sooner in Japan than the West as the next generation started earlier there, it had a longer tail as games released until ’00. There Nintendo had kiosks in stores where you could buy a game and download it onto a flash cart, a quite new idea for the time.

Overall the SNES had a long and very successful life, and remains extremely popular today. It is one of my favorite systems as well, it’s in my top five for sure. Indeed, if I have a complaint about the SNES, it is that it is too popular! I like to try to like less popular games and such, so that SNES fandom is so omnipresent among the retro-gaming community has caused me to often want to look to other systems instead. As much as I like the SNES I have probably spent more time online discussing the other systems that gen instead, which I am fine with. Regardless, that I like the SNES and Genesis equally frustrates some people, but it is my honest opinion.

Aesthetics and Design: There are two basic SNES designs, the Japanese/European one and the American one. I have never seen a Japanese SFC in person, but many people strongly prefer it over the US system, as it is a bit smaller and has curves, instead of the very boxy American design. I will say I like the look of the US SNES, it isn’t one of the best-looking consoles but it definitely looks good. And what I can definitely say is that American SNES cartridges are a lot better than the Japanese ones! Japanese SFC carts are rounded on top like the system, which means they do not stack well at all. This makes storage inconvenient to say the least in many situations. Additionally they do not have end labels, which means that you won’t know which game is which unless you add them yourself or such. The American carts, with their rectangular shapes and end labels, are a much better design. US SNES controllers have two concave and two convex buttons, too, which is better than the all-the-same buttons of the Japanese one. Also it is easy to play Japanese games on a US SNES with a minor modification, but harder to play US ones on a Japanese system since the cart port is too small; you need a cart adapter to do that with a SFC. Now, PAL systems are the worst of all here, as they are region-locked and won’t play any other games easily, and Europe got fewer releases overall.

When it comes to durability and reliability, the SNES is mostly quite reliable. With no common points of failure other than maybe the power port connection on the US console, SNESes are durable systems made to last. The carts are similar, though those batteries in many games are a problem. Also, the SNES has a bad habit of occasionally erasing a cart’s saves even when the battery is okay, which is not great. For the most part though the SNES is a very well-made console. The controllers are also quite durable and last for a long time.

Game Library: The large SNES/SFC library includes many of the industry’s most popular games of the early ’90s, so there is definitely something here for everyone. I don’t think I even need to go down the list, people reading this probably know it. If you don’t, see my Game Opinion Summaries list(s) for the system for more, but it certainly is one of the best ever. I love that a lot of Super Nintendo games save, that’s a major big deal game feature that you did not see anywhere near as regularly in console games before the SNES, or on the other consoles of its generation. SNES games are often easier to finish than games on other systems and I often like that. Anyway, there are also plenty of hard SNES games out there if you look for them. Really the only “issue” with the SNES library is how popular it remains. I love the SNES and its game library, and my two favorite console games of the generation are on SNES, but perhaps because of my love for the less popular but also good thing, these days I don’t think about the SNES as often as I do its main competition. That popularity also has led to high game prices. Anyway, beyond that, for negatives in the actual games, there’s really only one major one, that slowdown. It is a problem sometimes, but in most cases isn’t too bad. Those soon-needing-replacement batteries welded down inside the carts are a pain, though. Regardless, the SNES library is strong in almost every genre. As with most of the consoles on this list many SNES games are available digitally as well, which is great for those with carts with dead batteries.

 

Philips CD-i, CDI – 1991 (1992 EU/JP)

Release and Sales Info: From Philips, released in December 1991 in the US and in 1992 elsewhere. Commercial software released until 1995 or ’96 in the US, and 1998 in Europe. Sales are unclear due to the numerous models released from different companies, but they were poor; Philips claimed a million worldwide in October 1994, but in ’96 the Wall Street Journal said only 400,000 had sold in the US, and another article said only 60,000 sold in Philips home nation of the Netherlands (both of those as linked from the CD-i Wikipedia article). Sales may have been better among corporate users but how many sales that added up to is unclear, but that it was a financial failure for Philips is. I bought a CD-i in late 2018-early 2019.

History: Philips’ CD-i is a fascinating system with quite a history. Philips, the Dutch corporate parent of American Magnavox, had gotten into the videogame industry when they bought Magnavox and released their Odyssey consoles in Europe in the early ’80s. After that they stopped making games for some years. In the interim, Philips is one of the original creators of the CD format, along with Sony. In the late ’80s Philips started a program to develop an interactive CD format. This format was originally designed for interactive media, such as informative discs, image collection discs with audio, store kiosk stations, and more. It was designed with a mouse for a controller, so all CD-i controllers are, to the system, actually emulating a mouse. That it was originally meant for displaying images, and not playing games, is evident when you look at the titles released for this system. The CD-i is extremely impressive hardware for 1990 in terms of displaying static images and such! And with its Digital Video Cartridge MPEG video CD addon, it is fully capable of playing most Video CD movies, and CD-i-exclusive format movies as well. Needless to say, the other CD formats of the late ’80s to early ’90s, such as the Sega CD and Turbo CD, don’t come even CLOSE to this. Where Sega CD video uses 16 colors, even without the DVC, CD-i video is in fully color! Now, without the DVC it will be in a window just like a SCD game, but with the DVC you get full-screen, at least VHS-quality, video and still images. Again, nothing else at the time comes even remotely close, apart from far more expensive high-end home computers.

However, the CD-i has two major weaknesses. First, that mouse-based controller is a limitation, as the CD-i has only two buttons and was designed for analog movement, so even if you get a real gamepad for it it needs a speed switch in order to change cursor speed movement and such. Two buttons, with no Start button for menus and such, is not enough – a NES has four buttons by that standard, and all other systems of the day have at least three, including the pause buttons on the consoles of the Master System and Atari 7800. And second, while the CD-i is fantastic at playing video and still images, it is not very good at the kinds of animation that videogames require. Philips turned to games several years into the CD-i’s life in order to try to prop up the failing format, but you can tell that the CD-i was not designed with games in mind beyond quite basic ones. Some later titles, some of which require the DVC, do manage to pull off sprite-based graphics and animations on par with other console of the generation, but even there framerates are often far below those of SNES or Genesis games.

So in summary, the CD-i is a system which is very good at some things and fairly bad at others. Unfortunately for it, most gamers want more than just great FMV and static pictures. And even among people who did want FMV games and educational discs, since they were very popular for a while in the early ’90s, the CD-i’s high price and weak marketing were limiting factors which caused it to be less successful than the Sega CD, despite the Sega having far worse looking FMV. Later on, by ’95 the growth of PC CD drive purchases drove out most of the CD-i’s remaining market. The CD-i was successful in one market, though, and that is for kiosk and training installations for companies and government agencies. The CD-i was one of the more successful platforms for this field though the ’90s. Unfortunately, that didn’t lead to enough sales to save the system, which was a huge financial loss for Philips. The CD-i was more successful in Philips’ home nation of the Netherlands than anywhere else, but here it was an also-ran.

Aesthetics and Design: Philips, and several other companies who they licensed to release their own CD-i systems such as Sony, LG, DVS, and many more, released many different CD-i models. Most of them are large units which look a lot like a home CD player or VCR, though there are also smaller portable models and one which looks much more like a home console, with a smaller size, flip-lid top, and such. Some later models include the Digital Video Cartridge built in, but all earlier models can have one of two different revisions of the DVC added to them if they don’t have it built in. So in terms of aesthetics, the CD-i is fairly utilitarian, with very VCR-like looks. Still, from what I’ve seen they look fine, if quite different from model to model. I have the last model of CD-i, the DVS VE-2000, a model which apparently re-used unsold LG CD-i boards but in a new shell. This model was sold starting in 1998, meant for corporate use for companies still using them. It’s a nice looking VCR-ish system, if large.

For the most part, the CD-i is a fairly standard CD console for its time in terms of durability – the drive lasers can fail, but many are built fairly well. Most CD-is have one major design flaw, however: their infamous “timekeeper” chip which saves your game saves. Almost all Phillips-model CD-i systems have a chip which has a battery INSIDE of a chip! Now, videogame consoles putting batteries in consoles and carts to save games is normal, but putting the battery inside of a CHIP is very much not; this is the only console I know of which does that, and it makes replacing the battery much harder in these models than in most other consoles, once that battery dies. There are only two solutions to this: very carefully cut apart the chip, remove the battery, and attach in a new one connected to the contacts within; or buy the one or two portable CD-i models which have user-replaceable batteries, or the LG (their large “VCR-ish” one, not the small Goldstar rebadge of the console-style Philips system) and DVS models which have a standard battery visible on the board, with normal welded tabs like most any other console has. This is a big part of why I got the DVS, replacing its battery will be much easier than anything other than those portable ones, for less money than those very expensive systems cost. The DVS is not cheap, but those cost a lot more.

Game Library: The CD-i has a very weird library. Early on, the CD-i’s library is loaded with informative educational discs, discs for kids, simple games like Battleship and jigsaw puzzles, discs with nice high-color images and voice descriptions of things like Mozart’s times or the American national parks, and such. Later on the system moved on to a focus more on videogames, including the infamous Mario and Zelda games, some European puzzle and action titles often with iffy framerates and design issues, and such, and the DVC cart and its movies and FMV games. I find the educational and image discs pretty interesting time capsules which are well worth a look.  They aren’t games but are fun stuff to look at. The games are mix of good and bad. I don’t think the CD-i deserves the extremely bad reputation that it gets, so long as you spend the $100 it will cost to get a real gamepad for the thing and also however much a mouse or trackball will cost as you’ll want both. I honestly enjoy the sidescrolling CD-i Zelda games, but I will admit that it is a flawed system with somewhat limited appeal; you need to like the kinds of games the CD-i has in order to enjoy this. I do not like FMV games, so its main appeal doesn’t hit well with me, but despite this I think the CD-i is an okay platform overall. Sure, it doesn’t have the quality of games the best systems do, which is tough when so many other consoles of its day are so amazing. But even so this is a neat system to have, particularly for the collector or FMV game fan, but also for the fan of weird unique stuff, as I am. The CD-i has many true exclusives as well; most CD-i releases are not available anywhere else. Just like with the Magnavox Odyssey 2, Philips has not re-released anything from this platform on any newer format. Additionally, I don’t have any of them, but the stuff companies made for the CD-i for kiosks and such is surely quite interesting for the collector who can find them.

 

Sega CD, SCD – 1991 (1992)
(Sega Genesis addon)

Release and Sales Info: From Sega, released in December 1991 in Japan as the Mega CD, in October 1992 in the US as the Sega CD, and 1993 in Europe as the Mega CD. Games released until late 1995 in the West and February ’96 in Japan. 2.24 million systems sold worldwide, mostly in the US — only 400,000 Mega CD systems sold in Japan, and it did not sell well at all in Europe. I bought a Sega CD in August 2006, only a few months after I got a Genesis. I had had much less experience with it than the Genesis before then, as I didn’t know anyone with addons for their Genesis during its life, though I remember its advertising for sure.

History: Following their very successful, in America anyway, Genesis, Sega decided to get on the CD-addon bandwagon and make a CD drive for their system. This addon released several years later, and adds much more than just a CD drive! Indeed, in addition to that disc drive, this addon also has new chips in it which gives it hardware scaling and rotation, most notably. While not perfect this was a significant advance, and some SCD games show this off with much improved scaling over the software efforts in Genesis games. The system has hardware built in to make FMV playback easy as well, so you see a lot more full-motion video on the Sega CD than you do on Turbo CD. Unfortunately they could not get around the 64-color limit, and in FMV palettes are restricted even more so a lot of FMV runs with VERY few colors on screen, but it runs, and at the time was a pretty amazing thing. The system has one more drawback, too — the side port which connects it to the Genesis has limited bandwidth when compared to the cart port on top. As a result, some Sega CD ports of Genesis games have to cut back on animation and such, as there isn’t enough bandwidth in that connection to get all the animation and such through. The Turbo CD does not have this issue, but in this respect Sega didn’t plan quite as well when designing the Genesis. Oh well.

But for good or ill, the Sega CD is best known for being the system which, more than any other, brought the FMV craze home. Expensive and showy arcade games like Dragon’s Lair and Mad Dog McCree were one thing, but now you could play that game, and more like it, at home! Sega marketed the Sega CD heavily, but between its high price tag and relatively limited library compared to the Genesis, it didn’t sell as well as they hoped. The SCD did sell over two million systems and was the best-selling console addon that generation, narrowly edging out the Turbo CD, so I would not call it a failure, but it could have been more. The cost of CD drives during its life really limited its appeal, as did its relatively short life of only about three years in the US. Many people call the SCD one of Sega’s mistakes, but I don’t agree; while it has some issues, including the gameplay limitations of FMV, how low-color SCD FMV is, and its price and reliability, the Sega CD did something new and, at least for a moment, seemed to change the industry; FMV was HUGE for a couple of years in the early-mid ’90s! Before polygons took over everybody thought that FMV was the future, as how can you get more real than real life? The very limited gameplay options available to streaming video would destroy this genre within a few years, but some amusing stuff released in the interim, and a lot of it is on this system. Most infamously, the very well known SCD game Night Trap caused enough of a controversy to be prominently featured in a US Senate hearing on sex and violence in videogames, alongside Mortal Kombat.

The Sega CD is more than just FMV, though, fortunately for people like me who have never thought all that much of FMV beyond that initial ‘wow, that’s real video!’ factor. The graphics may be great, but the extremely limited gameplay of a Night Trap, Dragon’s Lair, or Mad Dog McCree more than outweigh the positives for me. However, the Sega CD also has many other games I like a lot more, including some of the best Japanese RPGs ever made in the Lunar series, several shmups as good or better than anything on the Genesis, a fantastic Sonic game, and more. The Sega CD’s library is not as essential as the Turbo CD, sure, but it still has a good library with more than a few memorable classics. Unfortunately many of the better non-FMV Sega CD games are extremely expensive, since FMV sold better by far back then, but they are there and are great. Back then though, apart from people rich enough to shell out the money for playing FMV games at home, the SCD had somewhat limited appeal. The advertising was good, but CD drives were expensive!

Aesthetics and Design: As I mentioned earlier in the Genesis article, there are two models of Sega CD, a first tray-loading model which goes underneath your Genesis and matches the model 1 Genesis in size, and a second top-loading model which goes next to your Genesis and fits the Genesis 2 perfectly. You can use either SCD model with either model of Genesis, but the sizes will look a little silly if you do. So, I use a Genesis 2 + SCD 2 setup. It’s the better setup anyway, as the top-loading drive is much more reliable than that tray of the first model – there is no tray to break in a toploader! Either way the Sega CD systems are nice-looking units with a great early ’90s aesthetic that I quite like. The Genesis 2 + SCD 2 combination is a great looking system.  Its controller is also my favorite gamepad ever that doesn’t have an analog stick on it, or rather the 6 button controller is; the original 3 button pad is good, but Sega’s 6 button pad is the best, both in form and function.

As for its design and reliability, the SCD is known for having reliability issues, but not more so than any other disc drive-based system from its time; the main issue is just that disc drives have moving parts, so they are less reliable over time than a comparable solid-state-cartridge system is. And that is very true here. I am one of the lucky ones, as my SCD works flawlessly to this day and has needed no work, but between the laser, tray mechanism in a model 1 system, a fuse which often blows, and a rechargeable cell battery which saves any game savegames, the Sega CD has plenty of failure points within it. On that last point there is also a memory cart available, but it also has a battery in it. Some homebrew flash cartridges give the system a welcome longer-lasting memory backup function, but even so that rechargeable battery in the system will need replacing at some point. Even so, the Sega CD is a good-looking and mostly well engineered system, any CD console of its age has issues long term.

Game Library: As mentioned above, the Sega CD is most famous for its games full of either animated or, more often, live video. These are known as FMV games. Indeed, the Sega CD brought the FMV craze home. Arcade games like Mad Dog McCree were one thing, but now you could play that game and more like it at home! FMV was HUGE for a couple of years in the early-mid ’90s! Before polygons took over everybody thought that FMV was the future, as how can you get more real than real life? The very limited gameplay options available to streaming video would destroy this genre within a few years, but some amusing stuff released in the interim, and a lot of it is on this system. Most infamously, the very well known SCD game Night Trap caused enough of a controversy to be prominently featured in a US Senate hearing on sex and violence in videogames, alongside Mortal Kombat.

The Sega CD is more than just FMV, though, fortunately for people like me who have never thought all that much of FMV beyond that initial ‘wow, that’s real video!’ factor. The graphics may be great, but the extremely limited gameplay of a Night Trap, Dragon’s Lair, or Mad Dog McCree more than outweigh the positives for me. However, the Sega CD also has many other games I like a lot more, including some of the best Japanese RPGs ever made in the Lunar series, several shmups as good or better than anything on the Genesis, a fantastic Sonic game, and more. The Sega CD’s library is not as essential as the Turbo CD, sure, but it still has a good library with more than a few memorable classics. I would say that overall the SCD has a good game library. It does not have the breadth and depth of the Genesis library, but there are more than enough hits to make this system worth having, if you can get a working one for a reasonable price.

 

Interlude

In 1993, the first next generation — that is, 5th gen — consoles released, in the Atari Jaguar and the 3DO, along with several consolized older computers in the Amiga CD32 (Europe/Canada only) and Fujitsu FM Towns Marty (Japan only). A year after that, more new consoles released, the Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and NEC PC-FX (Japan only), along with the SNK Neo-Geo CD. In addition to those, though, one new addon for the last generation of consoles released as well…

Sega 32X, 32X – 1994
and
Sega 32X CD, 32XCD – 1994

Release and Sales Info: From Sega, released in 1994. Games for the 32X were only released from late ’94 to early ’96. About 800,000 consoles were sold, mostly in the US where it sold well in Christmas ’94. I bought a 32X in October 2009.  Note that the 32X, when attached to a Genesis by itself, can use cartridges only; in order to play 32X CD games, you need a Sega CD attached to your Genesis as well.

History: The 32X was Sega’s last project where their Japanese and American branches worked together well. The project started out as an idea from Sega of Japan for a new model of Genesis with more color support built in, as they were frustrated with how limited colors are on the system when compared to the SNES. Sega of America heard about this and said no, what we should do instead is a more powerful addon which would add more colors and also better graphics. Sega head Hayao Nakayama okayed the idea, and engineers from both sides worked together to design the 32X. It was designed with two CPUs, in order to help developers get used to the twin-processor layout that the Saturn also uses. Parallel processing was brand new then so programmers had a really hard time dealing with that. The system doesn’t do polygons and such in hardware either, it’s all just what you can do in software with its reasonably powerful pair of CPUs. It can do a lot of colors, transparencies, full, 60fps scaling and rotation, and more, though, and push a fair number of polygons for the time. Compared to the systems of 1993, such as the Atari Jaguar and 3DO, the 32X is somewhat close in power. It has limitations, as the system has two graphics layers, one made by the Genesis and one by the 32X, and then just displays both at once, something which causes issues in some games when the two do not run at the same framerate, and can be tricky to program for, but the hardware can do some pretty nice things. It also can play either cartridge games, or 32X-exclusive CD titles, as it connects through the cart port to the Sega CD. There are only six 32X CD games and all are visually enhanced Sega CD FMV games, but still it was nice, the colors look great compared to regular SCD games.

The problem was, the Saturn was in development at the same time and released in Japan at the same time that the 32X was releasing in the US. The Playstation released in Japan at around the same time as well, and both the Saturn and PS1 are far more powerful than the 32X. The 32X then released in Japan the next month. The PS1 and Saturn cost more, but not so much more that people wanted to buy this instead of just saving up, or just waiting a year or two before joining the new generation. The system did well in the US in late ’94, selling hundreds of thousands that Christmas thanks to people wanting the new Genesis addon, and two games in particular, Doom and Star Wars Arcade. 665,000 of the 800,000 32Xes produced sold by early ’95. Sega thought they needed something big for holiday ’94, and for a moment the 32X seemed like a good idea. Releasing two new platforms, one an addon to their last system and one a new console, at the same time was a very bad idea though, and after the good start things went predictably terribly. Sega somehow didn’t realize that trying to support six-plus platforms at the same time would be a bad idea, but it was.

Indeed, the initially good sales and press reception changed soon afterwards, and sales plummeted. In the middle of releasing more than 150 games in the calendar year 1995, Sega of Japan decided to almost entirely stop developing new games for all consoles other than the Saturn. They did develop several new Virtua Fighter games after that date, one each for the Game Gear, Genesis, and 32X, and a few Genesis and GG games in Japan in the second half of ’95, but that was it; otherwise, the only games after then on those systems were Western. They also finally discontinued the Master System in Europe, and the Pico in Japan. The 32X would see a few Western games after this, the last in early ’96, and then it was dead. Some of these moves were needed, but mostly abandoning the 32X only maybe seven months after its release was a major mistake; you can’t support a system for that unacceptably short an amount of time and not expect consequences. And Sega had consequences, as their bet on the Saturn was a terrible one for the West, where few people had any interest in that troubled system. Sega probably should have focused more on the Genesis itself, since as the SNES showed the ’94 to ’96 period was still pretty good for 4th-gen cart systems in the US. By focusing on addon after addon then abandoning the system early, Sega hurt their profits. But then again, making questionable choices which hurt their profits was the Sega way, so major mistakes were probably inevitable. Oh well…

Aesthetics and Design: The 32X is a blob-like “mushroom” which sits on top of your Genesis. It requires its own power supply, making for a total of THREE needed for the full Genesis CD 32X unit, and also a video passthrough, as the Genesis needs to pass its video through the 32X through an exterior cable for merging, then from the 32X to the TV. Sadly there was no other way to add more colors to the system than this somewhat awkward solution. The system also doesn’t look great; you get used to the full combined system’s look, but that large blob on top of a Genesis kind of messes up the nice look of the Genesis + Sega CD combination. In terms of reliability though, the 32X is a reliable system which usually works fine, so long as you have all of the required cables and parts; there are many, I did not mention all of them here.

Game Library: The 32X has a small 40 game library, including 34 carts and six CD games. The exclusive library is small, but does include some pretty good games. Some of those are ports of games also available on other systems, to be sure, but the 32X versions often have unique features you won’t find elsewhere. A common criticism of this console is that it has very few exclusive games worth playing and there is some truth to that, but I do like the 32X regardless. Shadow Squadron is a fantastic game, and other titles such as Zaxxon’s Motherbase 2000 and the outstanding, enhanced 32X version of Virtua Racer Deluxe are well worth it! I don’t regret getting a 32X at all, and if you can find one for cheap and like the Genesis it’s probably worth getting. The 32X should not have been released, as it divided the Genesis’s userbase too much, but enough of its small game library are good for me to kind of like it regardless. The high prices 32X games and hardware sell for these days are unfortunate, though. This system is very interesting, but it is a much better sell for cheap than for expensive. Ah well.

After this the generation was not done, because that aforementioned Super Famicom Satellaview satellite addon did not release until April 1995, in Japan only. I don’t have one.

And with that, finally this update is done! That was long. It might be a while until I do the next one, I’ll see; it will also be long so I kind of want to do something else first, but I haven’t decided yet.


Fourth Generation Consoles Ranking

A ranking again? Why not, though I do have an all-systems ranking from a few years ago elsewhere on my site.

1. (tie) Super NES, SNES 1990 (1991) – It may be boring to say that the SNES deserves its place high on the list of the best consoles ever, but it is true.
1. (tie) Genesis, Gen 1988 (1989) – Just as great as the SNES, I am also a big fan of the Genesis! And yes, I still don’t want to choose between them, no matter how much that annoys some fans of both systems. Heh.
2. Game Boy, GB 1989 – My first video game console, I have a lot of nostalgia for the GB and think it still holds up very well.
3. TurboGrafx-16, TG16 1987 (1989) – Some might put the CD addon above the base system, but though the CD games are flashier, the larger HuCard library, overall, probably edges out the CDs.
4. TurboGrafx-CD, TCD 1988 (1989) (TurboGrafx-16 addon) – The Turbo CD is fantastic but doesn’t have the game variety of the base TG16 so it ranks a little lower.
5. Sega CD, SCD 1991 (1992) (Sega Genesis addon) – Not quite as good as the Turbo CD but also pretty good, this is a little below it but certainly, for me, better than the GG.
6. Game Gear, GG 1990 (1991) – The Game Gear’s hardware and library are quite flawed and I am a longtime critic of some things about this system, but even I have to admit that it does have some good games.
7. Phillips CD-i, CDI 1991 – The CD-i has better hardware than the Game Gear, but the GG probably has more high-quality games, so I guess I reluctantly have to give the GG the edge here. I kind of like the CD-i, but I can’t put it over any of these systems.
8. Sega 32X, 32X 1994 (Sega Genesis addon) – Releasing the 32X was a big mistake, but I quite like some of its small library regardless! I like a few 32X games more than anything I have for the CD-i, but the overall library… I can’t put it above it, there are just too many issues with this system.
9. Sega 32X CD, 32XCD 1994 – If we count this separately, it’s in last by a longshot! Yes, it’s nice to see FMV games with actual decent colors on the Genesis, but then you have to actually play the games…

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