October 25, 2002

2:53 PM

atari adventure.for your friday afternoon pleasure (via suppose)
posted by oliver_crunk (25 comments total)

Holy smokes: I remembered the exact path through the maze from, like, 15 years ago. Freaky.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 3:02 PM on October 25, 2002

Shadowkeeper: same here. Thanks, Oliver.
posted by scottandrew at 3:10 PM on October 25, 2002

forced full screen != good.

Why do people force things full screen when they know people will be browsing?

[sorry, private rant...]
posted by twine42 at 3:11 PM on October 25, 2002

Er..how do you get past the portcullis at the start?
posted by salmacis at 4:17 PM on October 25, 2002

man that takes me back. now that is a video game where you have to use your imagination. instead of being a 3-d rendered character, you're just a green block. and your nemesis is a dragon that looks like it was drawn by a 3 year old.

kids today have it to easy.
posted by birdherder at 4:28 PM on October 25, 2002

salmacis - go down first.
posted by yhbc at 4:33 PM on October 25, 2002

and your nemesis is a dragon that looks like it was drawn by a 3 year old.

I thought it was a duck...

No, really!
posted by armoured-ant at 4:39 PM on October 25, 2002

"Get this freakin' duck away from me!"

</Strong Bad>
posted by Space Coyote at 4:42 PM on October 25, 2002

Okay, Yorgle the Yellow and Rhindle the Red are in the game, but where the hell is Grindle? And where's the blue bridge which opens the way to that other dot in the hidden room?

...I need a social life.
posted by Smart Dalek at 4:44 PM on October 25, 2002

There are 2600 emulators on the web (stella is the one I use) and Adventrue has to be my second favorite game. The first? Yar's Revenge.
posted by eyeballkid at 4:55 PM on October 25, 2002

Oh, curse you eyeballkid for posting that Yar's Revenge link. Bad enough that I spent an hour replaying Adventure (and ditto to the "went through the maze like it was yesterday" comment). Now I need to play Yar until my head explodes. :D
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:06 PM on October 25, 2002

I'm not sure where, but you can, at least when I did a few years ago, download every single Atari 2600 game in one ZIP file. They take up about 10 MB on your computer. Including the emulator. Wow.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 5:07 PM on October 25, 2002

Oh, yeah, Yar's Revenge! I dunno, I had a certain affinity to that game. That was, I think, the only one where I could just play as long as I wanted and never die. It clicked with me, for some reason, like no other game since then has. Any game like that for you, anyone?
posted by paladin at 5:13 PM on October 25, 2002

a little about adventure, for those who didn't follow the 'via' link. (like myself, after i took a second look)
posted by oliver_crunk at 5:53 PM on October 25, 2002

I remember a weird game called Cosmic Ark that was made by Imagic for the 2600. You had to go down to a planet and pick up these life forms (or, you know, blips) and take them back to your ark, where you could presumably probe and humiliate them to your heart's content. That was a good one.

I followed another link on Atariage to Swordquest: Earthworld, which I have odd flashbacks to even now. It's like some tragic unfinished low-res opera, intended to have four acts, but the composer snuffed it after Act III.

I still hold to the maxim that every video game is just Combat in disguise, though. God, I loved Combat. You can take yer gawd dam EverQuest and stick it where the sun don't shine. Just gimme an invisible tank with bouncy bullets. Aw yeah.
posted by Kafkaesque at 7:07 PM on October 25, 2002

Hey kaf, did you ever find the bugs in Combat? My friends and I knew how to get that program to do a bunch of loopy things. We knew how to shoot both tanks across the screen in circles or to shoot through walls. I can't remember them all.

Also, I remember Cosmic Ark, and I remember the silvery Imagic cartridges. Cool game.
posted by eyeballkid at 7:26 PM on October 25, 2002

Eyeball, I am eternally jealous that you have properly installed the emulator. I tried to get MAME to work, with no success. I demand to know the secret!

Let's settle this the Atari way: You get the big slow plane, and I get three really little fast planes!
posted by Kafkaesque at 7:33 PM on October 25, 2002

tried to get MAME to work, with no success. I demand to know the secret!

Butter.
posted by eyeballkid at 8:19 PM on October 25, 2002

eyeballkid, what I remember about Cosmic Ark was that wonderful split-second when the sound stopped before you missed that last meteor and it blew up your ship. Probably one of the most annoying silence ever.

Greatest Atari noise ever: the sound of Zots approaching. Dun dun dun dun DUN DUN DUN DUN .....
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 8:19 PM on October 25, 2002

ah, I was also a big Yar's Revenge fan. I also like Asteroids.

Anyone remember Journey Escape? now THAT was the surreal one. You had to get the band Journey past Love-Crazed Groupies, Sneaky Photographers, and Shifty-Eyed Promoters and into the Journey Escape Vehicle after a gig.

Thanks to eBay, I now have that cartridge. And Fast Food/Burger Time. And Plaque Attack, which I believe was sponsored by the American Dental Association.

I've heard of (but have never seen, nor played) porno Atari cartridges. That would be strange beyond words.

Yup, I love my still-functional Atari 2600.
posted by Vidiot at 11:08 PM on October 25, 2002

From the page ( my emphasis ):

"[Flash] has developed scripting capabilities similar to its sister program, Macromedia Director, **which is my native language**."

His English is pretty good then.

<rant>
Please be polite and label Flash links as such so people who cannot see them will know.
The Web is built on open standards and proprietary Flash is not one of them.
<rant>

Off to download an Emulator so I can play too...
posted by godidog at 4:31 AM on October 26, 2002

And where's the blue bridge which opens the way to that other dot in the hidden room?

Thanks for saving me some time there-- I just wanted to know if he'd put the developers' names in. I think the problem is that only the first level of difficulty is supported (and who's cabinet is that? Mine had the difficulty switches on the back where they were much more, well, difficult to use).
posted by yerfatma at 6:22 AM on October 26, 2002

With all due respect to those who do not like Flash, I think that this is exactly what Flash is for. If I had needed to master Java to write games for web pages, I probably would have never made any.
posted by ae4rv at 10:01 AM on October 26, 2002

The Web is built on open standards and proprietary Flash is not one of them.

This is a common misconception. In fact, Macromedia has published the file format, and several other programs besides Flash itself (including a competing program from archrival Adobe) can write Flash files.
posted by kindall at 12:15 PM on October 26, 2002

I LOVED this game when I was a kid...I played it all the time. I can't imagine how it held my interest for so long, but somehow it did. Oh sweet nostalgia, how I long for my youth. Ahh, actually no, no not really.
posted by Zulujines at 3:22 PM on October 26, 2002