Notes: Level 6-3 made entirely out of pentagrams

March 14, 2011 3:34 PM

What do you mean you don't remember Olegco Gaming? They were like the best developer for the Atari! They had classics, like Cool Beens, and Ghost Garden Man. Don't tell me you never played Baron of the SkeleBone Zone! Well, you take a look at all of their games on their archive site. Now try to be a little more knowledgeable before we talk about video games again... thanks.
posted by codacorolla (17 comments total)

"Baron of the SkeleBone Zone" is a euphemism if I ever heard one.
posted by brundlefly at 3:38 PM on March 14, 2011 [5 favorites]

Genre: Horticulture/Horrorculture

That genre really died when Atari lost the video game throne to NES. There's something so distinctly American about the genre, something the Japanese never truly captured. Even though Ghost Garden Man failed to capture the stability of French horticulture, the vivid imagery of French horror more than compensated. What did NES have? "Casper and Corbusier"! Corbusier, the architect and urbanist, in a ghostly gardening game? Feh!
posted by filthy light thief at 3:51 PM on March 14, 2011 [3 favorites]

DiaperQuest II
Release Date: 1981
Genre: Diaper 'Em Up
Notes: Sequel of ``DiaperQuest I´´

You just can't make this stuff up. It's got to be real.
posted by GuyZero at 3:56 PM on March 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

Also, that there would be a DiaperQuest I that knew in advance that there'd be a sequel.
posted by GuyZero at 3:56 PM on March 14, 2011

If you find a ROM for an emulator that plays these things, make sure you play them on a clean build that has no external internet connection and you have never entered any personally identifiable information... I say this because these are memory and graphic intensive applications and not brilliant and humorous vaporware.
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:02 PM on March 14, 2011

POOPY BUT
posted by Hoopo at 4:05 PM on March 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

(Sorry. It's not often you get to write that and have it be totally relevant)
posted by Hoopo at 4:18 PM on March 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

Hey now, not every game can post a level made entirely out of pentagrams. Or the "First use of ``Circle´´ shape in gaming."
posted by freshwater at 4:36 PM on March 14, 2011

Remember when you could toggle the Atari's on/off switch REALLY FAST when you were playing DiaperQuest II and you could sometimes make unlimited TALC GET after stage 2 if you were playing on mode B?
posted by boo_radley at 4:39 PM on March 14, 2011 [6 favorites]

The Diaper Quest II graphics remind of the Mario Paint animated treats I used to leave my sister after I went off to school. She moved into my old basement room and had the SNES and an old TV in there, so on the weekends I used to sneak in while she was off working at McD's and spend a couple of hours animating a little dude dropping trow and mooning the screen, or a crudely drawn guy picking boogs or flicking the bird set to really obnoxious Mario Paint music. Then I'd turn the TV off but turn the volume way up, and leave the SNES on. When she would get home ad turn it on, there'd be a stupid cartoon blasting an oinking and meowing cacophony.

I was a bit old for that stuff then, but 15 years later that sort of juvenile humour can still make me LOL.
posted by Hoopo at 5:05 PM on March 14, 2011 [3 favorites]

I'd almost buy them as 5600 games, but not Atari 2600. Those graphics would simply not be possible on that machine, especially in 1981. Also, very few VCS games had title screens. The key to a good fake (besides being funny) is being at least conceivably real. This fails.
posted by rikschell at 6:39 PM on March 14, 2011 [3 favorites]

Yeah, it's sort of petty, but I would have liked this much, much more if it were box art and gameplay screens instead of gameplay screens and (anachronistic) title screens.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 6:54 PM on March 14, 2011

5600 games

You mean 5200?
posted by lumensimus at 12:20 AM on March 15, 2011

The key to a good fake (besides being funny) is being at least conceivably real. This fails.

I have to agree, sadly. These would have been perfect presented as little-known C64 games sold by mail order through small ads on the back pages of mid '80s Central European electronics magazines and now forgotten, or maybe as samizdat releases for some kind of Warsaw Pact ripoff of the Spectrum which had used Sputnik technology to solve the colour block problem, but I don't think the Atari 2600 could even display all those colours on screen at once let alone keep enough data in memory to display the bitmaps.

But I do want to play Death Forest Ov Ha-Satan.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 5:17 AM on March 15, 2011

The thing that really makes me think "not Atari 2600" here is the lack of bilateral symmetry in the backgrounds. This is one of the system's major idiosyncrasies: the hardware, which was designed for Pong, made it very easy to make a symmetrical screen layout; doing anything asymmetrical required special trickery, like changing the bitmap with exact timing while it was being drawn. This was a big enough hack that very few games did it. Even the maze in Adventure is built out of symmetrical screens.
posted by baf at 11:39 AM on March 15, 2011

I think I'll go hook up my Colecovision (to the 47") and play some Venture now....8 bit in HD! Metafilter=Enabler?
posted by ironbob at 2:31 PM on March 15, 2011

001. Collect All The Power Pellets
002. Morph Into Bike Mode
003. Drive Around
posted by fusinski at 7:03 AM on March 16, 2011