I have a flashback… which is fun on a rainy day.
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I really miss these illustrations. Somewhere between the high-tide of the NES era and certainly cemented by the age of Crash Bandicoot was the acceptability to market games with graphics that strongly resembled their gameplay.
Actually Nintendo specifically probably has a lot to do with it, Kung-Fu and Popeye cartridges come to mind. The Master System really excelled with it, with even the manuals having a gridded background reminiscent of pixel plotting.
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The Master System had some brilliant minimalistic artwork and some real stinkers too.
I’ll let you be the judge of what side of the spectrum this falls on:
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When I was a kid, I didnt see how very phalic that is…
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I can interact, with my TV! It’s brilliant, with 16 colors! and the sound! Think how many quarters I am saving!
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Porque no los dos?
Intellivision had Utopia, which became my genre of choice partly because I sought a similar experience in vain for so long that the initial experience kept getting better & better in hindsight because there was little to nothing to compare it with/sate the need.
Atari had Adventure, which is my second favourite genre, and what a game that was for it’s time!
But yeah in general Intellivision was better, though I preferred my buddy’s Odyssey.
“Stop licking yourself! Stop licking yourself!” Confused self-pleasuring bully?
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Odyssey? wasn’t that just pong variants? Or the one with the TV overlays?
Also, never played Utopia, but I have seen game play of Adventure. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and AD&D Treasure of Tarmin were, I think in the genre. Amazing games.
My friend had an Atari computer and it had a similar hack and slash dungeon crawler which me and a friend loved to play. We would duo team, he run the controls, while I ran the keyboard which did health potions and changed weapons, etc.
Odyssey 2 I should say, and it was great gameplay, particularly “Conquest of the World” and “quest for the rings” both games shamed what was available otherwise.
Utopia was a first “God game/city/nation builder” and had 2-player, it was fab
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Yea, sorry for not adding a link back to them, thanks for picking up the slack.
Yeah, in the context of modern, zombie Atari, you could even see “specially commissioned to enhance the Atari experience to further entice children and adults to embrace the new era of electronic entertainment.” as referring to this book itself to mean, “published to pretend like Atari is still a thing and make millennials aware of old Atari games so that ‘Atari’ can get more by whoring out the IPs.” Although in both the cases of the original art and the zombie Atari, it means, “create expectations of experiences that, in reality, are a total disappointment in comparison.”
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Dude.
Best. Present. Ever.
I wish I still had it in the box with all the games…
Atari Force! Or Yars’ Revenge, or something else. There were a bunch of them. I was utterly enchanted with them as a kid; they hold up better than you might expect for early '80s videogame tie-ins.
Sort of annoying that Ernest Cline is now considered an authority on 70-80’s culture. ‘Ready Player One’ was atrociously bad. It felt like it was written by a data-mining algorithm. It was without a doubt the most sterile and trite novel I have ever read. His dizzyingly non-stop parade of 70’s-80’s mainstream pop-culture ‘references’ that the book is gushingly praised for, showed a fatal lack of insight or context, and felt like the equivalent of a rich white record company executive writing gangster rap lyrics because gangster rap is selling the most units. It was literally a template, you could remove just the 70’s-80’s pop culture ‘references’ and replace them with random songs, games, films, etc from any other decade and the book would read and feel exactly the same and the prose would function exactly the same. I’m getting grumpy just thinking about how objectively terrible that book is; what a formulaic cash-in on ‘nerd culture’ and how lavishly praised it is by the rubes it was marketed to. That book singlehandedly destroyed my trust and faith in Amazon reviews.
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Not as disappointing as realizing my sea monkeys weren’t going to be getting married, going to work in the morning in a suit and tie carrying a briefcase while mom monkey blew a kiss from the porch, or waving to me on their bikes and skateboards.
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