Gaaaahhhh, Indiana Jones! That was the other “quest” type game I was trying to remember.
(Can’t play the bloody thing because the emulator I’m using doesn’t run that one properly, and all my old 2600 hardware is a truckload of states away, in storage, at the moment.)
I was the resident God of Asteroids in my house. I ran one game up over a million before I got bored and blew myself up. My mom was a freak for the Pac-Man mostly I think because she didn’t play it at the arcade and didn’t realize how bad the Atari version sucked. Berserk was awesome. I loved the warp shooting out the opening to pick off robots on the other side. I liked Yar’s Revenge too, although I think I was about the only person in the country who did (no one else ever seems even to remember the game much less admit to playing it).
What was the name of the game where you were trying to locate a chalice and return it to the gold castle? There were three dragons that could eat you and a bat that swooped around the game stealing things. It was always fun to get eaten while holding on to the bat which was holding on to a dragon and go zooming around the board. There was another game where you were a particle in a nuclear reactor and you had to herd other particles into a chamber or something. What was that one called?
Otto, do not fret…I was a YARS REVENGE addict.
The castle game was simply named “Adventure”. No idea about the reactor game.
One word.
HSWWSH.
Get it?
no.
Hell, I even remember that the manual for Yar’s Revenge had a mini-comic in it (Atari was big on those the last year or so they were releasing 2600 stuff) describing the backstory.
Adventure was indeed, the castles and dragons game. I thought every Atari-geek has seen the magic-dot easter egg in that one, but I guess not…
The reactor game was, well, Reactor. Some of the code for it was “adapted” for the Jedi Arena game cart, a year or so later, IIRC.
Thunder: Played a bit too much Yar’s Revenge, didja?
[sub]Can’t recall, now, was that a high-score activated egg, or did a specific in-game action trigger it?[/sub]
And the buried memories keep comin’:
Remember Xonox double ended cartidges?
Spike’s Peak and the impenetrable Haunted… Castle?
[sub]Haunted House was a different cart, released by Atari proper… that was the one with the floating eyeballs as your character.[/sub]
“Remember Xonox double ended cartidges?”
Ha! I do now. Was there ever a good game released in that format?
Quoting Dennis Miller: “Folks, let me tell you something…two of SHIT is…SHIT.”
Yes… we had one. I don’t remember the exact names, but we had the one that had the 2 tanks that blasted at each other, and the other side was “Chuck Norris” karate game that I got quite good at.
Granted the games on that were not near as good as those from activision, or any of the Colecovision games I had, but it was a gift and we played it and had fun.
I have two working Atari 2600s, and tons of carts - some of which I, personally have never played, as one system and half the carts were given to me by a former co-worker. They are not currently hooked up, but I have an urge to play them after reading this thread. My old NES, too. I bought TONS AND TONS of Atari cartridges a few years after the NES debuted. Got 'em for an average of $2. And every time I see joysticks, I buy them. I am not worried about a controller lack.
I loved Vanguard and Kaboom!, but countless others appealed to me.
I absolutely LOVED my Colecovision and the Atari attachment!
Venture made me a nervous wreck! Whenever you stayed in a room too long and that skull-thingy came after you… Whoo!
I once played Donkey Kong so long that I flipped the point counter five times before I quit.
My friend had a Colecovision, too, and he had a game called something like Journey Escape. Journey! As in the band! You flew a ship on a kind of vertically scrolling screen, picking up some items and avoiding others. All while the opening bars of Don’t Stop Believing played in the background.
On Atari:
Another Yar’s Revenge fan here. I also liked Joust, Combat, Missile Command, and Centipede.
If you were able to nail the woo-woo-spinny guy [sub] (not his actual name) [/sub] as he took a shot at your fly, the screen exploded [sub](not literally)[/sub]. If your flew your fly up the tiny vertical line continously as the explosion simmered down, sometimes the game would end with the words HSWWSH on the screen. That was the initials of the game designer (H S W) palindromed.
For my friends, the word HSWWSH became a verb to describe the action of something crashing, blowing up, or just not working right.
Sad follow-up:
Either I or my friend (it’s been too long to remember) returned the game because we thought it sucked. The reason that we gave for return was… “The game doesn’t work right. It says HSWWSH on the screen and stops working.” They fell for it.
Tangent: I know there was a Journey: Escape game for the 2600, but I never heard of another console version; you sure the one you saw was a Coleco cart?
Even the arcade version of that one was horrible… But come to think of it, I seem to recall seeing a PC, or maybe a C64 (or Amiga, et al) port of that one, so maybe there was a Coleco port after all.
[sub]Or possibly someone or other had the ROMs for the arcade version, with a coin-op emulator on PC, and I’m thinking of that… it’s all running together in my head, now.[/sub]
Thunder, did y’all pronounce that “hisswish?”
[sub]Thanks, man, now I got it stuck in my head.[/sub]
Hey! I found another link to that 10-in-1 Atari controller/game:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/cubegoodies/toys/5d39/
Unfortunately, I’d backordered. :dubious: At least you can see what it looks like.
Ack… didn’t see the question until now.
It was pronounced “Hoosh-Woosh” with soft “oo” sounds as in “good”.
This concludes today’s lesson on “How to pronouce HSWWSH”.
My brother (35) and I (30) have Surround marathons! For hours! That “beep—beep—beep” sound stil gets me all worked up.
I am, in fact, Chicken Scratch’s brother, and she’s right, we CAN play this game for hours on end!
We usually start with Slot Racers (you have to have the paddle controls for that), then Circus Atari, and then the final game, Surround.
Also, Thunder, I just had to chime in that I, too, have gotten Yar’s Revenge to do the HSWWSH thing.
Okay, recurring trivia time then (since I still can’t remember the specifics)
Which castle, on what difficulty level, held the “magic dot” that unlocked the game’s easter egg, in Adventure?
[sub]I’m thinking it was the Black Castle, on level three, but it’s been a good many moons since I played with this one.[/sub]