NES Works Gaiden

Rounding out the exploration of Nintendo's 8-bit competition in the U.S. comes the Atari 2600. The original hit console may have found itself diminished by the time NES launched, but that didn't mean it had tapped out. Atari Inc. would continue to push the 2600 as a budget-priced starter system until shortly before the NES's 16-bit successor arrived. This episode looks at what the 2600 represented in the late ’90s as a preamble to a brief series of game retrospectives that may just surprise you with the quality of the material developers and publishers were putting together for this most elderly of consoles...

Our survey of the Atari 2600's post-crash library begins with a trio of games that you could hardly call unprecedented. There's precedent for all of them! But frankly, they all hold up pretty well even today and demonstrate a collective commitment to quality that bodes well for this latter-day phase for the 2600. (It helps that the wizards at GCC developed two of the games appearing this week.) Sure, Jr. Pac-Man looks a bit meager in hindsight next to NES classics like Super Mario Bros. 3, but bear in mind that these carts shipped in 1986, when the NES and Master System were still mewling pups in the U.S. market. In that light, you can actually see the appeal of the 2600 as a reasonable, low-cost competitor to the NES.

Anyway—the cool thing about this approach to covering only the NES era of Atari 2600 releases is that it means I got to skip over all the stuff like edutainment games and the third-party slop that killed the U.S. console biz for a few year and just jump directly to mmmmmaybe the finest original creation ever programmed for the console? I am, of course, referring to Solaris here. Not Tax Avoiders. I guess I didn't get to skip ALL the third-party slop.

Another pair of Konami titles for PV-1000 with Tutankham and Amidar. Unlike last episode's games, this duo's releases under the Casio label are some of the few home conversions of the coin-op originals, making these carts fairly unique and decidedly rare. In fact, Tutankham has the unfortunate dual distinction of being the PV-1000's rarest game, but also (probably) its best. I suppose that's kind of nice, in that it certainly beats something like Pachinko for Sega SG-1000 (rare, expensive, and bad)... but also kind of bad, in that there aren't a lot of options for experiencing Tutankham outside of emulation.

And, hey, just because we've seen variants of all of these games on consoles of the era already doesn't mean these interpretations aren't worth discussing. Even the Mahjong game has an unusual element or two to set it apart from the many largely identical takes on the subject that cluttered game systems at the time. And the way these games play almost, but not quite, like their Famicom counterparts at the time bodes well for this system as, one hopes, an interesting citizen in the console community of mid-’80s Japan.

Lupin III, which plays a bit like Pitfall! interpreted as a single-directional scrolling running, stacks up quite well to other platformer offerings available for Japanese consoles at the time. It's not quite up there with Flicky, which also shipped in December 1984 for SG-1000, but it's a solid and convincing take all the same.

Another day, another NES Works Gaiden episode about Casio's PV-1000. In this case, we have two Namco games that would eventually make their way to Famicom. Dig Dug is a genuine B-tier video game classic; Warp & Warp is... not. But were these cartridges good enough to tide over the Japanese console audience's demand for Namco hits until the Famicom releases arrived two years later? Do they make the Nintendo versions obsolete? Are these, in short, the PV-1000's killer-app kingmakers? The fact that most of you had never heard of the PV-1000 before I launched this series is probably an existential spoilers to these questions. But still. It's fun to pretend. Special thanks to Christa Lee of Sound Retro Co. for modding this PV-1000 for composite output.