General gaming |
- Guest Column: Tales of the Starpath Supercharger
- The 5 Best and 5 Most Interesting Atari 2600 Games
- Hell Yeah! Review: Parts is Parts
- Guest Column: Adding On: The Peripheral Atari Experience
| Guest Column: Tales of the Starpath Supercharger Posted: 28 Sep 2012 05:44 PM PDT
Feature 1UP COVER STORY  1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600 Guest Column: Tales of the Starpath SuperchargerCover Story: We look back at the Atari 2600's greatest add-on.P eople that grew up with smartphones and memory cards size of a postage stamp containing orders of magnitude more storage than the computers that took men to the moon would probably look on the Starpath Supercharger as a quaint curiosity rather than the awesome leap in technology that those of us that were around when it was new believed it to be. The Supercharger was an add-on for the Atari 2600 developed by the Arcadia Corporation in 1982. Arcadia were later forced to change their name to Starpath due to trademark issues. The Supercharger plugged into the cartridge slot of the 2600 and added a whopping 6K RAM. Given that the system only had 128 bytes (not K bytes, bytes) with most games having 4K ROM, this was a huge upgrade. The additional memory allowed the games that were developed for the Supercharger to have significantly better graphics than the standard cartridges released for the 2600. Unlike later add-ons, such as the 32X, it didn't have a slot for plugging in cartridges. Instead, the games were delivered on cassettes that were loaded by playing them in a cassette player which was connected to the Supercharger via a cable that plugged into the headphone jack. All the games for the Supercharger were developed by Starpath and released in 1982. |
| The 5 Best and 5 Most Interesting Atari 2600 Games Posted: 28 Sep 2012 04:30 PM PDT
Feature 1UP COVER STORY  1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600 The 5 Best and 5 Most Interesting Atari 2600 GamesCover Story: The good and the fascinatingly strange of the world's first hit gaming console.L ists like this are never easy, and the discussion surrounding them often devolves into arguments over the games that were not included. The Atari 2600 hosted many great and important titles. Some people might decry the omission of Yar's Revenge, Donkey Kong, or Pong, and though those games were fun and/or important in the history of video games. That being said, when listing the best games for a system, I chose to ignore things like personal nostalgia (sorry Frostbite), historical importance (to a certain extent), and sales figures (because some of the worst 2600 games are among the best-selling). Instead, I focused solely on two things: How does the game compare to others of its time in terms of graphics, sounds, and gameplay? And how much fun is the game to play to this day? Top 5 Best Atari 2600 Games |
| Hell Yeah! Review: Parts is Parts Posted: 28 Sep 2012 03:59 PM PDT Play Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit for just a few minutes, and you'll notice that the game proudly wears its inspirations on its sleeve. Mix the platforming of Sonic the Hedgehog and the sprawling level design of Earthworm Jim into a framework that desperately wants to remind the player of Super Metroid, and you have an experience that's explicitly informed by the games its developers love. But the callbacks don't stop there; at times, Hell Yeah! will surprise you with just how far it goes to pay tribute to past classics with even the most minor of elements, from its Wario Ware-esque mini-games, to the way the protagonist explodes into a bunch of energy balls after touching spikes seemingly ripped straight from the world of Mega Man. Arkedo Studio definitely knows the essential parts of good platformers, and with Hell Yeah! they've set out to include as many as they can in this one -- even at the risk of robbing their game of its own identity. |
| Guest Column: Adding On: The Peripheral Atari Experience Posted: 28 Sep 2012 02:47 PM PDT
Feature 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 24 | 35 YEARS OF ATARI 2600 Adding On: The Peripheral Atari ExperienceCover Story: The 2600 didn't just pioneer game design; it also perfected the art of selling add-ons.P eople look back fondly on the Atari 2600 because of its games. Classic titles like Pitfall, Kaboom!, Yar's Revenge and Adventure not only defined a generation of gaming, but helped to lay the groundwork for what games would become over the next 35 years. But the 2600 was also the home to a long litany of ambitious add-ons, expansions and peripherals. And while some of them might not have always worked, or been entirely practical, many of them were just as important to the success of the 2600 -- though others served as shocking examples of things to come for later generations of hardware. |
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