davidcalgary29

Maybe...in South Florida? In the late '70s? The name is awfully familiar, and triggers memories of flying on Eastern Airlines to Disney World. Nostalgia! Speaking of nostalgia, the Rum and Butter and Cuban Lunch bars are Alberta specialties. They were discontinued for decades until a family decided to revive the recipes a few years ago. The best bars in that lot, though, are the coffee crisps.

LOL! Big Turk is definitely a love/hate (translation: most people hate it) experience for many. I had one (for the first time in years) a month ago, and was surprised that I had to yank and tug at it to break a piece off. I was actually going to send you a slab of McKintosh toffee -- a Canadian favourite -- but many don't know that you should shatter it with a hammer first and let it soften in your mouth unless you want to end up with a broken tooth -- and didn't want your next "gift" to be a bill at the dentist.

I'm waiting for the video of you and your girlfriend actually trying that ultra-Canadian specialty, Big Turk. It's a very special candy bar. Your unpacking videos were very cool. Love the cross-stitch kits!

Enjoy! I forgot to tell you that the dual-joystick controller was made especially for use with Robot War to emulate the arcade experience. Paul Champeau did a wonderful job with them.

I just opened my box to find..."Mr. Driller" for the Dreamcast -- the last game I wanted for the system -- and a bag of wonderful moon pies!!! Thanks, Secret Santa -- this is awesome.

I actually like Bug Hunt. While it's not particularly competitive with the competitors' light gun pack-in games of its era, it's still fun in short bursts.

We can probably consider Bug Hunt to be an XEGS exclusive, as it was a pack-in game and -- I don't believe -- ever sold as a standalone title in stores. It's possible that Atari sold it directly to interested individuals, but the only way most existing A8 users could get it was on the second-hand market. Not that there was any great demand for the game...

I'm in if we have to source our candy from another continent, so I can finally get a shot at getting some Miso Soup or "Adult Sweetness" Kit-kat.

Ooh, what's happening on Valentine's Day? Is there a secret Cupid Gift exchange that I don't know about? Details!

I am always impressed (and thankful) to see industry vets dropping in to explain their role in video game history. Welcome, John! H.E.R.O. is a stellar game, is still widely loved and played today, and I'm sure you know how massively influential it's been over the decades. I hope you get to check out A.R.T.I. for the 7800, which is a wonderful homage (and more) to your game.

Almost all of the XEGS label Atari releases are, in fact, excellent and certainly worth playing. All of the light gun games (yes, I'm looking at you, Bug Hunt) are actually lots of fun to play if you can get past accuracy issues (translation: there is no accuracy) on the XG-1. Crystal Castles is an excellent port of the arcade classic. And most of the unreleased XEGS protos, such as Deflektor, Tower Toppler, and Xenophobe, are stellar. But Atari's finest A8 effort is probably MIDI Maze, which tragically went unreleased but features real-time chat in a FPS with excellent graphics. It's too bad that you'll need a friend with a copy of the game and a modem to experience the full fun of the game, although you can play against the compuer. It also worth noting that you could play against a ST user running their port of MIDI Maze as well. There are a number of games that used the expanded memory of the 64K+ computers to speed up loading times and such. And I second the motion to get an SDrive or some other SD cart so that you won't have to hunt down individual cartridges, most of which sell for extortionate prices these days. I bought my first cartridge of Crystal Castles for $5 at a flea market in 1988...but it took me another twenty years to find another one in the wild. I can't imagine what a boxed copy of that one would sell for today. And I'm going to give a final plug for DataSoft's A8 lineup. Some of those games are just outstanding in terms of gameplay (if not graphics): their port of Mr. Do! is excellent, and Pooyan is woefully underplayed.

Well, at least they were better than Molecule Man. I never could get into that one.

What I'd like is a list of flippies that had Atari on the "A" side and C64 on the "B". I remember reading about one release that had this designation, which was so unusual that it even mentioned that fact in the review. Did anyone ever find an '80s release that had an A8 flippy with a system that was not the C64? I can't recall if I saw one with A8/Apple II or not -- perhaps I am thinking of Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. Almost all of the last A8 releases that I saw for sale outside of traditional computer stores (ie. Canadian Tire) were flippies of old games. Lode Runner was a popular one, as were the Scott Adams Comic Book "games". Awardware also had lots of their titles on flippies. And NTSC cassette games were sometimes flippies with other systems, right?

Huh. I may have to make the drive down there next year -- I haven't been to Calgary in four years.

Good point! I deleted my original photo.