davidcalgary29

Hi, everybody! My long trip from Rhode Island is finally over! Here I am looking out at a subarctic hellscape winter wonderland in Peace River, Alberta! It’s -27C so I’m keeping my tuque and gloves on.

Has anyone received their unit? Updates, please!

It doesn't seem that anyone from the first round of orders has received their system. I won't be buying one until the Lynx adaptor is confirmed not be vapourware.

The First XLent Word Processor? That one was pretty good.

I know that I'm not the only one who used a 130XE and Atariwriter 80 to write university essays into the early '90s, and I certainly had to sit at the machine for entire days doing this. I believe that I typed my last essay on the A8 in '93. I think people forget how terrible it could be working on '90s peripherals that we take for granted today. When I was a T.A. at university, I was asked to hand scan eighteenth century novels and collate the results into a database. It was excruciatingly slow busywork.

Ooh...cart only, or boxed?

As soon as I saw screenshots of the mech, I thought to myself "that MUST be an Epyx game!". And then googled it and saw that it was a Psygnosis game published well after Epyx bit the dust. In any case, while I've never seen that design in a game made for the A8, it was surely "inspired" (translation: ripped off from) the same artwork and concept that was used for the Walkers in Lynx Zarlor Mercenary and Electrocop.

How dare you! Klax is My Precious. Just be sure to pick up Loopz when you pick up some more goodies from Songbird. It's still one of my top-5 games on the Lynx.

Well, we can't live in fear of eBay scammers...and can't protect all the clueless buyers. And I'd rather give Good Deal Games, which has supported us for many years, the legit business.

Well, let's see your reviews then.

I'd actually buy the Saboteur package, but I guess that they don't want my money after all.

No international shipping options, of course. And the FAQ for the site contains at least one spelling error. And why is no information posted about what the "standard" package contains? Is is a bare cart, or does it come with a box?

I love the fact that this homage to crappy software houses is still going strong neary three years later. Aztec Challenge (version one) is terrible, but somewhat playable. But Hypnotic Land is such a trainwreck of a game that it doesn't even qualify as entertainment. My choice for worst commercial A8 release of all time!

How about a mini-review of the event? I'm certainly not going to be able to attend anything until PRGE -- if it runs next year.

Beautiful!

None of you people deserve any game stores! I have a four or five hour round trip drive to reach a GameStop (ugh, and ten hours for anything acceptable), and that's sixty bucks in gas right there.

I'm waiting for the Gizmondo adapter! Disappointed, but not surprised, that this looks like a 2022 release now.

I'm in!

I think that succession planning will probably become more viable as time goes on and systems (and their original users) become more rare. As it is, I have a quite a few pieces of "value" to fellow users; quite a few pieces with some historical "value"; and quite a few pieces of high market "value". As I age, I'll probably just whittle down my stuff to the solid pieces which will age well, or are irreplaceable. I can't imagine that my original 800 from 1983 won't work forty years from now (it's survived the storm surge of a hurricane and a tropical climate for years), so I'll definitely keep that one around. Cheap manufacturing processs of the XE line will probably mean that it's going to become incredibly hard to fix or maintain those machines, though.

Next up: game series that look exactly the same on platforms with different schematics. The only games (aside from text adventures) that I can recall that fit this model (and I'd think that this would be comparatively harder to achieve) are the plethora of 2600 ports that appeared on the A8s in 1982 and 1983. Pitfall! looked very similar on both systems, as did Spacemaster X-7/Alpha Shield. But I realize that I shouldn't hijack this thread.

Adjusting the metric measured in the "Top 100" to "by rating" leaves us with a much more reasonable list, but American input is still weighted much too heavily. I only counted one Polish game (and I've never heard of Vicky, so I have to check that one out), and any list that does not include MIDI Maze on it must be considered suspect.

It took me over twenty years to get this game on cartridge. Thorn EMI released a whole bunch of terrible games, and Orc Attack was released during Atari's "troubles", so I'm not surprised that most people in North America passed on this one even when it was available. That's a shame, as it really was, along with Computer War, their best release for the system.

I guess I can agree with that, to some extent, but the A8 market was still awash with a sea of blah at that time. There were Atari's games...and then were those companies which were hell-bent on replicating the 2600 experience on the 800, complete with limited gameplay options and limited visual appeal. And I'd replace Avalon Hill's library (almost always on tape) with that of SSI, as those games were everywhere. Infocom was certainly an outlier, but I didn't get into those games until they released Wishbringer.

"More popular" speaks to relative -- and not objective -- commercial success, though. The A8 was a marvellous platform for 1979...and Atari, Inc. squandered all of that promise by dithering about and by making no real effort to market it to any type of audience. So it just sort of sat there in North America. Was it more popular than the Exidy Sorcerer and the Compucolor II? Yes. Was it more popular than the TI-99 4/A in total sales? Probably not, at least while they were sold concurrently. Yes, there were plenty of games -- plenty of low-quality, and low-interest games, because home computer gaming hadn't really developed beyond arcade games in the early '80s. And then that development had a year-long hiatus because companies didn't want to risk developing for a company in bankruptcy, and after that the C64 took over, so the A8 got leftovers. Yes, the A8 lasted for ages, and outlasted most of its competition, but it sort of stumbled through its life (especially after 1984) and was never really a market leader in the way we think of those things today. The A8 really didn't get a mainstream commercial push until the Tramiels came along, and North American consumers largely regarded it as an obsolete product by that point. North America didn't really have a budget home computer scene with 1 pound games, unlike Europe, so there was no real late '80s NTSC software development scene on any real scale.

24 puzzles based on ancient games; some of them impossible, but many of them quite fun, such as "The Horses of Asvah", which is a representative of the standard sliding-tile game.