look like zellers carts, but they aren't

[Derek]

I may have double posted this as the first time it told me my topic title had to be longer than two characters, ahh, I think it is. Looks like seven words to me.

 

Anyway, I bought a Logitech Dual Action joystick, just like the one I had that died for no reason, and four Atari carts as it rained Thursday night, so I decided to go to get groceries and pop into Value Village, which rarely has anything Atari oriented, and if they do, it is the extremely common stuff. They had some Atari stuff, so I bought it, and I knew what Circus was, though it had a different front picture than the Zellers one that I have. It is the same game with a different picture on the front of the cartridge. Enduro is just that, the crappy Activision game which had no point, you just pass cars and occasionally the season changes. Boring. But this cartridge seems to match the Taiwan/cooper one on Atariage's rarity guide. So it is not a Zellers title? It certainly looks like one. Tank City, I assumed was going to be either Battlezone or Combat. It is Sega's Thunderground with three tanks that scroll up the screen instead of Sega 1983. The rarity guide credits it to Action Hi-tech. The fourth cartridge is Space Tunnel. I expected something lame, and was not disappointed in that respect. What a shitty game. But, it is rare enough to get a ? mark on the rarity column here. It is credited to BitCorp. on the screen, and knowing how crappy their other games are, this one does not disappoint. Annoying sound effects, boring game, repetitive game play. It has the picture that matches the Taiwan/Cooper label, so is this cartridge from overseas and made to look like a Zellers cartridge and sold at some other store back in 1983? I have tried to attach a scan, but have never been able to make that work, so if it isn't there, I'll try again. Anyone know anything more about these carts? They are all in very good shape, though loose. Thanks for any thoughts. They are interesting looking carts, but since I already had three of the four games, and the fourth, Space Tunnel, sucks, I really feel like I wasted my money. Why on earth was it called Space Tunnel? You are, I guess, in a downward travelling tunnel, with the same four boring enemies that come along while you are trapped in the middle of the screen, you have no apparent goal, the four game variations are basically the same. ZZZZZ. One description of it was it was a Vanguard clone. NOT!!! Vanguard was a pretty good Atari cart, this is just pure boring crap, rare or not, it is crap. I'd still like to know a bit more about the four of them, as this one was apparently an actual Atari issued game in 1983?!?! Really, something this lame was issued by Atari at a time when things were falling apart and maximum fun and appeal were needed to try and bring things back to life, this is what was unleashed? Ick! So here I go with another attempt to attach a couple of scanned pics.

RARE ATARI.pdf

[Rom Hunter]

First of all: try to seperate your sentences in a post.

 

It's quite hard to read it properly now, especially because it's a long text.

 

Second: your carts have nothing to do with Zellers carts, apart from the fact that they were made in Taiwan.

 

Your carts are the following:

 

Space Tunnel:

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-space-tunnel_17449.html

A Taiwan - Cooper Black cart, except yours is the longer label version.

 

Enduro:

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-enduro_17545.html

Also a Taiwan - Cooper Black cart.

 

Tank City:

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-tank-city_23956.html

A Funvision cart.

 

Circus:

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-circus_25290.html

A Taiwan - V-Case cart.

Would love to have a .jpg scan of that one for our database, btw.

 

 

Please know that Zellers carts don't come in V-case style cartridges and also not with Cooper Black type labels:

http://www.atarimania.com/screenshots_games_atari-2600-vcs-p_total-page-step-publisher_19-1-200-47_2_G.html

 

 

Enduro boring?

 

Well, all I can say that it's the most pirated VCS game in history:

http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-enduro_7304.html

 

And no. 1 in our Top 100 Downloads page:

http://www.atarimania.com/top-atari-game-atari-2600-vcs-_G_2_D.html

 

Must mean something...

 

Edited August 10, 2010 by Rom Hunter

[Derek]

Maybe if one was drunk and stoned then passing endless cars leading to no goal at all would be interesting. I found it boring. Is there a point to passing 200+ cars then four flags wave and you do the same thing again? How is that interesting?

 

Anyway, thanks for your reply. I didn't mean for the whole thing to be one giant paragraph. As I stated in the final sentence I was attempting to attach pictures, which did not show up as part of my post, but as downloadable files, not what I was trying for. I copied and pasted when it fucked up (as I knew it would) and I didn't want to type the whole thing in again, thus I just left it as the blob it pasted as. My printer saves all scans as Adobe files, so I opened paintbrush and saved the Circus file you wanted as a jpg, though it takes up the whole screen.

circus.pdf

Edited August 11, 2010 by Derek

[Rom Hunter]

No problem.

 

Thanks, man.

 

And if you ever find another funky looking VCS cart, please let me know.

 

[A.J. Franzman]

Maybe if one was drunk and stoned then passing endless cars leading to no goal at all would be interesting. I found it boring. Is there a point to passing 200+ cars then four flags wave and you do the same thing again? How is that interesting?

 

It's not much different than most other games of the era, where the goal is to perform some other repetitve task (shoot aliens, munch dots, collect coins, etc.) over and over simply to try to score as many points as possible. Note that in addition to cars passed, Enduro also counts scores in miles and days. There is a trophy which appears onscreen accompanied by a victory tune for surviving five days -- the game does not end there, though.

Edited August 11, 2010 by A.J. Franzman