What was that first game...

[leech]

... that you started cursing at?  Pretty sure mine was Pitfall II.  Though it may have been Archon, though that would have been me cursing at my brother because it seemed to glitch in his favor...

[Beeblebrox]

I seem to recall the air was blue whenever I played SpyvsSpy on cassette - but that was also partially down to the loading time between levels and the inevitable crashing whilst attempting to load it.

 

Electraglide, Encounter and the Last V8 were also titles I spent a lot of time shouting at! Ah and Potehole Pete.

 

I will go with Electraglide as my first rage inducing A8 game.

 

 

[Atari8guy]

The Last V8....that first part is tough as shit, I think I only got passed it once or twice.... a buddy growing up had it on the C64, just as tough.  

[leech]

I never played The Last V8, I should give it a shot!  Is that a Mad Max reference?

[Mclaneinc]

On the 8 bit Atari, that would be Bandits when that beetle thing drops down out of the blue and screws up your scoring..

 

Last V8 is tough as nails...

[Beeblebrox]

@MclaneincYeah - As far as I recall (cause I've not played it in 30+ years) ALL of the last V8 was hard heh heh!

 

 

[Mclaneinc]

To be honest, I think The Last V8 got play time because of the Hubbard soundtrack..

[a8isa1]

Caverns of Mars for sure! There are times you need precise control on diagonal movement and I just struggled when using the CX40s

[OmaOhneBH]

First game? Back in the days, I even started cursing at the first program I ever started on my newly received 600XL, which was PROGRAMM EINS (PROGRAM ONE) of the Owner's Guide. After changing the REM comment in line 50 from AUTOBAHN (HIWAY) to WEISSER HASE (WHITE RABBIT) and running the program again, it got me really mad seeing that nothing has changed, there's still the Autobahn (Hiway)...

 

 

 

[Tickled_Pink]

I suspect it might have been Arcadia for the Sinclair Spectrum. My dad bought a used 16K one in early '83 from our next door neighbour for £110. A week before the price of a new one went down to £99. I bought Arcadia because I'd seen it at a cousin's house and it's a pretty decent shooter that I've wanted to rewrite for the A8 or even 2600. Unfortunately I only had a B&W portable to play it on. The contrast one some screens wasn't clear enough and so I'd get hit by things I hadn't seen. I lost it big time quite a few times. Still have that Spectrum in the attic. Hasn't worked since '83. You join the dots.

[+x=usr(1536)]

7 hours ago, leech said:

I never played The Last V8, I should give it a shot!  Is that a Mad Max reference?

The entire game is basically a Mad Max reference.  One of the best (and toughest) budget titles ever released.

 

As for the first game I swore at: it was a Space Invaders cocktail that I was playing in the waiting area of a restaurant that my parents and I were at when I was around 5 years old.  I can say this with great certainty as my father came over, both confused and thoroughly unamused by my sudden - and loud - outburst of profanity at losing a life.  That was the immediate end of that game, replaced by a short trip to spankingtown for my efforts.

[drpeter]

Either Pogoman (when the bird started flying across the screen) or Mountain King (dashing to escape once wearing the crown- with the music getting ever more frantic, fires spreading everywhere and the difficulty of making precise diagonal leaps to move up a level).

 

Although the longest stream of expletives I recall (accompanied by much merriment from the rest of us) was my younger brother about to finally complete Shamus II....... and falling into the very last stalagmite pit & dying ignominiously 😂😂😂

 

I'm chuckling now thinking about it, 40 years later...

[leech]

22 minutes ago, drpeter said:

Either Pogoman (when the bird started flying across the screen) or Mountain King (dashing to escape once wearing the crown- with the music getting ever more frantic, fires spreading everywhere and the difficulty of making precise diagonal leaps to move up a level).

 

Although the longest stream of expletives I recall (accompanied by much merriment from the rest of us) was my younger brother about to finally complete Shamus II....... and falling into the very last stalagmite pit & dying ignominiously 😂😂😂

 

I'm chuckling now thinking about it, 40 years later...

Ah Shamus II, that was definitely a game that should have had me enjoying a bar of soap!

[leech]

2 hours ago, Tickled_Pink said:

I suspect it might have been Arcadia for the Sinclair Spectrum. My dad bought a used 16K one in early '83 from our next door neighbour for £110. A week before the price of a new one went down to £99. I bought Arcadia because I'd seen it at a cousin's house and it's a pretty decent shooter that I've wanted to rewrite for the A8 or even 2600. Unfortunately I only had a B&W portable to play it on. The contrast one some screens wasn't clear enough and so I'd get hit by things I hadn't seen. I lost it big time quite a few times. Still have that Spectrum in the attic. Hasn't worked since '83. You join the dots.

Kind of reminds me of the time I was trying to catalog all of the games we had (for some reason... that my 10 year old self could have made sense of) and I was using a program called Catalog 25.  Not sure who wrote it, pretty sure it was in BASIC.  But somehow I hit the delete key, and there was a confirmation, but instead of deleting the one record, it'd deleted all 100+ or whatever entries I'd spent the last few hours typing in (again, I was about 10 and finger poked the keyboard).  That's when I found out how hard it actually is to try to rip a floppy disk in half.  Those suckers are tough!

[Mark2008]

omg, I don't remember caring about finsihing  game,, I mean I'm sure I had moments, but, I do recall as a particular letdown, we spent the entire day typing in a game from a magazine.  We didn't have a disk drive - this was on the family's Ti-99.  My sister reading out the things to type, my brother and I taking turns at the keyboard about 1981, we didn't really know anything yet.  I know the ATari would give you immediate feedback, but it didn't analyze syntax errors as you typed, only at runtime.

 

She would just read alound - PRINT space quotation mark w e l c o m e---whatever it was, we'd type it in,  and then colon space colon.

All day long, to separate the commands, colon-space-colon.

 

Only problem was, it wasn't colon-space-colon.  It was space-colon-colon ....after typing the entire program in, we discovered we had errors on every single line we typed in.

 

My father was forever an optimist, he said it was good, it taught us to be precise.

 

And I suppose - the biggest disappointments were about not having things saved.  The worst is being so excited about finsihing something, and then flipping the machine off, and realizing you didn't save it.   Such disasters

 

 

 

[leech]

This is like in middle school, myself and two friends at the time typed in this giant listing from a magazine for the Apple II (it was supposed to be a text adventure).  It wouldn't work at the end... we spent many days looking for typos, until I found some tiny print that stated it wouldn't work on the particular model we were using!  Pretty sure it was the IIGS (I recall it having a mouse and a color GUI).  I need to see if I can find that magazine again...

[Tickled_Pink]

13 hours ago, leech said:

Kind of reminds me of the time I was trying to catalog all of the games we had (for some reason... that my 10 year old self could have made sense of) and I was using a program called Catalog 25.  Not sure who wrote it, pretty sure it was in BASIC.  But somehow I hit the delete key, and there was a confirmation, but instead of deleting the one record, it'd deleted all 100+ or whatever entries I'd spent the last few hours typing in (again, I was about 10 and finger poked the keyboard).  That's when I found out how hard it actually is to try to rip a floppy disk in half.  Those suckers are tough!

Obviously tougher than joysticks. Man, did I have a temper in my youth. Proved to be quite expensive in joysticks.

[Nermal]

For me it was probably Sea Dragon, Fort Apocalypse, and then Preppie (in that order) :)

[Gunstar]

You guys in PAL land had it easy with The Last V8 and Electraglide! When it was eventually sold in the U.S. by Mastertronic (on disk that came in a flip folder similar to what you get the bill in at a fine restaurant), they never bothered to make sure it worked right for the NTSC world! No glitching or anything like that, but the timer on both games was programmed for 50Hz and so you ran out of time much faster on NTSC machines! I NEVER made it to the first tunnel in Electraglide, even when I got really, really good (never hitting any object on the first level!!, I'd get to the point where the tunnel entrance started scaling bigger, and run out of time! I thought, due to it being a budget game, they did it on purpose because it was only that one level! On the Last V-8, it was the same, though after many hours of practice over the years, I did finally reach the entrance to the underground ONCE, only to die at the first 90-degree corner because of the touchy controls, and of course once in the underground. Those were two of the first and last three Mastertronic games I ever purchased back in the day, bought at the same time, Ninja was the third, a favorite of mine, and loved it, but then there was no timer to beat! When I played it on PAL for the first time the action was too slow compared to what I was used too, but that allowed me to actually finish the game for the first time as well!

 

I only discovered the reason why on both after converting my 1200XL to PAL about within the last decade! And then, The Last V-8 was super easy for me to finish the entire game the second time I tried all those years later, only to find out the second level was the last! Such a short game I couldn't believe I had wasted all those years trying to just get to the underground for that shit! With Electraglide, it's one of my favorites now because I can get through about half a dozen levels with all that extra time! Both were instantly too easy after all those years of frustrating attempts that made me so good at both games when I finally played them at the proper PAL speed!!! 

Edited January 6, 2023 by Gunstar

[leech]

2 hours ago, Gunstar said:

You guys in PAL land had it easy with The Last V8 and Electraglide! When it was eventually sold in the U.S. by Mastertronic (on disk that came in a flip folder similar to what you get the bill in at a fine restaurant), they never bothered to make sure it worked right for the NTSC world! No glitching or anything like that, but the timer on both games was programmed for 50Hz and so you ran out of time much faster on NTSC machines! I NEVER made it to the first tunnel in Electraglide, even when I got really, really good (never hitting any object on the first level!!, I'd get to the point where the tunnel entrance started scaling bigger, and run out of time! I thought, due to it being a budget game, they did it on purpose because it was only that one level! On the Last V-8, it was the same, though after many hours of practice over the years, I did finally reach the entrance to the underground ONCE, only to die at the first 90-degree corner because of the touchy controls, and of course once in the underground. Those were two of the first and last three Mastertronic games I ever purchased back in the day, bought at the same time, Ninja was the third, a favorite of mine, and loved it, but then there was no timer to beat! When I played it on PAL for the first time the action was too slow compared to what I was used too, but that allowed me to actually finish the game for the first time as well!

 

I only discovered the reason why on both after converting my 1200XL to PAL about within the last decade! And then, The Last V-8 was super easy for me to finish the entire game the second time I tried all those years later, only to find out the second level was the last! Such a short game I couldn't believe I had wasted all those years trying to just get to the underground for that shit! With Electraglide, it's one of my favorites now because I can get through about half a dozen levels with all that extra time! Both were instantly too easy after all those years of frustrating attempts that made me so good at both games when I finally played them at the proper PAL speed!!! 

Haha, wow.  Good to know when I get around to playing them!  Is there a fixed NTSC version out now?

[Gunstar]

1 hour ago, leech said:

Haha, wow.  Good to know when I get around to playing them!  Is there a fixed NTSC version out now?

I have no idea. Since my two main Atari's (one in my office/electronic shop and one in my bedroom) are both converted to PAL with video upgrades, so PAL or NTSC doesn't matter, as I have Sophia 2 HDMI out on one and the other goes through a PAL/NTSC dual compatible video2VGA converter/upscaler, which spits out a VGA signal at 75hz to my monitor, I can use the PAL versions without timing issues, and all NTSC software I have work fine on them too. It's just a non-concern for me anymore.

Edited January 6, 2023 by Gunstar

[+DarkLord]

I think for me, it would have been "Realm of Impossibility".

 

Those freakin' zombies and that "wiggle! wiggle! wiggle!"
motion required with the joystick at the ladders and exits!

 

Ugh! Still kinda makes me grind my teeth.   

 

Oh, I'd have to give a nod towards Archon as well. Some of

the AI controlled creatures and their slinky "turn on a dime"

and shoot actions!

 

[leech]

27 minutes ago, Gunstar said:

I have no idea. Since my two main Atari's (one in my office/electronic shop and one in my bedroom) are both converted to PAL with video upgrades, so PAL or NTSC doesn't matter, as I have Sophia 2 HDMI out on one and the other goes through a PAL/NTSC dual compatible video2VGA converter/upscaler, which spits out a VGA signal at 75hz to my monitor, I can use the PAL versions without timing issues, and all NTSC software I have work fine on them too. It's just a non-concern for me anymore.

Nice!  I actually have a PAL 800xl with VBXE / U1MB on the way, a 130xe and 600xl that are also PAL, so wouldn't have the issue either, as I can always pull out another machine.  Weirdly, it'd probably be more beneficial to patch games that used NTSC artifacting so they make better use of colors than it would be to try to fix all the PAL games to run at proper speeds on NTSC, since I think there are less of the former.

[leech]

4 minutes ago, DarkLord said:

I think for me, it would have been "Realm of Impossibility".

 

Those freakin' zombies and that "wiggle! wiggle! wiggle!"
motion required with the joystick at the ladders and exits!

 

Ugh! Still kinda makes me grind my teeth.   

 

Oh, I'd have to give a nod towards Archon as well. Some of

the AI controlled creatures and their slinky "turn on a dime"

and shoot actions!

So I don't know what happened... but my brother and I decided to do Realm of Impossibility co-op... and then never died.  I don't know if we somehow set it to easy, it glitched, or what the deal was.  There for sure were not all the enemies that we remembered being on there.  This was only a few years ago and we played it on my 130XE.  Couldn't help but think I somehow fired up some hack that was made easier!  Still one of my favorite games though!

[+slx]

Must have been after a missed jump in either Jumpman or Spelunker. But can’t have been too bad as I‘m generally soft-tempered. 

 

With Archon there was always a chance of getting better and taking revenge, more so if my unicorn was still available.