- THE AA GA,ME OF THE WEEK -

[ANTHONY ATARI]

AA

[ANTHONY ATARI]

AA

Back in the olden days, when I was just a young tyke, Sega was just an arcade game company that made games for the good’ol Atari (before creating their own consoles later on). The Sega carts all came with interesting looking, designer cart. housing. One of these games was called TAC-SCAN. For some reason I remembered the game being really fun and wanted to do a “game of the week” on it. So I took it off the shelf (for the first time in like 3 years) and gave it a play so I could write this. But come to think of it, I was a bit disappointed. Before I get into that, though, I would like to say that this game is unique and interesting because you have to plug the paddles into the right port instead of the left port. I cannot think of any other one player game where you use the right port. I really love the old paddle games. Although through the later years companies have tried to emulate paddle games with the keypad, there’s, nothing quite like the smooth playability of a good paddle game.

But that’s one of the things that makes TAC-SCAN disappointing. They might have well just have made it into a joystick game, because you either go left, straight ahead, or right. There’s no variability.

This game is your typical “you are at the bottom firing up at the enemies above” game. You are in outer space and you control a fleet of 6 little ships. Coming at you are the enemy ships, and these guys fire a “double shot laser” at you. The game gets faster and faster with each faze. At first its kind of easy, but after a while it’s hard to avoid getting your huge fleet (which takes up like ¼ of the bottom of the screen) hit. The thing I don’t like about the game is that the enemies seem quite robotic, and this is another one of those “play until your dead” games. Although it is challenging, I will assure you that this in one of those games you play with for a few minutes, get bored with, and then play something else instead.

If you are collecting to get a large variety of games, then I think this game is cool to own because it’s a Sega game, has a cool looking housing, etc. But if you are collecting for playability, you’re better off playing Space Invaders.

[ANTHONY ATARI]

Tac-Scan

[+Random Terrain]

Oh yummy! Red text on a blue Background! I love it!

 

Not:

http://www.randomterrain.com/webdesign/rea...eadability.html

 

[NovaXpress]

For the love of God, reduce that oversized photo.

 

Then when the thread is readable we can get into why I (and no doubt many others) totally disagree with your review.

[pinball22]

Since this is an Atari forum, I hope those Little People are appropriately old-school wood.

[FireTiger]

There are a handfull of other games that use the right port on the 2600 and the right controller if you have both controllers hooked up. US Games being one set I can think of and Wizard of Wor (CBS) another.

[Plink-Plonk-Ploink]

Please resize the big picture It totally screws up the forum size and I haven't read your (I'm sure nice) article because of it. It's too annoying to scroll all the time to read a line