AtariAge Forums: AtariAge Forums -> Chronogamer

Dodge 'Em aka Dodger Cars (Atari VCS, 1980)



This game is about an insane sonuvabitch who has no regard for your life, your passenger's life nor even his own life.

The playing field is a four-lane circular track. The player races around it collecting dots. The player may only change lanes at four points on the track's circle. The crazy bastard in the other car is going around the track in the opposite direction and his sole goal is to ram you head on... That expression sounds familiar in this context, I think Sega put out this game in the arcades as Head On, but I'm not swearing to it, and I'm too lazy to go to klov.com to look it up.

Anyway, this is a fun game. I explained the concept to my son (in the way I presented it above) and he took the bait and agreed to play before realizing it was one of Dad's "old games". It's a good thing that some of these games are worth dragging my son 30 years into the past for, otherwise, he'd write a scary book about me... (Chronogaming...an Abusive Trip Through My Father's Personal Hell was a working title during the RCA Studio II period...)

While the concept is simple, the game play is fast and exciting. That other car -- no, it's more fun to think of it as a deranged driver -- always switches lanes at the last split-second to ram you and cause you and your car and his car, the crazy fool, to explode in a cloud of pixels. You anticipate the explosion; the sound of shattering glass; the flames rising out of the flowing gasoline...

The cart has three games. You against the program, you and a second person taking alternating turns against the program, and you and another person taking turns being Christopher Walken. The third game is the most amusing, because at no point is a person required to just sit and watch. If a player clears the track twice, then two opposing cars are employed, and are both controlled by the other player. How is this done with one joystick? Well, if a car is at a lane-changing point, if it can change lanes in the direction of the given input, it will. It works and makes things very difficult for the one just trying to collect dots.

Interesting to note; the crazy drivers can't make each other explode. We tried to get them together, and it's as if they exist in two different dimensions. It's okay though, either can wipe out the other player's car.

Fun for the whole family, especially those who can't drive yet. It's also a good moment to share any horrifying drunk driving stories you know to reinforce the stupidity of driving while drunk, or of changing lanes to ram another's car head on.

Next game: Night Driver or Why Not to Drive Drunk, Part 2.

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Off topic, but my Xbox Live name is Chronogamer. If you play 1 vs 100 Live on the Xbox 360, then you'll know what I'm talking about. Last night, I (with the help of my lovely and brilliant wife) came in third out of a crowd of 42,000 in a Live game and won myself a copy of RezHD! Yay! By the way, if you're an Xbox Live person, please invite me to be your friend!

3D-Tic-Tac-Toe (Atari VCS, 1980)

I need to clear up any impressions I may have given about my feelings towards playing 3D-Tic-Tac-Toe. I wasn't dreading it because I thought it would suck, I was dreading it because it was going to require a bit more brain power than my energy levels are prepared to muster on the weekends.

3D-Tic-Tac-Toe is a 4X4X4 take on the traditional 3X3 version of the game. Not that I think any of you don't already know this, but it is played by you (X) and an opponent (O) taking turns placing your markers on locations in a 4X4X4 grid. The first to place four of their symbols in a row wins. In traditional Tic-Tac-Toe, there are eight ways of lining up your markers three in a row, and it's very easy to learn how to force a tie once you've played only a few games. After all, there are only nine positions to occupy. In a 4x4x4 cube however, there are now 64 slots to occupy and 76 ways of lining up your markers. You have to have the ability to plan ahead and visualize well to win against the program.

3D-Tic-Tac-Toe has 9 games on it. Game 9 is for you and another human to play. Games 1 through 8 are progressively harder single player versions where it's you against the program. Game 1 is the easiest, where the program only looks one move ahead and only takes a few seconds to make a move. This one isn't hard to beat, and only took me a few tries. For Game 2 the program looks two moves ahead and takes three seconds or less to make its move. This is noticeably more difficult than Game 1, but after playing for about 30 minutes I was able to improve enough to beat the program about three out of five times, more if I chose to go first.

Game 3, the program looks three moves ahead, and can take up to a minute to prepare its move. This is where I got my butt kicked repeatedly. Yes, I got better, in the sense, that after playing for about an hour, I got better at seeing the early phases of what the program was doing, and prolonging the inevitable loss, but lose I usually did. Over and over.

Game 4, 5 and 6 each look the appropriate number of moves ahead. Game 4 can take as much as three minutes to plan it's next placement. Games 5 and 6 up to 10 minutes or less. Game 7 looks ahead nine moves, and takes 10 minutes or less to do so. Game 8 will also look ahead nine moves, but take up to 20 minutes to make a decision.

3D-Tic-Tac-Toe is the type of game that, were I a sufficiently advanced player, I'd prefer to play on an emulator, because I could get through the "AI thinking" times that much faster. However, given my current level of play, Game 3 was as high as I was able to get. I'm just not a good enough thinker/planner to do well at this, which is exactly what I had anticipated, and what I was dreading. I can't really comment on how good the AI was, all I know was that it is much, much better at this game than I am.

So, this game uses the joystick. When it's your turn you move the cursor through the levels to wherever you want to place your piece, and hit the button. This is not a hard interface to learn to use. On the other hand, it does take a little practice to visualize what is going on on the board. You're playing a 3D game on a 2D screen, and while the program does manage to display everything clearly; it is up to you to get used to reading it. I played 2.5 hours and I'm still not used to reading it.

Like Chess or Stellar Track, my Inner Geek rejoices to see 3D-Tic-Tac-Toe on the system (Yes, I remember not liking the VCS version of Chess, but I'm still impressed that it exists on the Atari VCS). 3D-Tic-Tac-Toe oozes the mystique of "You'd better be ready to think, or you're getting your butt kicked." If I'd been playing it back in the day, when it wasn't so easy to find something else to play, I could easily see getting addicted to it, and actually improving my game over time...though honestly, that didn't happen with Chess so who knows?

Playing 3D-Tic-Tac-Toe for two-and-a-half hours last Saturday afternoon doesn't do it justice, but it was certainly exercise for my flabby little brain. Given how time quickly flew, I'd say I had fun playing it. However, it wasn't the type of fun that I wandered around after going "wow, that was fun!" it was more like: "Whew, the life has been drained from me, was I really playing that long? Did the sun set already? Why am I so hungry? Who are these short people calling me 'Daddy'?"

I recommend giving 3D-Tic-Tac-Toe a try, but be warned, the "brights" ("waaay above average" and above) among you might do alright, but the "tweens" (which is "above average" but below "waaay above average") may pull a brain muscle like I did.

Though I can't find my little "what to play next" grid, I know I haven't yet played Dodge 'Em, so that's getting chronogamed next.

Circus Atari (Atari VCS, 1980)

One of the inspirations for doing what I'm doing here (even though it's been progressively less frequent) is the fact that "back in the day" I didn't actually get to play most of these games. Intellivision? I know one person that had it, and I only ever saw AD&D in action-but never got to play it. I had one friend with an Odyssey^2 and I never ever even saw it hooked up. I'd never heard of the Bally Professional Arcade back in 1981 and, though I'd seen the Channel F in catalogs, I'd never seen one "in the flesh" until 2002. So, it's always a pleasure, while in the process of getting through these games, to take out a game that, not only did I play it back in the day, not only did I play it often, but I actually played it often with other people, which is why I attach some significance to it, I guess.

Circus Atari is based on an arcade game called Circus (Exidy, 1977). It could be described as a derivative of Breakout with a thematic twist. Your "paddle" is a teeter-totter that you can move right to left across the bottom of the screen. On the "low end" of the teeter-totter is a clown who is to become your projectile. Parading across the top of the screen are three rows of balloons (red, white (though I thought they looked yellow) and blue). A second clown comes into play by jumping out from one of the sides of the playfield when you press the button on the paddle controller. You have to maneuver your teeter-totter to catch that incoming clown on the teeter-totter's "high end", so that the clown on the "low end" is catapulted into the air towards the balloons. The goal being to pop as many balloons as you can, while scoring points and going through clowns as if they were a disposable commodity.

The clowns are animated while they are projectiles, flailing their little arms and legs about in an effort to keep themselves upright while airborne. When up among the balloons, they'll pop as many as they come close to before falling back towards earth. When you fail to catch the plummeting clown, he becomes what is known in show business as "Circus Pizza" -- he lands with a splat, head grotesquely flattened on the floor of your tent, arms and legs still attached but wiggling like recently detached lizard tails. This never fails to amuse me. Never.

(My corporate sponsors have informed me that some clown union has threatened legal action. I must point out, that the loss of life in funny ways is only funny in imaginary circumstances. My dark humor is purely in the context of the videogames of which I write.)

(Ethics require me to admit that I actually don't have corporate sponsors and there is actually no clown union... as far as I know... it's more of a guild... I think...)

The cartridge, as expected from Atari, has several game variations, mostly amounting to one and two player variations of: with and without overhead "bumpers", an easier version for beginners, and a two-player only version that has the players "share" the balloon field while alternating turns. This last variation is interesting in that if you don't "clear" a row, then your opponent might, getting all the good points. A feature of the game is that the red button allows you to switch the high and low ends of the teeter-totter to give you some flexibility in catching the poor, doomed, and yet, happy, soul.

Speaking of doomed, yet happy... my children did groan a little as I recruited them for their reactions to this gender-neutral game. Their initial reluctance did give way because what child doesn't like to see a clown go splat? After about 15 minutes, I turned it off to write this, but they were actually interested in playing some more! I forbade this, of course, because I'm a power-abusing father.

While I do think of Circus Atari as a Breakout derivative, it should be noted that, unlike Breakout which bounces the ball around in a straight line, circus clowns trace through genuine parabolic arcs...elegant yet simple in their mathematical beauty. Okay, not as simple as a line, but the arc does lend a certain, curvy grace to the flight path. In accordance with a law of physics, the clowns do soar higher and longer if you land the incoming clown further out on the edge of the teeter-totter. Sadly, the inevitably tragic ending of the clown is not intensified by this increased flight duration, but it does let you pop more balloons.

Frankly, (may I call you, "Frankly"?) we only play it to watch helpless passengers of the equation describing a parabolic arc, often ending their trip in the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of show business. No business like it; no business I know.

If I assigned numbers to games, I'd give this a good number. A number that everyone would recognize, but not be bored by. Probably a number created by multiplying two large primes and adding a one to it. Circus Atari is that much fun.

Ironically, I'd been putting off this entry for such a long time, because I thought I was going to have to play 3D-Tic-Tac-Toe and I am admittedly hesitant to do so. I was very happy to double-check my previous entry and realize I had intended to play Circus Atari. However, what must be done must be done, and I do intend to play 3D-Tic-Tac-Toe next. And soon. Really!

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Steeplechase (Atari VCS, 1980)

Before I get into the game, I want to get into the term "Steeplechase".

For me "Steeplechase" has always stood for the name of an amusement pier in Atlantic City (though there was one in Coney Island, too, I never saw it). I can't say my family and I went "down the shore" a lot when I was growing up near Philadelphia in the late 70's, early 80's, but the few times I went I remember two of the Atlantic City piers, Steeplechase Pier and Steel Pier. For a 516kb image of Steeplechase Pier, click here. The linked picture is quite a bit before our time, but in some twisted symbolic way that only quality writers can pull off, Steeplechase Pier and the amusement piers like it are a cultural grandparent to our beloved pastime of video games so I don't feel entirely off-topic to bring it up here.

If you go to that linked picture you can see people on "holiday" in 1910. 99.99% of the souls in that picture are undoubtedly worm food by now, (with the possible exception of the children on the lower right corner). However, to most of them Steeplechase Pier and Steel Pier were highlights of their holiday. 30 years later, the children and teens going to those places with their families would likely have the same sense of nostalgia so many of us retain from going to arcades in our growing up periods. Hmm, what was my point... oh yeah. In the 2070s, the pictures we have of our Arcades from the 70s and 80s will somehow look as grainy and as dated as this does to us now. Time and populations are really weird that way.

Okay, I admit it, I didn't have a point, but that's a cool picture of Steeplechase Pier and I wanted to share.

Anyway, the word "Steeplechase" was associated to that pier for me, and somewhere along the way, I learned it also has something to do with horses jumping over hurdles in a race. I was surprised to learn that Steeplechase originally refers to racing from the church steeple of one town to the church steeple of the next town, jumping over whatever got in the way -- ditches, fences, walls, hedges, creeks, etc. Steeplechase for the Atari VCS is more about the horse-hurdles variant.

With two pairs of paddles up to four people can compete in two different race types with three levels of difficulty for each. The first three games are regularly spaced hurdles with beginning, medium and hard difficulty. The last three games are irregularly spaced hurdles, also with beginning, medium and hard difficulty. If you are playing with three other people, I can't see that it makes much of a difference which difficulty level you play, but if it's just you and one other person, the remaining horses are controlled by the computer, and then it does matter, because the computer is tough to beat.

So, what's the game anyway? Okay, four horses each with their own lane race across the side-scrolling screen from left to right and jump over the hurdles approaching them from the right when the trigger button on the paddle controller is pressed at just the right time to have the horse jump over the obstacle. (Yeah, it's a run-on sentence. Just deal with it.) If the player presses the button too soon, or too late, the horsey graphic performs a grimace-inducing, knee-bending stumble-slide which slows your horse down.

The "paddle" part of the paddle controller is used to control how long the horse spends in the air when jumping over the hurdles. The hurdles are of different widths: narrow, not-so-narrow, and friggin' wide. The paddle controller moves a height bar on the right side of each horse's lane. If you're a starting player, you just set that bar as high as it will go, and if you time every jump just right, you know that you'll clear even the friggin' wide hurdles. However, the horses don't actually progress towards the right side of the screen while jumping. The more time the horse spends in the air, the further they will fall behind the other horses. In a beginner-level game, the player can get away with just jumping with the bar set high. A more nuanced style of play involves setting the bar to match the length of jump needed, this allows the horse to spend less time in the air for the narrow and not-so-narrow jumps. This increased attention to not only timing your jumps but also your jump efficiency is a necessity to getting even close to beating the game-controlled horses of games 2,3 and 5,6.

Here is a YouTube video I found that shows a full game of Steeplechase (being played on an emulator, but hey, I'll take it)



This game is not what I would consider an attention grabber. Nothing explodes, nothing moves very quickly, and yet, you'll find yourself frantically trying to keep up with the jumping and the height bar as you spend a lot of time looking at the other horses' collective rear. Steeplechase is an easy game to understand, but I do not consider it a simple game to play. Putting the height bar on the opposite side of the screen actually made it a little tough to pay attention to the height of the bar and the timing of the jump. Also, the thrill of successfully jumping a barrier is not as positively rewarded as the punishment and negative impact of watching a horse crumble to its knees after failing a jump. After a few races and seeing her horse hit the ground again and again, my daughter was ready to turn in her saddle and frankly, so was I.

Sadly, I was unable to muster the enthusiasm from my other two family members to give it a shot, nor was the daughter interested in playing again, even if I could get the others to play. Lesson here: if you have a four player game, get everyone to play it with you first, otherwise, it may be hard to get them all to play after they hear the grumbling of the first guinea pig.

Kudos belong to Steeplechase for creating game-controlled opponents with simple but effective A.I. In the easiest games, the competing horses are clumsier and their jumps aren't as well timed. For the medium level, their jumps are well timed, but they might not be jumping efficiently. For the hardest level, if you're not playing perfectly you will be eating their dust/mud/turf.

Next time we play... Circus Atari!

As a sort of PS: The manual for Steeplechase reminds me that while consoles like the Intellivision and Odyssey^2 were pushing "serious" fun, by calling their games simulations, games for the Atari at this time were all about having fun. There's a lot of space in the manual spent on describing the attributes of each of the four horses involved in the race. While none of the horses seemed to have any intrinsic differences that I could detect, it's an interesting contrast. Intellivision manuals went out of their way to describe in detail every last feature of a game, down to describing the sound effects. The manual writers for Steeplechase had no problem including "flavor" material to make a customer reading the manual chuckle a bit. While such marketing-driven humor rarely ages well, it's still interesting to see.

Stellar Track (Atari VCS, 1980)

The genetic precursor to Stellar Track is a main frame computer game called Star Trek, based on the franchise of the same name. You can read all about the history of the Star Trek Game at Wikipedia. It isn't that I'm too lazy to just paraphrase the entry, (though I am), but I'm more or less trying to keep this about the particular game rather than it's history.

When you start a game of Stellar Track you're given a mission screen. Here is an example:


A good beginner's game is recommended in the manual to be between 25-35 Aliens with as many Stardates as you can get. In my experience, those sized games are the most fun.

You exist in a galaxy consisting of a 6x6 grid of quadrants. Amongst the 36 quadrants are the number of aliens you're hunting as well as your two starbases. When you start the game, you don't know where anything is. Here's what your Galaxy Map looks like at the beginning of the game. You can see that it tells you you're located at Quadrant 3,2 (third quadrant from the left, second from the top).


At the moment the only thing you know is that you're in a Red Quadrant which tells you you've got alien ships near by. If you perform a Short Range Scan, you can see them.

(That example is taken from a different playthrough, so don't let that quad coordinate confuse you.) Yes, you're the ship that looks a little like the Enterprise, and your enemies look a little like Klingon starships.

If you found yourself in a green quadrant, you could be more relaxed and take a Long Range Scan to see what occupies the quadrants immediately adjacent to the one you're in. Here is an example of what the galaxy map looks like after I've scanned it from two locations: 3,2 and 3, 5.

You can see that in the quadrants surrounding my scans, there are numbers. A "20" means there are two alien ships and zero star bases in that quadrant.

Later on, from this next scan, you can see that I've found a Starbase, shown by the indicator "01" at quadrant, 6,5.


The strategic part of this game is being aware that you have a limited amount of Stardates to spend, and knowing that every time you warp from one quadrant to the next, you're burning up a stardate. For instance, warp to a location three quadrants away and you're burning up three stardates. The game demands that you balance searching for aliens with slaughtering them. You also have to consider repair trips to your starbases as well.

Coupled with the strategic aspects of this game are the tactical aspects. When you do warp into a quadrant with enemies in it, you have two ways of taking them out. Weapon 1: Photons can only be fired in a straight shot down a row, column or a diagonal in a quadrant, but are guaranteed to hit and obliterate target in their path. Weapon 2: Phasors are a sort of radial destruction beam that dissipates as they spread like ripples on a pond. They are guaranteed to hit the enemy ships in the quadrant but damage decreases with distance. You choose the direction to fire the Photons, but their main disadvantage is that you may need to scan the quadrant before firing, leaving yourself vulnerable to attack. You choose the power level of the Phasors, the advantage here is that you know you're going to hit whatever is in the quadrant, but you don't know necessarily how much damage you're going to inflict. If it isn't enough, then expect return fire.

Here is an example of a quadrant with no enemies and a starbase in it.

The gray background is indicative of a starbase's presence. To dock at a starbase, just warp on top of it. So, why dock at a starbase?

Well, you use up energy as you travel from quadrant to quadrant (100 units per quadrant), you use it up warping from sector to sector within a quadrant (10 per sector), you lose energy when you are "hit" by the enemy, and you use it up firing phasors (up to 999 units in a single shot, though that's overkill). So, one good reason to visit starbase is for fuel. However, in addition to losing energy when hit by enemies, your various ship functions can be damaged. You can lose your Short Range Scan, your Long Range Scan, your Photon Launcher and/or your Phasors! I have found an effective combat tactic to be warping into the center of a quadrant, and firing off a good sized phasor blast before even scanning the quadrant. This will usually take out two or three of the aliens in the quad. If I waste time doing a short range scan just to see where they are, then they all get a chance to try to damage me after that scan.

This is a game I wish I had discovered back in the day. I'd seen Star Trek on a home computer or two (probably a TRS-80, but I wouldn't swear to it) and was very curious about this type of game. Now that I've found it, while I don't think I will choose to spend a lot of time playing it beyond what I have for this article, I can say that were I to have had this back in the day, it would have been a huge time sponge. Each time you start a new game, depending on where you are in the galaxy, and depending on how many aliens and stardates, you have to plan your strategy differently. There are difficulty switches which control the effectiveness of your shields and your phasors, but I've been keeping them on Novice. Here is what I'm used to seeing when I finish a game.

Which means I suck. However, I find it hard to believe that if I wiped out 60 out of 61 aliens and ran out of time, that we'd still need to surrender to them, but the game needs to have boundaries I guess.

I have gotten as high a rank as Commodore.



I think I've played about a dozen games now, and I've only won once . The highest rank achievable is Admiral and it's based on your use of resources in addition to actually defeating the aliens. Okay, truth be told, I'll probably continue to play until I see an Admiral ranking. So far, I prefer the recommended "beginner" games, with between 25-35 aliens and 35-40+ stardates. The games with less aliens also give less startdates. Since the aliens can appear in quadrants in groups of 1, 2 and 3, with less aliens it's possible to find your targets spread out over the galaxy and hard to reach with the amount of star dates you're given. When you get many aliens and many stardates, you may have plenty of time to track them all down, but it can be a long and tedious process.

I've found screenshots of this game on the webanets, but they'd been taken with an emulator which grabs just a single frame. Due to the programming technique used to display the text in this game, the only decent screenshot is a good ol' fashioned picture of the TV. Here are some of the remaining screenshots.

When you warp into an occupied quadrant, it's good to do so with phasors firing.


This is what you want to see after you've fired some phasors blindly.

By the way, it looks like I've just killed an alien but still have a full compliment of photons and energy. The status displayed here is the status displayed prior to me firing any phasors. To see my current status, I'd have to use the Status command again. The Commands are selected all via moving the joystick left or right and pressing a button to make your selection. It seems awkward at first, but one gets used to it quickly. Programming in warp coordinates also quickly becomes second nature, though I won't get into that here. I do recommend you play this game with the instructions!

The background is green - the quadrant is clean!


This is not an action game by any stretch of the imagination. It is a "thinking" game, and it is a chance to play a game formerly limited to big computers on your itty bitty Atari VCS. While there's little chance of interesting my son in Stellar Track (as long as we've got Spore sitting on our Mac), it has certainly kept me engaged the last few evenings. heheh, 'engaged', that's, like, a warp pun...

Next entry: Steeplechase. Yeah it's another Sears game, why the heck not?