Game of the week: Cosmic Avenger for Colecovision

History records the arcade game Cosmic Avenger as being the very first continuous horizontal space shooting video game that also included side scrolling. Some might argue that Defender was the first such game, but the screen in Defender was technically not continuous but looped back in upon itself.

Unfortunately, despite its little place in history, I don't remember Cosmic Avenger being a big hit at the arcades back in the day. Oh, I'm not saying I never saw a Cosmic Avenger game in the arcades, but it wasn't very often that I'd run across one, and I'm thinking I would be hard pressed to find a working Cosmic Avenger game today.

However, Cosmic Avenger was fun to play back in the day and it must have had something going for it because it was ported to the Colecovision home gaming system.

The arcade and Colecovision versions of the game are quite similar, but that shouldn't be a surprise because the Colecovision was known for quality graphics back in the day.

The gameplay is quite simple by today's standards. The player controls a spaceship that flies over cities and mountains and even under water, all the while shooting at enemies in the sky and on the ground below.

The graphics are a bit garish, even for the early 1980s, with lots of bright pinks and yellows, but they felt appropriate to this game. The Colecovision game had one fault I did not care for which was the choppy frame rate; the screen didn't blink all the time, but it seemed whenever action heated up, then there would be blinking, blinking and more blinking, which wasn't all that common in Colecovision games.

How does Cosmic Avenger hold up today? Well, it's a horizontal shooter with somewhat cartoonish graphics, so what do you think? So, probably not very well. Still, Cosmic Avenger offered plenty of action, and collectors could do much worse in finding this cartridge for their old Colecovision.

Video game of the week: Venture for Atari 2600

In 1981 the arcades were full of maze games and shooting games. Little yellow fellows zoomed around a screen eating dots and alien menaces died by the millions. There were a lot of arcade games, and after a while many of them started to look the same, like clones of other games.

Of course there were some games which were different from many of the others. Venture is one such game.

Released in 1981 by the Exidy Company, Venture grew to some success in the arcades, though it never quite had the legendary status of such games as Donkey Kong or Space Invaders and the like. The player controls a small dot on the screen known as Winky, and Winky's goal is to travel around a dungeon and collect treasure while avoiding or slaying monsters. It's a fairly simple process, and the first dungeon (of three) is pretty easy for most players, but there was still fun to be found here.

In each of the three dungeons there are four rooms that Winky must enter. Those rooms contain the treasure. Out in the dungeon are giant monsters roaming around, and Winky isn't able to kill them. But in each of the rooms are monsters Winky can kill with his trusty bow and arrows; even after slaying a foe, however, Winky has to be on his toes because touching the body of a dead enemy can still kill Winky. And if Winky takes too long in any of the rooms, one of the giant monsters from the dungeon will pop into the room and make a beeline for Winky.

It wasn't soon after Venture became known in the arcades that Coleco made a home version available for the Atari 2600 and just about every other major home gaming console of the day.

One could call Venture a minimalist game, and to some extent that is true. The sound is very basic, almost monotonous, and the graphics are pretty bland, even by standards of 1981. However, perhaps it is only nostalgia, but there was plenty of fun to be had having Winky traverse around the dungeon slaying monsters and stealing treasures. Perhaps we just didn't know better back then because we were all thrilled with every new game that came along, but I, for one, always appreciated the simplicity of Venture and the fun that came along with the game, despite that once you've master this game it does not have much replay value.

Video game of the week: Killer Bees! for Odyssey 2

The Odyssey 2 home video game console, also known as the Videopac outside the U.S., had a decent following in the early 1980s, but it was never the most popular system. A large part of that had to do with the system's lack of strong graphics and sound, but that meant the creators for the Odyssey 2 games had to work all that much harder to make stronger gameplay.

To that end, such unique games as Killer Bees! came about.

The player controls a swarm of bees in an arena. The bees attack robots, which slows down and eventually can destroy the robots, leaving behind a tombstone where the robots died. The most dangerous enemy? Another swarm of bees, and they fly around quickly trying to attack the player's bees. One by one, the player's bees are picked away, and once there are no more bees for the player, the game ends.

For today's gamers, this might sound a little silly and overly simplistic, but for the early 1980s it was actually a pretty decent game. Unfortunately, the Odyssey 2 was never shown a lot of love by consumers and collectors, and such games as Killer Bees! never caught on big time.

While the graphics for the Odyssey 2 were never great, here they are quite sharp, bright with no blurring. The sound is simplistic, as well, but it's appropriate for the system and the time period. The controls are excellent.

The game speeds up slowly, adding to the tension, and while Killer Bees! might not be a game you would want to play for hours and hours, it is a nice little game that can give you a short break.

Killer Bees! was truly a different game for its time period, and deserves to get a little notice for its uniqueness. Collectors of retro video game systems could do far worse than to pick up a copy of Killer Bees!

Video game of the week: Discs of Tron for arcade

In 1982, Walt Disney Pictures released a movie called Tron. Since then there have been a ton of video games based upon the movie, and there has been a sequel film only released in 2010. While the original movie and the sequel did alright at the box office, and they have their cult followings, neither has been a huge success with the general viewing public. Still, the movies live on in part because the original was one of the first films to really tackle the subject of video games, part of the plot being about real humans becoming part of a computer world and taking part in actual games.

Like I said, there have been lots of Tron video games, both in the arcade and for the home console markets, as well as for computers. But of them all, my personal favorite has to be Discs of Tron.

Discs of Tron was not the first Tron video game. That honor goes to a game simply titled Tron, which was popular in its own right and not a bad game by any means. But Discs of Tron, to this day, has the best action and continual gameplay of any of the Tron games.

In this game, the player controls the Tron character in a world of video games. Specifically in this game, Tron moves around on a giant floating circle in an arena while using flying discs as a shield and as a weapon to defeat his enemies.

The first level of the game is fairly easy, with Tron moving around on one circle while facing one simple enemy. But as the game progresses, Tron must move around on more circles simply in order to survive the barrage of enemy discs, bombs and other attacks coming his way. Sometimes there are shield in the center of the screen, these shield making it more difficult for Tron to hit his target, but also making it more hard for the enemy combatants to attack Tron.

The control system for this game was quite complex for its time. The main controller was a large joystick with two buttons, one a trigger and the other smaller on top, but the player also had to use a dial for Tron to aim his attack discs. By today's standards that's no big whoop, but in the early 1980s this was considered complicated gameplay. Still, it wasn't anything a gamer couldn't figure out, and the complexity of the controls actually added to the fun once you were familiar with them.

There were at least a couple of different cabinets for this game. One was the traditional cabinet in which the player could just walk up and insert his or her quarters. The other was a cockpit cabinet in which the player could sit down within the cabinet for play. It seems I've seen a couple of smaller table cabinets, but my memory might be playing tricks on me.

This game is still popular today, and if you search online you can probably find a few free versions of it to play.

Anyway, Discs of Tron is my all-time favorite arcade game. It was fun, exciting, had great graphics and sounds, and could offer hours of play. For only 25 cents. You can't find that nowadays!

Video game of the week: Centipede for Atari 7800

In the early 1980s, vertical shooting arcade games were all the rage, with Space Invaders being the godfather of the genre. One of the most popular of such games was Centipede, released by Atari in 1980.

Centipede was in many ways like a lot of shooter games of the time. The player controlled an object at the bottom of the screen that blasted away at objects further up the screen. But Centipede was a bit different. For on thing, it wasn't a science fiction or military game. The shooter in the game is a little head, sometimes referred to as a garden gnome, that blazes away at centipedes, mushrooms, spiders and other crawling critters. In another way Centipede was unlike most vertical shooters of the day in that the villains (ie. the targets) weren't all the same, but each moved in a different way and posed different dangers.

All of this combined with great gameplay and solid replay action created one of the more popular arcade games of the early 1980s, and many still remember and even play Centipede today on computers or on one home gaming system or another.

But back in the early to mid-1980s, most of the home gaming consoles didn't have all that great of graphics. Most of the home versions of arcade greats just didn't match up to the originals.

Atari combated this by releasing its Atari 7800 system, initially in 1984 but to a wider audience in 1986. One of the first 13 games released for the Atari 7800 was Centipede.

Finally gamers could play arcade quality games at home, and the Atari 7800 version of Centipede did not disappoint. This game wasn't exactly like the arcade version, but it was pretty darn close. The graphics were bright and solid, and the gameplay was almost exactly the same as the arcade game.

The biggest difference was in the controls. Centipede in the arcade was played with a trackball, while the Atari 7800 used joysticks. This could be alleviated to some extent by hooking up an old Atari 2600 trackball to the 7800 (yes, the Atari 7800 was compatible in nearly all aspects to the 2600), but it still wasn't quite the same.

One place the 7800 version of Centipede improved upon earlier versions of the game was that two players could play the game at the same time, so you could sit down with a buddy and blast away for hours.

Truly, the Atari 7800 version of Centipede is one of the best home versions that can be found of the game. If you are a doubter, give it a try.