[net.games.video] Q*bert Malfunctions

ech@pyuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath) (08/15/83)

Despite Mark Horton's rather poor review, I tracked down a Q*bert at
the local Toys R Us, brought it home, and plugged it into my Coleco
via the Atari 2600 adapter.  Hmm, crummy graphics, but what the heck...

Trouble is, as soon as I jumped to the first cube, the game reset.
Repeated attempts, power down/up, etc. yielded consistent behavior. 
Now, I have never had an Atari or Activision cartridge fail to work the
first time out (or even Parker's Frogger), but shucks, everybody burns
a bad ROM now and then.  So, I trundled back to Toys R Us and exchanged it.

Q2 has even more interesting behavior: if the first cartridge was autistic,
this one is catatonic.  Nada.  Repeated hits on the Coleco's reset key
give an occasional transient look at the remembered crummy graphics,
but no sustained image.

Of course I checked out all the connections, etc., even ran through my
cartridge library: everything else is nominal.

Does this sound familiar to anyone, or did I just stumble on a crummy
lot?

=Ned=