rusty (01/11/83)
this is a review of the atari 5200 defender and pacman cartridges. atari 5200 defender is TOTALLY AWSOME! (pardon my california vernacular.) i finally have a game for my 5200 that has me addicted. all the other 5200 games run from fair to good (with the exception of one which is outstandlingly bad; see the following pacman review). defender is extremely playable, has great graphics, and great sound. the use of the controller is very good except for one drawback. the top two fire buttons are used for smart bombs, the bottom two fire buttons are used for normal firing. the drawback is that to use hyperspace you have to press any button on the keypad, which i find inconvenient to do. the other misfeature of the game is that in two player games you both share the same controller by passing it back and forth. i don't understand what implementation detail caused them to have to do that. 5200 defender is a faithful reproduction of the arcade version. i never played defender in the arcades very much because i found it difficult to keep track of all of the buttons. 5200 defender is much more fun than the arcade version. there are 3 levels of difficulty that one can start at; easy normal, and hard. there is also a ``demo'' mode where the defender space ship can't be harmed and it randomly fires and moves up and down, it always manages to clear the screen eventually and so its score just keeps climbing. if you have a 5200 get this cartridge. atari 5200 pacman is absolutely not worth buying. do not buy it unless someone is selling it for less than $1. it has good graphics and sound, has ``movies'' between some of the screens and you might think it was a good game. but what kills it is that to move in one of the 4 directions (up, down, left, right) you must have the joystick EXACTLY positioned. since the 5200 joysticks have at least 256 discrete positions this turns out to not be very easy. do not buy 5200 pacman.