Games Bought Thread 3

[A Black Falcon]

So I got another console recently. I wasn't really planning on it, but there was a sale on Ebay and after looking around I... got a Colecovision. Yeah. It was $125 after the $25 discount, which is pretty expensive but is a fair price for a Colecovision -- they're oddly expensive consoles considering that it sold pretty decently... maybe that's because of their poor reliability record and decent amount of demand, but the Colecovision is one of the more expensive mainstream consoles from before the current generation. It's odd but true.

It came with the system, power supply, RF cord, eight games (below), and five controllers -- two regular controllers, two Super Action controllers, and a Roller Controller. It also came with a small pile of manuals, including one for the system itself (which is mostly ads for games), several of the games (listed below), and the Roller Controller, along with several warranty cards. The ebay description said that all four of the regular and Super Action controllers had issues, but the roller controller was good and the system worked perfectly. That description was accurate -- the system itself works great, which is important considering how poor the Colecovision's build-quality reputation is. Coleco regularly cheaped out on build quality, apparently. Both of the regular controllers, however, have malfunctioning left side buttons. The Colecovision, like all three major consoles of the early '80s, has a 12-key keypad, with some the main action buttons on the sides. In this case there are two side buttons, left and right, and they are different buttons. So yeah, the sticks and keypads work, but the broken buttons are kind of a problem. The Super Action controller is a large thing you hold, with four trigger-style buttons and a keypad and arcade-style stick on top. It looks durable, but apparently the sticks often fail, and indeed both have somewhat flaky sticks. They work fine in some games, but in others, like Donkey Kong, I found going up ladders with these sticks pretty much impossible. I was thinking about just using the Super Action controllers for games, but not with sticks that don't work in some games...

So last, there's the Roller Controller, which is a trackball. It's got the trackball and some face buttons in the middle, and two wells on either side to clip two regular Colecovision controllers into. That this controller was included with the system was the thing that convinced me to buy this console, because it has some nice features that I like. First, it's got a solid six or eight foot cord, so unlike my other early consoles (2600, 5200, O2...), I can actually put the Colecovision with my other consoles, and not on the floor right by the chair. That's pretty nice, because regular Colecovision controllers have the expected like two foot long cord of consoles back then, and they're made even shorter because they have spiral phonecord-style cords. With the Roller Controller though, I just need the trackball near me and not the whole console. It has plugs to connect to both controller ports on the console, and also, oddly, needs a passthrough at the consoles' power input, but it works great. The console itself looks really ugly this way because the Coleco has two big holes in it to fit the controllers into, but it works better this way and the thing is perhaps one of the ugliest consoles ever anyway, so that's fine. (Seriously, though, Coleco could have invested in some people who could do design, they clearly didn't have many...) The roller only has a few games which natively support it in analog mode, including one which came with my console, Slither, but it also can (badly) emulate a gamepad.

Better, though, the roller also has two wells in it for controllers, and these kind of latch into place and have plugs inside. These controllers work just like if they were plugged into the console, which is pretty cool. Well, kind of; they work great, but there's one really weird quirk -- both controllers control both players all of the time. Most Colecovision games are two player alternating, not simultaneous, so it works for them, but I haven't tried a two player simultaneous game yet (Super Action Baseball might be the only one I have?) so I don't know how that would work.

Anyway, my solution for the busted controller buttons problem is to use the Roller Controller as an arcade-style stick, using the stick on a controller plugged into the lefthand port and the two* face buttons in the left-center of the roller controller itself. This solution works great and, large size aside, is pretty comfortable. It's surely much more reliable than the side buttons on the Colecovision controllers itself!

So yeah, games.

Colecovision games
--
First, these first eight were bundled with the console.

Zaxxon - cart only. This is an alright version of Zaxxon, but while it is a pretty important classic, Zaxxon's isometric view can be annoying...
Donkey Kong - cart and manual. The system's packin, this is the most common Colecovision game. There isn't much reason to play it now though, the NES version is better, as are the Switch arcade port, the N64 version, etc.
Donkey Kong Jr. - cart and manual. This is a pretty good port, though again the NES version is better. It has the same issues as the first game but I've always liked this one more than the first DK, so it's nice to have...
Cosmic Avenger - cart only. This is a decent port of a Scramble / Super Cobra clone game originally made by Universal. This game's no match for Super Cobra (which I have on 5200) and is kind of boring, but it's okay.
Slither - cart and manual. Slither is the game which requires the roller controller. It's a Centipede clone, and sort of like Cosmic Avenger, it's fine but isn't as good as the game it copies. The Roller Controller in analog mode does work well, but this game kind of reminds me of those TI 99/4A overhead shooters, more so than it does Centipede... and those games are fine, but again, Centipede is better. Still, this game is good. It's not great but is good.
Super Action Baseball - cart, manual, and scorebook (no overlays included however). This game requires the Super Action controllers. And yes, I said controllers, because this is mostly a two-player-only game -- sadly, unlike Atari's RealSports Baseball on the 5200, this game has no AI opponent so you can only play another human or play a practice mode where you try batting and such. That's unfortunate, I know that most sports games on the 2600 and Intellivision are two player only, but by this point I'd hope for more, particularly from a game that was originally bundled with two very large controllers! So, I haven't played this yet and doubt I will have many opportunities to.
Q*Bert - cart only. Q*Bert is an arcade classic, but it's never been a game I played a lot of. This seems like a good port of the game, but getting used to the isometric controls would take some time... up goes up-left, down down-right, etc.
Carnival - cart only. Carnival is a port of a Sega arcade game. It's a shooting-gallery game, and is kind of mediocre. It's not too bad but is forgettable stuff.

It's an okay but largely uninspiring selection of games, really.

Additionally, since the console arrived late last week I have gotten some games locally, from two places which have old games. I found some pretty interesting stuff! There are a few more games I'll need to go back and get, but I got eight so far. These first three I just got today, and the five below I got Sunday.

WarGames - cart and manual, $16. This is an interesting game for the time well worth a look. The game takes some getting used to so having the manual is great. It's kind of like Missile Command but slower and more challenging, and with multiple screens at once.
Smurfs: Rescue from Gargamel's Castle - $12, cart only. This is a platformer. Yeah, I've got a bunch of those for this system. I'm not expecting much from this one but got it anyway...
Defender - $8, cart only. I love Defender so I had to get this. I've heard this has some issues compared to the 5200 version -- that version is fantastic and probably my favorite 5200 game, but I've heard this one has no difficulty options and is easy -- but it's from Atarisoft so they'd make their version better... still looks nice though, and it's Defender.
Space Panic - $5, cart and manual. Space Panic is an interesting early proto-platformer. It heavily inspired Lode Runner, and has similar gameplay to that classic. The arcade version might be the first game with a side view where you move a character around, which is interesting! You can't jump, but otherwise it's platformer-style, except of course you dig holes to trap enemies. It's a simple but good game.
Miner 2049er - $9, cart and manual. This was a really cool find, as Miner 2049er was an influential early platformer and it's still fun to play. You have to walk over all floors on each screen, within a time limit, to progress, and there are twelve stages. Simple graphics, but it's a good game.
The Heist - $10, cart only. This is another platformer, where you explore around 10-screen levels collecting all of the paintings on each level. Visually it seems inspired by Keystone Kapers, but with quite different gameplay. The graphics are nice for the time. It seems to be a very hard game, as you'll need to memorize everything in each level to have any chance of finishing within time. Whoever played this last knew that, as included with my purchase was a sheet of paper with hand-drawn maps of the first two levels... pretty cool stuff. Level 3's apparently the hard one though, as they gave up there.
Linking Logic - $6, cart and manual. This game is licensed from Fischer-Price, and is a kids game... a kids' puzzle game. This is actually an interesting game, as you have to set up a level, using items you can place on the stage, so that your character (a boy or girl child) will get every item if they go straight ahead. Once you start you can't turn around, but do need to hit a button when passing each item you can interact with, so you do need to pay attention. Basically, this is one of those puzzle games where you put things at points to get around obstacles (pits, here), sort of like a Mario & Wario or some of the more recent Mario vs. Donkey Kong games. There are five puzzles per difficulty and four difficulties, and there are bonus versions of each stage as well where you can freely control the other child, but the maze turns invisible so if you want to get all the things you'll need to remember where the holes are. It's a neat little game, I like this kind of thing.
Monkey Academy - $10, cart only. This kids game is less interesting. It's very much like Donkey Kong Jr. Math, pretty much -- a math problem is presented on the screen, and you move a person around, platformer-style, to go to the answer while avoiding some enemies.

After getting all these the Coleco's looking better, it has some good games. I still wonder why the things are so expensive, but it's interesting, anyway. There are also a lot of homebrew games for Colecovision, as it's nearly identical to the Sega SG-1000 internally so the games from each system are easy to port to the other and people have done a lot of that, and it's also similar internally (not identical, but similar, particularly in its graphics chip) to the hardware in the MSX and people have also ported some MSX games to Colecovision. There are also modern homebrew games. I'd need a flashcart for any of that, though, of course.

For one last thought though... seriously, the Colecovision is a pretty ugly looking thing. The Atari 5200 released the same year and looks much nicer! It has a cover for its controller holders too, so you can hide that part if you don't use it, as I don't. The Coleco is just left with big holes on the top if you're not using those. It is noteworthy for being the first console with an expansion port for hardware expansions, and is very notable as being the console Nintendo designed the NES hardware to beat, but it's not a very nice looking box. The 12-second long delay before Colecovision games actually boot is weird too, and the flaky and failure-prone controllers (and consoles apparently) are not good from a reliability standpoint. Ever since I started looking into early 80s consoles some years ago, for some odd reason, while the Colecovision is the popular system as it sold better and has a lot more games, I was more interested in the Atari 5200. That's still true, but it is nice to finally have this as well. Also I do see Colecovison games in person sometimes, as its 2-million-sold number suggests, so it's great to have the system for them. (This is one argument for this system over, say, the Atari Jaguar or Atari Lynx. I've seen stuff for those MUCH less often. I keep thinking about a Jaguar, then getting some other console instead. This years-long process apparently has continued yet again!)


Finally, I also got a manual for Wrecking Crew (NES) for $6. Also free with what I bought today, I got manuals for Carrier Aces (SNES), Battle Clash (SNES), and Super Sprint (NES).