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UCM 24
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                          LCD GAMES REVIVAL - PART 2
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Yes, this was thought to be part two of the reviews of the little LCD games that
are bringing the GAME & WATCH by NINTENDO  to the Atari machines but somehow the
whole story already found its end.

Lately I got a mail by  Florent Coste, the  author of the games, who pointed out
that he didn't liked my  reviews that  much at the one  hand and that a harddisk
crash has  abruptly ended  his works for more  conversions at  the other. So the
games  "PARACHUTE" and  the pacman  clone by  BANDAI  called "PACK MONSTER" will
maybe never be finished  as all what is  left of those games are the screenshots
on his homepage. That is quite bad as he said that he had added several features
I missed on the games I had reviewed in UCM # 23, such as music and sound fx...

Is this the end of ATARI.GAMES?! So there is just one thing left atm. He has released a third game as well, it is called "FIRE" and in my eyes the most interesting and funny one. It still does not feature any sound and effects but it is funny to play. This one features a burning house with people that are jumping out of the window and you're taking over the job of the fire fighters that are here with a net and your goal is to guide those people with the net to the ambulance. So they're jumping out of the windows and everytime they smash onto your net they jump again and you have to guide them on their way to the car. Not that tricky at the beginning, but even the easy mode gets quite hard very soon, as the house seems to burn down, more and more people appearing on the windows and jumping out of them, it doesn't matter if you're there or not... and if you aren't fast enough it makes a little "splat" and you can scratch his intestines from the ground. So three and more people are jumping around on the screen and you have to run left and right to catch them...
Who's the next one?! Arf... If you miss one he is displaied as "angel" on the right upper part of the screen and if you have missed 3 the game is over and if you have catched enough you can enter your name into the saveable highscore. What to say? This game is the most funny release of ATARI.GAMES and maybe also the last. Even if it still misses a decent music and sound effects, it is quite better as the previous ones. Not that the game concept is that much impressive as it doesn't differs that much from the others, no... but at least on the grafix side the thing looks a bit better and we're slowly reaching a point where we can say, that all colours on the ST are used. The controls are good as always, the saveable highscore does its own for the motivation but the point that the game still only runs from disk sucks a bit. Atm it is very doubtful if there will be more games from ATARI.GAMES since it seems that the lost datas guided to a loss of motivation to go on as well... too bad as the planned but lost releases looked far more interesting. _.tSCc.__________________________________________________________moondog_11/2k2_
UCM 24