You know, by 1978 I'm sure they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they never really considered whether or not they should. It's your typical memory-based flip-the-cards-and-get-matches type beat, and while I can certainly dunk on this for entirely being something that's more suited for a mini-game in even an NES game, but this do be like literally year 1 atari stuff so I have plenty of slack to cut in the content regard.

That being said though even in the context of its release I think this game is beaten by an actual deck of cards in a lot of ways. For a console that ships with a controller with 4 directions and a button why the hell would you go with needing a proprietary number pad controller to dial in which cards you want to pick instead of like using the joystick as a cursor and the button to select? The single player mode is entirely player-driven when it comes to goals; the manual doesn't even have anything like "try for a score under 10 to be a real Atari Concentration Camper!" or whatever, you just match pictures, and when it's done it's over. There's also a mode that replaces one pair of pictures with 2 wild cards that can be matched with any other card, except for the fact that it doesn't clear both the card the wild card is matching with as well as the card that it's supposed to be matched with, which just leaves you with a dead game at the end as you have two spare cards that cannot match with each other. It makes the wild cards less of an assist feature as they actually just end up being random game-ruining landmines. Very cool.

I get that this game was released in such an early state of gaming that the mere aspect of interacting with your TV to play something normally designed for tabletop play gave this game enough value through novelty, but like there are 2600 launch titles like combat and pong that have way more intuitive and responsive gameplay and control, so even in its time there would be better options to play imo.

holy shit. I just beat Battletoads.

I've seen the web lambast this game endlessly as the game has been showered with the title of "hardest game of all time" from all sorts of people and places on the internet. For years I had just assumed that this would be a game that I would never even think to pass the infamous Turbo Tunnels, much less actually see the ending. It was only when I saw this game cleared on a two-part Game Center CX playthrough when the illusion of this game being impossibly difficult faded. In fact, it looked like a fun kind of challenge! I figured that if Arino could beat this game, so could I, and as such I put it on the "games-to-stream" backburner until the time had come. And boy, did the time come. Roughly 9 hours of grinding later, here we are.

I think the main reason why this game sticks out so much as being so nightmarishly difficult is mostly due to how outwardly hostile the games design tends to be. Memorizing the levels and becoming intimately familiar with them through repetition (and a little bit of trial and error) is the key to being able to progress. Each level honestly stands out from one another well enough to make climbing back to where you were before at every game over not TOO painful in the grand scheme of things. Each of the 12 levels usually has some kind of gimmick or new mechanic to grapple with, like the ropes in stage 2, the turbo tunnels in 3, ice in 4, surfing in 5, snakes in 6, etc etc. Honestly the game does a solid job introducing the mechanics to let you know how things work before cranking the heat up. Graphically this game is really solid on the NES with plenty of quirks and tricks used to give the game some pizazz. It's definitely more of an A-list Rare NES title that contrasts from the licensed shovelware they occasionally made (likely to fund the projects they actually wanted to make like this)

It is still quite a spicy game, so those that are averse to getting your shit kicked in will have a bad time. Honestly the difficulty felt most similar to like middle-echelon Mario Maker levels. Like, the kind of stuff made by someone who is clearly good at games but not like insane person kaizo shit nawsay? Considering the fact that Rare has mentioned their lead designers being good at games and that a lot of difficult NES games are usually products of the developers also being the playtesters, essentially tuning their games for themselves rather than their players and accidentally cranking it up a bit too much, that's likely why this game is how it is. I had to use every trick the US version of the game could allow to finish this; I used the warps to skip levels 2, 4, and 7 while also alternating both players every continue with down+A+B held to get the most possible lives and continues the game offers, and even then I made it out on my last continue. Against games like this though, you really gotta get every leg up on the game that you can ngl, a clear is a clear. The hardest part for sure was the third rat in Rat Race, if you can pass that point you have enough skills to make it through the rest imo. Clinger Winger or whatever tf it was called was a cakewalk ngl, I heard the horror stories about that level and was surprised when I cleared the speeder section on my first attempt. This game is certainly a hot one, but idk it's definitely not the hardest game ever made. I don't even think it's the hardest game I've played, I had way more struggles with getting through stuff like Ninja Gaiden Sigma and God Hand (to their detriment, mind you. Overly hard games suck imo) than with this. The game is still pretty masochist-core, don't get me wrong, but if it was really the hardest game ever, I wouldn't have been able to get here in the first place. A must-play for pain-seekers, but definitely take-it-or-leave-it for the normal folk out there.

naw man i can't think of any reason why you should play this, especially over the much superior Basketball that came out much earlier. Like, I respect the attempt to innovate by making it be 2v2s instead of 1v1s, the visuals look more like a basketball court instead of the surface of mars, and you can hear the crowd cheer every time you score, but the added complexity of the team aspect of the game really hurts more than it helps.

The court is like split into two horizontal rows that each team player resides in, and you control them at the same time. You can't have the lower player go in the upper half and the upper player can't go in the lower half, it's like theres an invisible barrier that separates your two players. If the ball lands in the middle of the court, is it in the upper or lower half? Who knows! There's also the added problem of the pass and shoot buttons being bound to the singular button on the joystick, so it's very easy to do one action when you were intending to do the other. Awesome! The CPU obviously has none of these problems, and will absolutely smoke you no matter what difficulty settings you might have the game set to. I would say this might be fun with another player as both people are bound to the same control handicaps, but you know what else is more fun either by yourself or with a friend? REGULAR BASKETBALL PLAY THAT INSTEAD THAT GAME OWNS!!! if this is what real sports are I only care about fake sports.

luckily it's very unlikely you could be in a situation where you could only be able to play this and not regular basketball given the fact that this game was never actually released and as such the only way to play it is through compilation titles, flashcarts, or emulation. As far as I can tell, every title that features this game has the superior regular basketball as an option as well with the one exception being... Atari 50?!?!? What's up with that??

Neat idea for a game tbh. It's like a twist on breakout where there's your typical rows of bricks but instead of being the paddle under the brick row breaking the blocks with a ball, you are on the blocks side this time around and are trying to replenish the rows with blocks as the computer breaks through them from underneath. If a large enough hole is made that the computer can suck you out of your blocky fortress, then you lose. There's also a 2 player mode where one player gets to be the pig and the other player gets to be the wolf, but I haven't been able to try that mode out due to being a solitary gamer.

I get that they were going for a three little pigs theme by having the walls be made out of bricks plus each pig works as a way to give the player 3 lives, but it doesn't really look like Bigelow B. Wolf is actually blowing away bricks and sucking out the pigs as much as he's some sort of frog-wolf using his long tongue to eat the bricks and pigs.

The gameplay has the same frenetic energy as like having to put tracks over a constantly accelerating train to prevent it from crashing. The main way to stay alive and score well is just to keep pace with placing blocks right when the wolf destroys them, which is certainly easier said than done and eventually becomes impossible as you need to keep moving back to grab more bricks. I'd definitely suggest playing this on the B difficulty where you can drop the bricks from anywhere because on the A difficulty where you have to run up and down there's actually no hope of ever keeping pace with the wolf and you will die VERY quickly. I'd also suggest keeping an alternate controller like a genesis or looser aftermarket controller around because the constant erratic movement you gotta do does not mix well with the standard 2600 joystick. Supposedly if you can surpass 25000 points and send proof to Activision (supposedly on either difficulty, they don't really mention), you get to be an honorary Activision Oinker, complete with commemorative badge. I got around 45k points on my first attempt with B difficulty (A difficulty I died around like the 2k mark I think), so I better be an honorary Oinker, goddamnit. Microsoft better be using some of those 75 billion dollars to make more badges for people so help me god.

Step aside, 2K.

It's Purple Guy vs. Kermit the Frog at a no-holds-barred 1v1 on Planet Basketball, winner takes all. It's incredibly simple, you move and shoot with the stick and button, and all you need to do is run into the ball to steal it from your opponent. You can hold the button down with the ball to aim it at the cost of standing in place, leaving yourself open to stealing, and the game just becomes this frantic scramble to get the ball and throw it in the hoop ASAP before you get cornered and the ball stolen. I've played this occasionally in the past with other people and it's pretty consistently gotten good times out of the multiplayer just for how goddamn simple and goofy the core gameplay is.

I honestly thought this game was like combat in that it was multiplayer only for the longest time, but lo and behold, I found out today that there is indeed a singleplayer mode where the AI plays as Kermit. All I can say is goddamn can this frog ball. Seriously, the computer opponent is no joke, as it has one sole purpose in life; to make sure the ball goes in the hoop under any means necessary. This mfer dodges and weaves around you to get net using constant rapid diagonal movements, and he very rarely ever misses any shots he takes so you gotta just rush his ass and hope that you can steal the ball in the tiny window when he's trying to shoot. Conversely, if you have the ball, you better believe this guy is gonna be on you to steal your ball and IMMEDIATELY go after getting more points before you can even process what's happened. I genuinely wasn't expecting my ass to get clapped so hard by an Atari 2600, but I perservered. The manual states that there's some kind of dynamic AI at play, where the closer the game, the greater Kermit's lust for points becomes. It states that if you can win by a lead of over 4 points, you are a "superior player", and I can confirm that yeah that about sums it up alright. I had to remove my power limiters and do the ol' plug-a-genesis-controller-in-the-atari trick so that I could even keep up with the CPU since dear god the constant diagonals the CPU makes felt deliberately planned in order to make it as difficult as possible to chase with the real Atari joystick. (how the hell do you use that thing comfortably???)

I have learned some tricks up my sleeve though. The top right corner of the court is a safe space that Kermit will just kinda hover around you but not actually steal the ball from you, so if you want to stand a chance, aim for shooting from up there. Conversely, if both players get close enough with the ball, it will erratically vibrate between both players like an atomic particle as both players exist in a state of stealing the ball. Sometimes you can get the AI to be stuck like that in the bottom right corner, so an easy way to become a certified Superior Player is to get an early point lead and then sacrifice Purple Guy to seal away the evil aggression of Kermit the frog by trapping them both through the power of Atomic Balling. I have also discovered that even though the CPU is controlling the second player, pressing the button on Player 2 will still make them jump anyways so you can also use this psychokinetic power to force Kermit to jump against his will, slowing him down so you can make some easy shots. If real basketball had strats like this, I'd be watching ESPN like a drug addict.

It's simple, it's dumb fun, it's fucking basketball on atari. The golden age of basketball games began and ended here for all I'm concerned. Even when times up and the game is over as the system rotates around the attract colors for Planet Basketball, you can keep playing either with a friend or against the AI like nothing changed, there just won't be any points that count. No other basketball game is going to be as dedicated towards balling eternally as this one. If you have the means to do so, definitely give this a try (preferably with a friend). atari games rule

was it fucking worth it?

As I am writing this right now, my car is perched atop a bus station, watching endless amounts of police cars slam themselves into the pillars below me as i rest motionless. Once I've rested long enough for the timer and bounty counts to reach their arbitrarily high numbers, I will retreat back into the bus station on a raised platform, where either the police will not realize what I am attempting to pull and they will remain under me at a length just far enough for the game to consider myself having evaded the cops, or they will catch onto my shenanigans, drive up to my platform, and catch me red-handed, putting the past 20 minutes or so of idling to waste, and forcing me to start over from square one. Yep, that's me. You are probably wondering how I got here, so allow me to explain.

I've been quite the fan of racing games these past few years, so I've been giving the NFS series a solid go. I've heard from many people that Most Wanted '05 was the pinnacle of the series, the thrilling fan-favorite before the slow but certain decline. "The cop chases are awesome", I've heard. After hearing all the hype, I grabbed myself a (surprisingly pricy all things considered) copy of the "definitive" Xbox 360 version, played through the Underground duology for context, and went to driving. The thing about this game is that it's strongest and most unique improvements are also the sharpest double-edged sword that makes this game so much less enjoyable compared to it's predacessors imo.

The game itself is pretty similar to the previous years NFS, Underground 2, albiet with some additions and changes. The open world is still there, though the game now offers a menu to just quick-jump to races instead of needing to spend time driving to waypoints. It definitely gives the game a much snappier pace to it, at the cost of making the free roam mode almost entirely optional unless you need to go to a car shop (and even then I found the fastest way to do that is to just go back to the safe house and use the shops right next to it). The races still feel just as weighty and solid as previous titles, cars still feel good to drive, and the drift/streetcross events are omitted from previous games. The dreaded drag race events are regrettably still here, but they are so few and far between that it's really not much of an issue imo. The races are still as fun as ever, and like Underground 2 the racing difficulty strikes a nice balance in never making you too far ahead, but also not going turbo overboard like Underground 1 did with the rubber banding. Races are still fun and cool!

The vibe of this game is also entirely different from previous games. We have gone full 7th gen mid-2000s edgy punk vibes by now, baby. This game is DRENCHED with that iconic Xbox 360 piss filter, races take place in a shady, dirgy, late-afternoon city rather than the neon-lit night life vibes that the Underground games carried. The muddy pallete isn't to say that this game is bland, it's still quite stylized after the dirty vibes that they are going for. Whenever you clear an event, the game shows a picture of your car at the time of winning, shown through various dynamic camera angles depending on how you finished, all shown through a detailed background of asphalt and concrete. The game has more of an edgy plot this time around; it's a revenge story. Your unnamed street racer man is doing street racer things when this sunnuvabitch challenges you, cheats the race by rigging your car beforehand, tries to steal your girl, and gets to the top of the street underworld using YOUR ride. It's up to you to rise up the hooligan leaderboards by taking out the top 15 racers to finally give that mfer a piece of your mind. Essentially, this is car-themed No More Heroes. Instead of the CG cutscenes of the previous games, this uses live-action FMV actors for the cutscenes and it is gloriously cheesy. Each member of the Blacklist has their own intro that looks like it came straight out of a trashy MTV reality show, complete with stylized graffiti tags for every member. The cheesy cutscenes if anything felt more like the series was going back to its roots on the 3DO, as the very first Need For Speed game had quite similiarly playful live-action cutscenes. My only wish was that the game could have had more to show in its narrative, as most of the cutscenes are at the very beginning of the game. It certainly knows how to set the mood really damn well though!

All of this falls apart with the newest gimmick this game offers; the famous cop chases. Cop chases are an iconic aspect of the original Need for Speed games, so this game brings them back after their absense in the Underground games. Sometimes while minding your own business, a cop can find you and instigate a cop chase. Evading the cops for long enough gets your heat gauge up, which gets more cops to show up until the game reaches cartoonish levels of police activity, flooding your screen with so many cops wanting to ram your ass you'd think you are playing Dynasty Warriors in Detroit. Cops can also sometimes rear their heads into you mid-race which turns things chaotic as now you have to handle both your opposition as well as your newfound persuers. All of this sounds good on paper, and at first the chases were really fun to do! The problem comes from the persuit milestones. In order to deem yourself worthy to challenge the next Blacklist opponent, you need to pass these arbitrary challenges, and they just get increasingly rediculous as time goes on. Stuff like "ram into 25 different police vehicles", "bypass 12 different police blockades", "stay in a persuit for longer than 13 minutes", etc. What's annoying about it it feels like the point of the higher heat levels feels more like a timer system a-la old arcade games making a higher effort to kill you the longer you linger, yet the milestones feel like they are set at directly counterintuitive goals, focused on farming RNG elements that are usually outside of your control (like when and where blockades spawn, or how many of certain cop cars can show up). Make a mistake and get busted, and you lose all of your progress for that chase, which gets REALLY frustrating when you lose 15+ minutes of chase progress to something stupid like a random truck in traffic running into you or a slightly uneven piece of terrain geometry catches you up. Get busted too many times, and you lose your car, and if you lose all your cars it's game over, so there's a significant punishment to messing up chases. I can understand why people see the high difficulty as a good sense of tension, but I really HATE it when games make me feel like I'm wasting my time, and the chases in this game felt so much like that. It never felt like whenever I got busted that it was a mistake on my end, but rather just some unfortunate circumstance that happened from the game deciding my time was up and launching 5 different waves of suicidal armored police SUVs on my ass that launch me into the pirhana pit of 20 cops chasing my ass. Like imagine playing Pac Man, but every minute the game adds another ghost to avoid, and the game just gives you dumb objectives like "eat 30 ghosts", forcing you to linger until things get too much. Eventually things got too much for me, and Need for Speed: Most Wanted became Need to Cheese: the Wanted System as I learned about the handy Bus Stop exploit that I have been using this whole time. And even then, sometimes the bus stop trick doesn't work and your time gets wasted anyways!!!! The only way to leave cop chases is to escape or get busted too, there's not even an option to quit to the menu in the pause screen so if a cop comes when you are trying to do something else enjoy having your time wasted!!!!!!! gaming!!!!!!!!

Idk man, this game certainly has vibes but the cop chases just made this game absolutely sour for me. I think I've come to realize from playing this and the Underground games that these games aren't really designed with the premise of actually being "cleared", and the fun comes more from being able to just drive around and vibe in the game. Because in my times playing any of these games so far, I've noticed that they revel in dragging themselves out way too far, wasting any progess-seeking players time. For every time I was vibing with the races and aesthetics, I was absolutely livid with frustration at watching my sweet time go to deadass nothing. The Blacklist 15 could have been the blacklist 10 and the point would have still made its way across imo.

Anyways, I was able to make it through that final cop milestone, so time to finish this game. I noticed one of the cop cars try to drive up and bust me while I was writing this, but they backed up and left on their own instead. Perhaps the game has finally taken pity on me, and realized enough has been enough. Usually I don't write reviews of stuff before having seen the credits roll, but I feel at this point my opinions have solidified and by the time anyone reads this, the deed will have been done.