Activision Hits Remixed Review

So when people bleat like tortured lambs about shelling out for full priced games today, think of the poor children that lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road in 1982. Kids today. Don't know they're born. Tut.

Back in olden times when there were only three television channels, no remote controls and country-wide blackouts, buying every single game on this here Activision 'hits' package would have set you back well over a thousand pounds. Today, lucky lucky lucky souls that you are, the cost to you will be less than £20. That's the sort of price we like to pay for time travel.

Freeway - Frogger without the water.

Historians will recall that Activision was basically born out of the dissatisfaction with the Atari business model that didn't allow third party publishers to release games for its system. Despite the inevitable litigation, Activision went ahead and did so anyway, and enjoyed some massive hits in the process. Between 1981 and 1984, the company unleashed over 40 titles - which this budget-priced compilation rounds up in exhaustive style.

Giving an in-depth journey into some of the earliest home videogames hits (officially the second generation), this package will have gamers of a certain vintage (i.e. mainly those of us over 30) weeping. Whether those tears will be salty drops of woe at having your illusions roundly shattered, or diamonds of nostalgic joy depends on your powers of remembrance, general interest levels and forgiveness at a technology generation that was already fairly dated at the time these games appeared.

Shooters

Mirroring the international obsession with shoot-'em-ups that existed at the start of the '80s, it's perhaps not surprising that around a third of this compilation is littered with simple shooters. Most of them are simple clones of the big arcade hits of the time, or variations on a theme. For example, Robot Tank does a reasonable take on BattleZone, Chopper Command does Defender in a helicopter, while Spider Fighter isn't a million miles away from Centipede. Elsewhere, Megamania does Space Invaders with scrolling aliens, Demon Attack is Space Invaders again, while others try their best to inject scenario variation by simply changing the kind of craft you're shooting from.

Horizontal scrolling shooter Seaquest finds you shooting from a submarine, Plaque Attack puts the player inside a person's mouth while trying to defend their teeth from invading junk food (rather like Imagine's Molar Maul if you ever played that on the Spectrum), while Crackpots tasks you with throwing Petunias at the bugs coming out of the sewers below. Imaginative enough scenarios, but exceptionally simple gameplay that makes it hard to stomach playing many of these games for more than a few minutes. But enjoyment isn't really the point is it? It's about nostalgia and having a laugh at how things used to be while MP3s of Soft Cell and Men Without Hats play over the top - even while the game itself is playing.

Beamrider - a classic example of a retro game you shouldn't fire up again.

Towards the end of the 2600's lengthy life span, vertical shooters like River Raid showed infinitely more ambition than most of the games here, with scrolling landscapes that really pushed the ridiculously limited technology within the ageing console. Even now it's pretty smooth and playable, albeit in that typically unforgiving way. The sequel doesn't fare quite as well, though, with its fiddly altitude-based targeting system that instantly makes the core shooting aspect a bit of a faff. Elsewhere, there are some real dogs, like Beamrider with its laughable pseudo 3D scaling attempt, while it's hard to even fathom if there's an actual game to be had in Starmaster. The trouble with having so many games to wade through is if they aren't immediately playable, the temptation is to quickly move on. So we did.

Driving

There are just three driving games on offer in the collection, and given the 2600's woeful graphical capabilities, it's not hard to see why. Grand Prix, for example does a pretty appalling job at top-down racing, where the basic gameplay involves merely steering between lines of cars moving in a straight line. Dragster, meanwhile, does the whole shebang side-on, with a horrible manual gear change system that makes it alarmingly easy to blow your engine if you dare to over rev for half a second. Enduro - to my eyes at least - seemed like a big title when it came out, and is definitely a good contender for the best driving game on the 2600. With smooth sprite scaling and decent controls, it's surprisingly adept at what it does - but even so, your eyes might start bleeding after a while.

Sport

This is an easy category to write about, mainly because it'll consist of giggling and grimaces to convey the pain. My notes for Boxing read 'top-down, rubbish', Tennis merely says 'heh', Skiing notes that it's 'really bad', Ice Hockey says 'ho ho', while Decathlon - easily the pick of the bunch - is described (with amazing insight) as a 'button masher'. Generally speaking, the graphics limitations don't give the programmers a prayer of even vaguely approximating most sports, or are simply so limited in gameplay terms that it's reduced to half-hearted button pressing or shuffling movements. Decathlon is definitely a good 'un though. I'll never tire of that whole Track & Field button epilepsy.

Miscellaneous

The best thing about games in those early days was that publishers were willing to put out all sorts of crazy games with off-the-wall concepts - and this collection is rammed with games that almost defy classification. Barnstorming has you flying through barns while trying to avoid geese, while Dolphin is perhaps best described as a chase-'em-up, where you're trying to outmanoeuvre a chasing squid in the water, with the chance to turn the tables on it if you dive out of the water at the right moment.

Fishing Derby - dig the detail.

Others are easier to describe, but no less unique. Fishing Derby, predictably, has you dropping a line down to the fish, reeling it up when you've got a bite, while trying to avoid losing your catch. Grid-based muncher Kabobber is certainly an interesting concept, where you try to control a cluster of little critters around in the hope of adding to you numbers. Kaboom feels like one of Nintendo's Game & Watch games, where you have stop bombs reaching the bottom of the screen with your bucket of water.

Oink! is similarly charming, and tasks you with stopping a rabid wolf from breaking into your house of straw. He frantically tears what look like tiles off the side, while you struggle to replace them with equal haste. It's amazingly simple, but curiously enjoyable. Pressure Cooker, though, feels a bit like Burger Time gone wrong and simply wasn't very playable. Equally horrible was Thwocker - a bouncy platform-style game with tedious instant death tendencies to have you reaching for the Game Select button. But few can compare to the pointlessness of satellite docking game Space Shuttle - a gaming experience seemingly designed to shatter young children's dreams and annoy the parents who paid for the game in the first place. For the board and card game mentalists, Checkers and Bridge do a reasonable early job of simulating these old favourites, but presumably about one person reading this will even care, so we'll move swiftly on.

Elsewhere, things pick up with road-based Frogger-inspired Freeway, while Frostbite is an interesting igloo building game where you hop between floating blocks of ice avoiding clams and snow geese. And towards the end of Activision's 2600 adventures, we got to enjoy some really good stuff like action adventure Hero - where you had to explore caverns with a chat with some sort of hover ability and shoot the sort of bugs that inhabited early '80s videogames.

Laser Blast. Giant frickin' lasers.

Arguably the most famous game on the entire collection is Pitfall - a game which helped take the plaforming genre to new heights, with large multi-screen environments and challenging trap-laden levels with swinging ropes and snapping crocodile pits. It's absorbing even now, which is probably why David Crane is such a familiar name 25 years on. The sequel, though, is blighted by irritating music and a baffling death mechanic which systematically drags you back to the beginning if you die. And a special mention also goes to Keystone Kapers - a robber chasing game set on multiple stair-linked levels where you have to hastily leg it after a criminal before he makes his escape. My ever tolerant partner was right - it's a lot of fun.