What's up with the Phone Controllers?
Written: Aug 18 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Some good games.
Cons: Graphics not as good as the 2600, weird controllers.
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| Alkaiser's Full Review: Colecovision |
I remember the first time I saw this machine. My Uncle Louis bought it, and we were all stoked about playing with it. He had 2 games, Donkey Kong and Zaxxon. So we played those for a while, and eventually we inherited the machine for ourselves.
As fun as Donkey Kong and Zaxxon were, they didn't stay challenging for long. I could pretty much flip Zaxxon as many times as I wanted after a while, so we started looking into other Coleco offerings.
It was then that I played my first platform game ever. It was called Jumpman Jr., and it managed to captivate my family for a while. The concept was simple, you were a little man who wanted to stop these bombs from exploding, so you ran around and defused them before the timer went off.
However, offscreen were evil enemies who would shoot bullets at you. If you got hit, or missed a jump too badly, Jumpman Jr. was toast. the death music is still trapped somewhere in my consciousness.
Then came Time Pilot. Hoo boy, that game was fun for a while, too. Until I figured out that you could fly at the upper left corner, and as long as you fired your gun, you'd never get killed, and you could get infinite points. My videogame innocence was shattered. Now that I look back, I think that was the first bug I ever found. (Once I got that job as a game tester, I told my parents that all the hours I spent playing in my childhood were just early "job training".)
The system itself tried to be more than a system, although I didn't have the manual, so I don't exactly know what else it was trying to be. As you can see from the picture, the controllers were set up like a phone, even with the # and * buttons. The side buttons were hard to fire rapidly, but by some odd twist of fate, one of them got gummed up real bad, and we made the discovery that you could plug it into our Commodore-64 and it would detect it as rapid fire. Previously unbeatable records in Summer Games I & II were now falling by the wayside.
I guess, looking back, it was probably a pretty fun system. Probably had something like 4-bit graphics, and a processor that wasn't the swiftest. Beat the heck out of the Intellivision, but I would have taken an Atari 2600 over this.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Alkaiser
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 - Top 500 |
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Member: Clayton Chan
Location: Irvine, CA
Reviews written: 655
Trusted by: 344 members
About Me:
Broke the 700 pound mark on my leg lifts.
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