Bad Old Games: Bowling (Atari 2600)
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 16 окт 2024
- For $1 a month you can join my Floatplane community!!
I have hundreds of video game systems and thousands of games in my collection.
You'll get photos of every video game related thing that I get as I get it plus a few extras here and there.
For $2.50 a month you will get photos as above PLUS ad free early access to my videos, uploaded as soon as they're finished instead of waiting for the scheduled upload on youtube!
www.floatplane...
Bald guy in the brown dimension throws a white ball at white dots, erasing them, and gets a super star and retrieves thw white ball, the cycle restarts
The nes ball
Rolling a square ball because this is before circles were invented
one must imagine the bald guy happy
Don't forget that he does a dance to some psychedelic music when he gets a spare or a strike!
@@ozzie_goat They didn't invent the circle until Wii Sports Bowling
My grandfather loved bowling, but got to a point where he physically couldn't do it anymore, right around when the Atari 2600 came out. When we got ours, he had a lot of fun with it and got his own 2600, and he played that old Bowling game the rest of his days. Keeping score on paper and everything.
that is a tragic mental image
ONE frame of this video contains more data than the entirety of that video game cartridge.
Wild
Bowling was a 2K game, or 2048 characters. That's it, it would fit neatly on two pieces of standard A4 paper. That they got a playable game out of so little space is incredible. One frame of this video likely contains more data than the entire 2600 games catalog, which easily fits on 2 floppy disks.
@@Zerbey uncompressed, a frame should be around 4.3 megabytes
Compressed (RUclips bitrate), about 33.3 kilobytes
Reminds me of the Google Stadia!
probably more than the entire Atari catalog
@@Xnoob545I'm genuinely curious how you figured that out and got those numbers.
My dad played this piece of shit so much that it was burned into our huge old wooden-console TV.
Brown game on Brown TV!
@@De19thKingJulionDon't forget, brown _pants_ were also common for the time!!
As well as mysterious brown tracks in tight whities, which everyone wore...
Mid-60s to mid-80s were a peculiar time in fashion. (😊 at least in my opinion; born in 83)
@@DUKE_of_RAMBLE My parents' late 1980s travel photos even show a field of brown flowers under a brown sky! Crazy how recent colours came to the world lol
@@De19thKingJulion haha You sure you weren't looking at the Negatives? Or perhaps a Sepia photo? 😅
_edit: Purely out of curiosity if there even were any brown flowers, I looked... There are a few, but with the exception of the "Chocolate Brown Dahlia", I'd say that most you could argue are more _*_purple_*_ than they are brown..._ 🤷♂️😊
some people with 600 hours in Elden Ring? newbs
Dad with 1200 hours in Atari Bowling? true gamer
I wish bowling sounded like that in real life
There would be a lot more drinking.
I wish I started flashing and beeping whenever I got either a spare or a strike
No, no you don't.
@@Wario-The-Legend that would be super fun honestly
@@blakksheep736 everyone takes their turn wisely planning it out so they don’t have to hear the dreaded crunch twice
My favourite thing about this era of games is the fully sick looking cover only for the game to look nothing like it.
"Everything today is so complicated. Don't you yearn for the days of 'Bowling', 'Golf', 'Skiing'? 'Eat', 'Sit'... 'Shoe'?"
-Caddy, 3 May 2024
and now the games look nothing like the trailers and announcements you see at expos or promotions
@@Archer690Channel you say nothing like them, but even watchdogs e3 presentation looks a hell of a lot closer than any atari game box did to the actual game
For anyone who has older family members who don’t get the appeal of video games, remember for most of their existence THIS was the caliber of games. They kinda had reason to shake their heads.
if not their whole lives, then at least a lot of their formative years
I'm amazed that there's people who still think this is all videogames is, when that hasn't been true for 40 years.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine hell, even Super Mario Bros (1985) is way ahead of atari2600
Then we have DOS and Windows9x stuff
We have early Halo (actually was on Mac OS and Xbox I think)
We got half life
Yeah games got much cooler even still in the 10th century, over like 15 years
Well I don't know too much cuz I was born in 2009 but like those games were actually pretty good
And of course the legendary Minecraft (2011), later but still golden (talking about early releases, but not betas or earlier, so that's why I said 2011)
@@Xnoob545 it’s so funny to me that the NES literally had to re-prove that video games didn’t have to suck.
@@Xnoob545 also no way Halo was on Mac OS, I had a Mac at the time and we were lucky to get Age of Mythology.
This was one of the ways early Activision was good: they used pixel art on the box that was stylized but at least resembled what you got on screen. Yes I know, Activision good is very alien sounding now
EA was the same way, with both of them born out of programmers getting tired of not getting credit within Atari. Once the founders left, the investors took over and turned them into the behemoth publishers that we know today.
It’s why I’m glad Valve is a privately owned company and not publicly traded.
@@piratebear3126 Luckily Gabe Newell is immortal, so there's nothing to ever worry about.
As an atari collecter I don't know if my standards for atari games have gotten too low but this genuinely looked kinda fun.
Yikes
Unlucky 😬
Dragster, on the other hand, stank. (This was my childhood gaming console. I’m old.)
The fact that this probably took a maths/computing graduate about two months to program tells you everything you need to know about the sheer difficulty of writing a game for the 2600. And how much worse a shovelware title could be.
That said, I love the artwork on the Atari sports game boxes. It's stunning.
I think the graphics were more based on the raster lines on the TV
@Metal_Maxine yeah, you would be right. Because the 2600 was so slooooow the programmer would have to optimize a LOT in order to be able to compute everything in time for the next pixel to be drawn. That’s the reason why the 2600 has its signature “wide pixels” because they had to double the width of the pixels in order to leave the programmer time to do anything of value.
There’s a coffee table art book of Atari box art. It’s awesome.
And also why they likely wanted it to be called "Game *Program",* as an upsell of what they're making. 😅
_"No no no, it's not JUST a game! It's a full blown program, with math and all the tribulations of coding!"_
I LOVED this game lol. I could see why it's not the best, but I have a load of memories playing this game with my dad.
Finally, a new episode of Terrible Old Games You've Probably Never Heard Of.
A FITTING PUNISHMENT!
WILL YOU KEEP THE BLOODY NOISE DOWN I'M TRYING TO SLEEP IN HERE
Ooh, controversial!
As simplistic and bare-bones as it is, you gotta admit, that desire to get a strike mixed with the difficulty of getting it is actually a pretty good incentive to draw you in to the next roll and the next roll and the next. I can kind of see why someone thought this was marketable.
I actually have good memories of playing this at my grandmas house on what was my dads Atari. It was fun enough but it definitely was a game you’d get bored of after one or two rounds
James: *does graphics reveal*
Me: "I mean... They're not actually that bad, all things considered."
Also: kitteh!
I was pretty impressed that we even got a person-shaped bowler and not just a ball.
The 84 crash only affected the American market. The European and Japanese markets were basically untouched, and went from strength to sternght
Americans: "The video game market is collapsing"
Brits: "heh. miner willy go brrr"
@@RAFMnBgaming 🤣🤣🤣🤣
@@RAFMnBgamingi just moved to the uk from the us and now i understand why
Every thanksgivings my uncle brings over his Atari and the whole family plays this game. And the person with the highest score says what they are thankful for first
The uncontainable excitement in James's "yay😐" is a mood
James you live in Australia there was no crash, just microcomputers.
That high quality Trinitron really pulling it's weight on this game! 😊
So much aperture grille resolution, for all 80 pixels. haha
@@nickwallette6201 The absolute *_crispest_* 80 pixels you will ever see! 😅
Atari box art really put the art into it. They certainly made it hard for you to have low expectations. Wood grain on the Atari never gets old 😂
Uh huh... "grain"... sure... lol
I was kind of surprised there weren't any wood plank lines in the plane. I wouldn't think that would take too much coding storage... But I'm also not a coder, and I suppose it also would not have any 'shortcuts' like a modern coding languages do. Alright, fine, I retract my statement! lol _(still posting this, for the Almighty Algorithm's sake!)_
@@DUKE_of_RAMBLE for context, one frame of this video quite possibly contains more data than the entire 2600 catalog of games. There is no extra coding storage
@@The_Silliest_Lilly heh Yea, I had seen that tossed around in a couple threads. It's pretty crazy how far we've come technologically in under a century! From building-sized vacuum tube computers, to a powerhouse WITH a screen that is a modern smartwatch, and also that I can get hundreds of Mb/s with sub-50ms latency from my Starlink service.... coming from outer-friggen-space! _(granted, low-earth orbit, but still outerspace!)_
Truly is mind blowing when you stop to think about it, isn't it?!
I remember as a kid in the early 80s going to Kmart and digging through a bargain bin of discount Atari games, spending my allowance then coming home and experiencing instant regret moments after turning on the console. Your video lasted longer than many times plugging in a game and realizing it was complete garbage. The shovelware back then was very real towards the end of the Atari era.
I had this on a ds collection, legit loved playing it, me and my grandma would play it all the time in waiting rooms
Used to have this game when I was younger. Would play it for minutes on end. Probably have to get it again for my collection
This was an awesome video. Just the right amount of coverage of an Atari game. More of this!
Games at that time were programmed by a timer that gives a different seed each time you play depending how much time you touch the controls ahead the start screen, like Mario or Tetris, on Mario you actually can see this at the demo on the begging of the show where the character follows the same program each time but the one for the background changes, so each time demo it’s displayed you have a different result on how far Mario gets on the world
0:20 basically were sitting in an era similar to this and am waiting for the current crash
Not really similar imo. Is there unfun, expensive, overmonetized trash out there with inflated budgets? Sure, but there's also a ton of good stuff from smaller developers.
Also, unlike the bad old days it's incredibly easy to get an idea if you'd like a game. Check out a video or stream, online reviews, digital purchases with universal no-questions-asked refund periods.
Skill issue, simply don't touch aaa slop
genuinly not at all man, there are a lot of AMAZING games
@@marcusborderlands6177 True, if you don't look only at AAA shovelware then you can find genuinely good games.
I fondly remember that game! My fave Atari 2600 games were Space Invaders and Superman, though
that was one of the most played games on my 2600 back in the day lol. now it would bore me senseless
tell me why i read this as james rolfe and I was very confused as to why this wasn't an AVGN video.
James saying "on the other hand" with his hand on screen looking very hand like was coincidental and nothing else
Honestly for 1979 this seems decently fun, definetely way better than Football (plain-ass, normal, everyday, no question about it football)
Avgn reference
Blowing
😳
Blowing balls
That's actually alot better looking than I expected
The artwork on the 2600 game boxes were fantastic.
As a person that played this and other Atari 2600 games, I can honestly say that it is very different to play this against someone else, like a friend of a family member. The game is still like that, but competing against someone makes it actually fun. Some games of the Atari 2600 were designed for playing against people and others were meant to be played alone. Haunted House is a game you play alone. This one, or Basketball, or Tennis, or Outlaw were all meant to be played against someone, and that made it actually fun.
That's somewhat fair. Hardware limitations did mean it often had to be one or the other. But as they say: 'Yeah, no @$&* it's fun to play with a friend. Everything is fun to do with a friend. Going to fetch water with a friend is fun.'
Those 2600 Vs games that use the paddles are far more on the upper crust of what the original library had to offer. By lord, sometimes I wonder if the paddle shouldn't have been the primary controller for the console.
Urgh, that single button joystick...
Videos keep getting better and better! Good job!
A guy named James reviewing bad games? This will never take off. /s Love the content mang. 😎
Back in the day, they also had paper catalogs that sat with the games that had screenshots of the games themselves. They were usually either packed it with the console, a game or even in a display with the games that were for sale.
This was my very first game on the Atari in 1980 🥳
And it was a lot of fun back then ☝️
This game ROM is an entire 2 KB of space. Meaning you could fit nearly 700 copies of it on a 3.5" floppy disk.
We've come a long way.
Yeah digital systems have improved unfathomably
My friens had an Atari still in the late 90s and we played the crap out of that Bowling game it was probably the most fun game he had for that system (he had an NES, Super NES and eventually a 64 as well so we weren't just stuck with the Atari)
Boxing for the Atari is where it's at. Had the Activision classics for PS1 and we played the hell out of pitfall and boxing. Hockey is good fun too
Love your videos man!!! Keep them coming! ✌️
I loved this game when I was a kid!
I got an Atari 2600, the new version, when I was about 5 or 6, in the early 80’s and I am sure I had this game. Funny thing I was never disappointed with any of the games. I had a cowboy shooting game that I liked, but I also had muppets maybe lost in space I think it was called, and I played that the most but I think the only thing remotely muppet related was the colour of the pixels, but god I loved that Atari. I can’t remember a time that I owned it that I ever didn’t run home from school and play it the second I got through the door.
I actually loved playing this game. I was probably 3 or 4, but I still loved it haha This, Berzerk, Ice Hockey, and Astroids were my faves then.
Loved this quick style review video please do some of the xonox double ender carts. Used to play Artillery Duel with my dad on his 2600 and he loved the Chuck Norris game on the other end.
This game sounds clean with that catalitic
i sure hope this is a very fateful bowling remake!
This was one of the better games on my TV Boy.
i was forbidden to play Atari at night as a kid, because the sound would travel up two floors and make people lose sleep. who knew that Bowling would be so noisy haha
i like the rain sounds
All the fun of actual bowling probably
I thought it was a fun game when I played it with my parents back in the 90s. It's funny seeing this PAL version with its bowling ball looking more like a ball. It always looked like a roll of toilet paper with the roller sticking out each end in the NTSC version.
0:45 omg Adelaide weather has been all over the place lately. I'm kinda over it. EDIT: Wait how did I just notice that screen was property of ABC and 2 how did you get it? That's awesome.
My mom and I used this game all the time when I was a kid.
I can't wait for Episode 3 of James's pre crash games. This one had lots of charm... But eh, not really accurate to bowling.
Ironically this game was quite well received at the time and considered a graphical tour-de-force. Don't quote me on this but I think it was the first Atari game to have a multi-colored player sprite.
I'm kind of surprised they went through the effort of putting in collision detection and carried over momentum on the pins when they're hit. I figured it would just be whatever the ball hits and maybe an amount of space around the ball by some metric. Kind of crazy to think the 2600 is running on a 6502 variant, and then you compare to other console/computers with similar 6502 variants and see the differences (I know, dedicated PLA's and custom chips for graphics, sound, etc. on a different level of complexity, still interesting to compare what the 6502 based chips could pull). I built a 2600 based engine on a Z80 emulator I wrote for RP2040 based microcontrollers early on to crash course myself on the RP2040. Will be interesting to see what kind of emulation and bare metal programs can be done with the RP2350.
Man, you gotta check out Solaris, it's mindblowing what they managed to do on Atari 2600
I still play this. got a 300 back in 82. I was 8.
I would love to see poster sized versions of the box art
Ah, the classic I played mainly just because it was on all the plug and play 2600s and killed time in multiplayer when you werent quite feeling Warlords
I mean for a 2600 game, it's not bad, I'd have gotten a few hours of fun out of it when I was a kid. Be interesting to see someone dump the code of this and see what the algorithm is like, someone smarter than I am preferably.
Babe wake up james channel uploaded
I got really into Atari collecting having got my first 2600 in '09 at 14. I had few games but sold after a few years. then a few years ago I bought another and started collecting again. Atari games are the kinda games my brain can get enraptured with for bursts of time. heres a list of games I think more people should check out:
Dragonfire (said in another comment. Run around and grab treasure. every level u eat the fire breathing dragon gets faster. hectic and intense game when u get into it)
Entombed (programming marvel with randomly generated levels!! pretty hard, and kind jank but kinda addictive)
Adventures of Tron
Ghost Manor (A game with an Ending! short and sweet. u can be the boy or girl, girl by default to save the boy surprisingly. the dracula fella at the end is kinda tricky to beat but once u know it its cake)
Wizard of Wor
Worm War I
Demon Attack
Frogs and Flies
Bump n Jump
Kool Aid Man
Fast Food (I grew to really enjoy this one)
Radar Lock
Motorodeo (A 1990 release!!! do backflips in monster trucks! tricky game but played it a good amount)
Xenophobe (interesting port of the arcade. shooting aliens on atari is just neat. and small cutscenes too? wild)
Moon Patrol
Secret Quest (Zelda type game from '89)
Battlezone(3D tank game on atari! also comparable to Robot Tank. just fun to look at for a few minutes)
Jungle Hunt
H.E.R.O. (Activisions greatest game on the system to many)
Keystone Kapers
Cosmic Ark (I love this game some. shoot meteors, land on planet, pull in creatures with beam. repeat. its always funny you're the aliena abducting the cows from earth)
Frankenstein's Monster (reviewed in AVGN's Halloween episode. this platformer is so hard to me and keeps me coming back to it)
California Games (the BMX level is so fun!!)
Enduro
Barnstorming
GI Joe Cobra Strike (Paddle game! not much of a GI joe game but as a game called Attack of the 50ft Cobra it works alot better!)
Congo Bongo (when you beat the stages it shows u lighting the monkey on fire and it makes me laugh)
Now he shall play et Atari 2600
One of the terrible things about the 2600 is that while ET is indeed terrible as a plug-and-play game... it's one of the best games on the console once you learn how to play it, with the jedi powers and all that. It's a scavenger kinda game, and the RNG means you're not playing by rote, you actually have to look around.
... ET is still a pretty bad game. The intrinsic poopiness of the 2600 really makes designing a hypothetically good 2600 game a fascinating exercise. Montezuma's Revenge can't be the apex of what the hardware is capable of, is it?!
0:50 true, even outside the US, the country that experienced the video game crash as many games from the ZX spectrum, C64, Amstrad CPC, etc. were shy about showing in game graphics, especially if the game inside looked especially poor.
Somehow this game is still more satisfying than NES Pinball.
tbf these graphics are actually pretty good by Atari 2600 standards
Game of the year right here, folks.
Good old games.* I like this one for some reason.
this wouldve costed you like $150 in todays money
$150 adj. AND you didn't know what the game played like? No wonder the video game market crashed, that's absolutely terrible.
Shoulda compare it to the intellivision version
Yar’s Revenge is HYPE!
So the "video game crash" was just everyone deciding "I'll wait for the reviews."
I think I’d take up bowling if the ball purred after I let go of it.
We live in an absolutely tiny apartment with very little storage. Unfortunately, I can’t retain all of the cases for my physical media. The only case I have ever kept is a PlayStation one game called “Racing” by A-1 Games. The back of the case recommends other hit titles they’ve produced such as “sports” and “action”. Everything about the cases just so funny that I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it seeing as how I bought it only because I thought it was funny.
Haha I’ll have to look those up
Niko! My cousin! Let's go bowling.
Initially mistook this video's notification for an AVGN episode. lol
James Channel
James channel
James Channel
Just a reminder for folks, there’s a great coffee table book of Atari game box art. It’s called The Art of Atari.
james you should keep these videos going a bit longer and then make a compilation of all the meow outros together
My dad loved playing this game as a kid he’s 51
Basically wii sports bowling but on the atari 2600. Not bad!
rain rain go away got me a little bit lol
I remember brown living rooms by myself trying theses consoles while the grown ups were off talking and they bought these things as a thing u do maybe? My dad got a comadore that I was already playing with. At the same house I was seein a VHS player
Sounds like R2-D2 later in life.
I first played Atari 2600 Bowling when I got an Atari Flashback (I think 4 or 5) and oddly enough, I like it. It's pretty simple and dumb. But also I prefer Atari 2600 Asteroids to the Arcade version, even though the 7800 one is the best.
I put hundreds of hours into the 2600 version as a kid, I could play it until the score looped back to 0. You're correct, it was one of the better games on the console.
Im expecting the game to print out something with that noise. Likely a paper saying “go play something else”
No joke, I was born in 1994, had a genesis, atari, and a ps2 and I would play the shit out of this game with my Dad.
KITTY!
Also: Come on, even real bowlers don't constantly throw the ball straight down the lane. This is a highly sophisticated physics simulation, thus you need to curve the ball into the pocket like the pros do!
I always found multiplayer to be fun
The 2600 jr was my first system and I don't have any fond memories of it 😊
Freind: you want to play B O W L I N G
i actually just came across this in all my carts yesterday and it fetches a good price, usually when they do that its because they were crap so never sold many
i like atari bowling tbh, best with someone else where you can be stupid competitive over a bad bowling game
I hope to see an intellivision episode
I think the game is louder and more obnoxious than a real bowling alley.