Justin

I received F-ZERO for Christmas one year when I first got my Super Nintendo. I wasn't expecting it and it was an absolute thrill to play. The graphics seemed so amazing, and I really loved jumping off of the ramps. F-ZERO is also one of those Nintendo franchises that deserves to sit alongside Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Pokemon, Mario Kart, etc. but for the longest time had been "forgotten" to an extent. I always find myself playing F-ZERO around this time of year, and would like to continue revisiting F-ZERO in with a special holiday Squad Challenge every year, racing a different track from the game. The "Mute City" tracks are so emblematic of the game and easy to access as they are the first track to race in all three leagues. I hope you'll all join us the next time we revisit F-ZERO in a future Squad Challenge.

Congratulations RadioPoultry! WOW!! I'm thrilled to see this turnout for our 2nd Annual F-ZERO Squad Challenge! Especially with the Malware situation going on. I love that you guys all turned out for this, even if F-ZERO isn't your strongest game. Congrats to all our racers who showed up to play, lots of friendly competition all around this challenge. Atari Creep livestreamed this event on his Instagram and YouTube, which was a lot of fun, special thanks to him for getting the word out. It's been really cool to get to watch other people play Squad Challenges live. Congratulations to @RadioPoultry on his score! Radio came in with a total lap time of 2' 07" 59. @kamakazi20012 takes 2nd with 2' 11" 32, and my score was 3rd on the scoreboard at 2' 16" 43. @greenween gave it his best and got a lap time of 2' 22" 37, @RickR was right on his tail at 2' 22" 71 and @Atari Creep rounds things out with 2' 32" 85 performed live. All of you showed how it was done, a huge congratulations to everybody who turned out for this Squad Challenge and posting absolutely incredible scores! I hope everybody enjoyed playing Mute City II on F-ZERO. We had more 16-Bit challenges this year and will continue with more challenges this year for Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, Atari Lynx and more. Way to go everybody! F-ZERO MUTE CITY II FINAL STANDINGS 1 RADIOPOULTRY 2’07”59 2 KAMAKAZI20012 2’11”32 3 JUSTIN 2’16”43 4 GREENWEEN 2’22”37 5 RICKR 2’22”71 6 ATARI CREEP 2’32”85

Thanks for the input guys! I''m adding your nominations into our big list of games! Let's make this a fun year 😉

I love seeing all of those boxes lined up. So cool. What a nice collection @RickR it's always nice to see other people preserving and playing these gems.

I'll start us off. This is a fun track, not especially challenging, but not a cakewalk either! I hope you guys enjoy this! This lap time was my best out of four tries. I'll give it another go soon. Good luck to everybody playing! Best Time: 2' 16" 43

The Mandalorian is the first live action "television" series set in the Star Wars universe. It just wrapped up its first season on Disney+ so now maybe we can discuss this show without spoilers. Is anyone else watching The Mandalorian, and did you like it?

It's time to nominate games for us to play in in 2020! We had a lot of fun in High Score Squad this year, and I'm thinking about the year to come. What games do you want to see in High Score Squad for 2020? Post your suggestions below!

F-ZERO Super Nintendo Entertainment System Controller: PLAYER'S CHOICE Difficulty Level: Grand Prix > Queen League > Standard Class > Mute City II Achieve best time to win challenge Play on: Real Hardware / Dedicated Console / MAME / Emulation OK! ✔ Squad Challenge ends 11:59 pm PST January 14th, 2020 OBJECTIVE: Play for the best possible time using the difficulty settings defined in the challenge. Post a photo or video of your score in this thread. Scores must be achieved between December 23rd, 2019 through January 14th, 2020. Screen captures are not allowed as they are easily manipulated for falsified scores. Multiple submissions are permitted. The player with the best time at the end of the competition is the victor! ELIGIBILITY: Anyone can join in. All players are welcome! PLAY RULES: Games may be played on real hardware, Flashback or emulation, using any controller or keyboard, following rules and game settings as delineated in the Squad Challenge. Enhancements, rewinds and hacked versions of this game are not allowed. DIFFICULTY LEVEL: Grand Prix > Queen League > Standard Class > Mute City II. We are playing for the best overall time to complete the course at Mute City II. At the title screen select GRAND PRIX. Players may select any air car they wish. Next, select the League and Class in which you wish to race. Players will select QUEEN LEAGUE, then STANDARD CLASS. This will start you at Mute City II. You do not have to play the rest of the courses. We are only playing for the best overall time to complete the course at Mute City II. FAIR PLAY: Players should play fairly, be honest, and have fun! Falsified scores will result in your immediate removal from the site. It goes without saying that no use of cheats, hacks, cartridge frying, enhancements, Photoshop, subterfuge, or any other unfair advantage is allowed. Everybody hates a cheater. MORE: To review detailed rules on how to play, please visit the High Score Squad page here: MESSAGE: Welcome to our 74th Squad Challenge! This time we're playing the Mute City II circuit in F-ZERO on Super Nintendo, a true SNES classic! I have wonderful Christmas memories of F-ZERO, I received the game with my SNES when my family was very poor and I was not expecting anything for Christmas. The game brought a lot of fun and joy into the house around that time and I always love playing this game at Christmas. It's become a bit of a tradition, and as such I've made it part of a Christmas tradition here in the forums as well. 🎄 F-ZERO is one of the iconic titles on Super Nintendo and was a good demonstration of the Super Nintendo's Mode 7 graphics. F-ZERO was a predecessor to anti-gravity racing league games such as Wipeout that would come in following generations. PDF F-ZERO Instruction Booklet is attached below. Good luck! NOTE: This Squad Challenge runs through JANUARY 14th, 2020! Enjoy! F-ZERO.pdf

On the upside, we're now officially "THE MOST DANGEROUS ATARI SITE ON THE INTERNET"

Merry Christmas Everybody! 🎅

Great work Brian! Best wishes on the success of your new book!

The Forums were just upgraded to the latest version and inspected for Malware. It came back with a clean bill of health: The Malware is definitely contained within the main section of the website which houses the Blog and is built on Wordpress. When I built that part of the site in 2014 I thought Wordpress was a pretty versatile and reliable way of going about this. I would like to avoid having to rebuild that portion of the site entirely. I love the clean design. It may need to be rebuilt on a platform other than Wordpress though. In the meantime I'm going to continue working with Kamakakazi20012 to resolve this issue once and for all. A special THANK YOU to all of you here who have offered your input, tolerated "warnings", and trudged on regardless. You're all our classic gaming family and I'm glad you're here. I always think of Atari I/O as being "an experience". Does that sound silly? I want Atari I/O to be like what you would feel going into an arcade, Chuck E. Cheese, or your favorite pizza parlor with arcade games. Or a theme park. I was having lunch in EPCOT building some of this site when it was new thinking about this being "an experience". This whole Malware thing interrupts that experience like nothing else, and what's worse is it undermines trust in our site. The Malware issue is the must frustrating thing I've experienced since the site went live. I will get it resolved soon. The site isn't going anywhere. Happy Holidays everyone! Justin

Congratulations atarilbc! Congratulations @atarilbc on your score! You made history! Looking at all of these scores, you guys really reached stratospheric heights in this game. I hope this was a fun challenge! Food Fight has always been one of my favorite games on one of my favorite systems. It's such a simple concept, "Mindless fun" as Atari Creep puts it. Whenever somebody asks me why the Atari 7800 is worth owning, I always cite Food Fight as one of the must-have games. We'll certainly revisit this game again in High Score Squad to celebrate the holidays in the future. Next time we do this challenge we'll increase the difficulty level. I thought this would've been sufficiently challenging to prevent never-ending games, but you guys are beasts. How do you think Food Fight holds up on the Atari 7800? Does it compare well to Coleco? NES? @atarilbc posted an astronomical score of 20,010,600 points! Unreal! The legendary @RadioPoultry joins atarilbc in the '10M+ Winner's Tier" ranking 2nd place on the board at 10,005,100 points. @nosweargamer took the 3rd spot on the board with an impressive 1,215,100 points, "The Don" @RickR showing how it's done again with 1,061,200 points, and @Atari Creep rounds things out with a solid showing of 155,800. Honorable mention to @TrekMD for joining in the fun here, even though he was unable to play. Congrats to and everyone who jumped in this squad challenge and shared a score! Atarilbc should be very proud of his accomplishment and I'd like to encourage him to post his new high score on the Scoreboard, and let's make sure this Challenge continues on! NOTE: Our next High Score Squad Challenge will be a special F-ZERO holiday challenge on Super Nintendo. Be there! FOOD FIGHT FINAL STANDINGS 1 ATARILBC 20,010,600 2 RADIOPOULTRY 10,005,100 3 NOSWEARGAMER 1,215,100 4 RICKR 1,061,200 5 ATARI CREEP 155,800

Food Fight Atari 7800 ProSystem Controller: CONTROLLER / KEYBOARD / PLAYER'S CHOICE Difficulty Level: Beginner (Starting at Level 1) Play on: Real Hardware / Dedicated Console / MAME / Emulation OK! ✔ Squad Challenge ends 11:59 pm PST November 30th, 2019 OBJECTIVE: Play for the highest possible score using the difficulty settings defined in the challenge. Post a photo or video of your score in this thread. Scores must be achieved between November 15th through November 30th, 2019. Screen captures are not allowed as they are easily manipulated for falsified scores. Multiple submissions are permitted. The player with the highest score at the end of the competition is the victor! ELIGIBILITY: Anyone can join in. All players are welcome! PLAY RULES: Games may be played on real hardware, Flashback or emulation, using any controller or keyboard, following rules and game settings as delineated in the Squad Challenge. Enhancements, rewinds and hacked versions of this game are not allowed. DIFFICULTY LEVEL: Beginner. Start at Level 1. As you progress, the game will become progressively more difficult. FAIR PLAY: Players should play fairly, be honest, and have fun! Falsified scores will result in your immediate removal from the site. It goes without saying that no use of cheats, hacks, cartridge frying, enhancements, rewinds, Photoshop, subterfuge, or any other unfair advantage is allowed. Everybody hates a cheater. MORE: To review detailed rules on how to play, please visit the High Score Squad page here: MESSAGE: Welcome to our 73rd Squad Challenge! November means Thanksgiving celebrations, Holiday shopping, and lots of FOOD! What better way to celebrate than with a few rounds of Food Fight on Atari 7800!? Food Fight has always been one of my personal all-time favorites on the 7800, and was called "a Masterpiece" in Tim Lapetino's book Art Of Atari. Is Food Fight one of your favorites on the 7800 System? Let's get ready for a Thanksgiving feast and throw some food! I hope you guys enjoy this Squad Challenge! ROM and Instruction Manual are provided below. Good luck to everyone playing! PS!: I realize the m-ware issue is still affecting the site. It must be very annoying to get that message every time you visit our forums. I know it is for me. I'm still working on this and will get this resolved. I've been busy with taking a continuing education course for my job which has really cut into my free time to work on the site. The site will always be here and I will get the issue resolved soon! NOTE: Our next High Score Squad Challenge will be a special winter challenge for the Super Nintendo. Be there! Food-Fight.pdfFood_Fight.a78

Congratulations RadioPoultry! Congratulations @RadioPoultry on such an epic score! I hope you guys enjoyed diving into Alleyway on Game Boy! I hadn't played this game in years, it was nice to pick it up after such a long time. It was one of my first games on Game Boy, and I really connected with it because I had always loved Super Breakout on Atari 2600 and Breakout-style games. How do you think Alleyway holds up compared to Super Breakout? Do you guys feel it could have used some Arkanoid elements to the game? @RadioPoultry posted an astronomical score of 10,467 points! Unreal! @kamakazi20012's score ranked 2nd place on the board at 3,879 points, "The Don" @RickR took the 3rd position with an impressive 3,173 points, Lynx Master @btbfilms76 joined in this round and placed 4th with a solid showing of 2,982 points, and @Atari Creep rounds things out with a LIVE performance of 1,987 points. Congrats to @RadioPoultry and everyone who jumped in to play in this squad challenge and shared a score! Radio should be very proud of his accomplishment and I'd like to encourage him to post his new high score on the Scoreboard, and let's make sure this Challenge continues on! NOTE: Our next High Score Squad Challenge will be a Thanksgiving challenge for the Atari 7800 ProSystem. Be there! ALLEYWAY FINAL STANDINGS 1 RADIOPOULTRY 10,467 2 KAMAKAZI20012 3,879 3 RICKR 3,173 4 BTBFILMS76 2,982 5 ATARI CREEP 1,987

Alleyway Nintendo Game Boy Controller: CONTROLLER / KEYBOARD / PLAYER'S CHOICE Difficulty Level: Default (Press Start To Play) Play on: Real Hardware / Dedicated Console / MAME / Emulation OK! ✔ Squad Challenge ends 11:59 pm PST November 14th, 2019 OBJECTIVE: Play for the highest possible score using the difficulty settings defined in the challenge. Post a photo or video of your score in this thread. Scores must be achieved between November 1st through November 14th, 2019. Screen captures are not allowed as they are easily manipulated for falsified scores. Multiple submissions are permitted. The player with the highest score at the end of the competition is the victor! ELIGIBILITY: Anyone can join in. All players are welcome! PLAY RULES: Games may be played on real hardware, Flashback or emulation, using any controller or keyboard, following rules and game settings as delineated in the Squad Challenge. Enhancements, rewinds and hacked versions of this game are not allowed. DIFFICULTY LEVEL: Default. Press Start to Play. FAIR PLAY: Players should play fairly, be honest, and have fun! Falsified scores will result in your immediate removal from the site. It goes without saying that no use of cheats, hacks, cartridge frying, enhancements, rewinds, Photoshop, subterfuge, or any other unfair advantage is allowed. Everybody hates a cheater. MORE: To review detailed rules on how to play, please visit the High Score Squad page here: MESSAGE: Welcome to our 72nd Squad Challenge! November kicks off the Holiday season, which often times reminds us of traveling, road trips to see family for holiday gatherings, and many hours spent in the back of the car playing video games. We're starting things off with Alleyway for Game Boy! Alleyway was one of the first Game Boy games released in the USA, and one of the first games I can remember playing for Game Boy. Alleyway is a nice Breakout clone. I loved Breakout and Super Breakout on Atari 2600, and although it lacks the Arkanoid-style power-ups, Alleyway still proves to be a fun game. I hope you guys enjoy this Squad Challenge! ROM and Instruction Manual are provided below. Good luck to everyone playing! NOTE: Our next High Score Squad Challenge will be a Thanksgiving challenge for the Atari 7800. Be there! Alleyway.pdfAlleyway.gb

Congratulations btbfilms76! Congratulations @btbfilms76 your astounding score! I hope everybody had a fun and safe Halloween and enjoyed the heck out of Splatterhouse! I was never great at Splatterhouse but I remember picking it up for the first time and how it felt so advanced compared to the games we had gotten used to by then, like Mario Bros. Plus how graphic everything seemed at the time. I was glad to see everybody in "the TurboGrafx club" show up for this! Even despite the malware issue, which I am working to resolve quickly. You guys posted some great scores and I'm happy to have come in dead last in one of these Squad Challenges! You guys posted some impressive scores on a very challenging game. @btbfilms76 posted an astronomical score of 101,800 points, performed live in front of an audience on YouTube! Unreal! @Atari Creep ranked 2nd on the board with a score of 28,100 points, also performed live in front of an audience on Instagram Live! @RickR takes the 3rd position with a solid 16,400 points on his first try, and I round things out in 4th place after playing for a few hours to get 15,400 points. Congrats to @btbfilms76 and everyone who played in this squad challenge and shared a score! I'd like to encourage @btbfilms76 to post his new high score on the Scoreboard, and let's make sure this Challenge continues on! NOTE: Our next High Score Squad Challenge will be for the original (DMG) Nintendo Game Boy. Be there! SPLATTERHOUSE FINAL STANDINGS 1 BTBFILMS76 101,800 2 ATARI CREEP 28,100 3 RICKR 16,400 4 JUSTIN 15,400

Fellas, Splatterhouse is kicking my butt beyond belief. I've played it twice now, for an hour at a time. This is my best score. I scored 200 points more at the very end right after I took this photo. I'm going to celebrate Halloween with a little more Splatterhouse so we'll see if I can top this score. I had to jump in on this though! My High Score: 15,400

Death seems to come fast on TG16!

I'll probably get in a few rounds of Splatterhouse on TurboGrafx-16 and hand out Halloween candy. Will I dress up as a ghoul? A zombie? Nicki Minaj? Possibly! What are you guys doing? 🎃