Justin

BIG WAY TO KICK THINGS OFF!! @datafry

This is EXACTLY the reason we created the Scoreboard! It's not just another Twin Galaxies, it's a way for us to continue our favorite High Score Squad Challenges over a long period of time. I hope you'll keep playing, @RickR, you're very good with strategy and I think something will "click" for you and you'll do very well at this game. So glad to hear it @datafry I hope you'll continue to join us for High Score Squad Challenges! LOL you know it 😎

High Score Squad Special Event! Club VCS Recharged Squad Challenge Missile Command: Recharged March 1st - 31st HIGH SCORE SQUAD SPECIAL EVENT: ATARI VCS players be sure to stop by our new Club VCS and join us for our very first Recharged Squad Challenge! We're playing Missile Command: Recharged on the Atari VCS, now through March 31st! There will be new Recharged Squad Challenges coming every month in Club VCS, be sure to join us and show off your VCS skills. Big shoutout to @Sabertooth who is organizing the event and has been putting in tremendous work into making the Atari VCS community something genuinely amazing. THANK YOU to everyone who has been participating in Club VCS and inviting new Atari VCS fans to join us!

Congratulations No Swear Gamer!! TWO IN A ROW! Congratulations to high score legend @nosweargamer on his second win in a row, and on becoming our new TurboGrafx-16 Bomberman '93 Squad Champion! No Swear blew it up with his stellar score of 126,700 points, landing himself the top spot in our Final Standings! NSG live-streamed his high score performance in front of an audience on YouTube, and all of his viewers got to watch him win. WAY TO GO @nosweargamer! And a big congratulations to everybody on all those incredible scores across the board! I hope Bomberman '93 was a fun game and a good reason to pull out the TurboGrafx-16. I took 2nd Place in our Final Standings with my score of 114,100 points. High Score Squad regular @Atari 5200 Guy takes 3rd Place with his score of 52,300 points, that was an amazing effort! Newcomer @datafry joined us again and brought some super-sharp skills, taking 4th Place on our Final Standings with his score of 35,500 points! The legendary @btbfilms76 kicked off our event with his impressive score of 21,700 points, securing 5th Place. @Sabertooth played Bomberman '93 on his VCS and brought some seriously sharp skills of his own with an even 20,000 points, taking 6th Place. @RickR kept on fighting throughout, and reached 15,600 points to clench 7th. @Gianna was a passionate player and scored 10,100 points on her first time playing Bomberman '93. My congratulations to all who joined us in our TurboGrafx-16 Bomberman '93 Squad Challenge and shared these high scores. I hope everybody had a blast! Also, we'd like to offer a BIG WELCOME to new member @datafry who joined us once again this week in High Score Squad. We're thrilled you're here, WELCOME!! I'd also like to recognize and say thank you to Atari I/O's content creators who do so much to get the word out about High Score Squad events, and invite new friends to join our Atari Party at Atari I/O. @nosweargamer went live on YouTube on MULTIPLE occasions with our Bomberman '93 Squad Challenge and in each one played for over an hour before his subscribers. I was in attendance along with many of you and watched him achieve his fantastic scores! Be sure to subscribe to No Swear Gamer's YouTube Channel and join him on Discord. Congratulations on your 2nd win in a row! HIGH SCORE SQUAD SPECIAL EVENT: ATARI VCS players be sure to stop by our new Club VCS and join us for our very first Recharged Squad Challenge! We're playing Missile Command: Recharged on the Atari VCS, now through March 31st! There will be new Recharged Squad Challenges coming every month in Club VCS, be sure to join us and show off your VCS skills. Big shoutout to @Sabertooth who is organizing the event and has been putting in tremendous work into making the Atari VCS community something genuinely amazing. THANK YOU to everyone who has been participating in Club VCS and inviting new Atari VCS fans to join us! As always I'd like to encourage Squad Legend and our new champion @nosweargamer to post his high score on the Scoreboard, and let's make sure this Challenge continues on! Congratulations to NSG, special thanks once again @Gianna nominating this game after playing Bomberman on Switch, and a big congratulations to our wonderful little community for being such a great group to spend time with, I hope everybody had fun playing in our football league! NOTE: We play an often overlooked Activision classic in our next High Score Squad Challenge - Crackpots for the Atari 2600! Be there!

Appreciate your thoughts @Atari 5200 Guy but I have to disagree. Tommy Tallarico is not Preston Tucker, nor have big corporate and governmental entities felt threatened enough by Amico to where they colluded to quash the little upstart Intellivision. I think it's always a good idea to be skeptical of people asking you for your money, particularly with Kickstarter projects where they aren't close to shipping a final product. We've seen this time and time again dating back years. It's why we don't allow paid pre-sales on Atari I/O. Remember that Tucker wasn't just a movie. He was a real person, and those events, although simplified for the movie, actually happened to good hardworking people. I think people are overthinking this, or rather thinking about it too much. Most projects are crazy and hectic until they get launched. Passionate people who are deeply invested in their ideas and dreams are going to do whatever it takes to make their project successful. It's not always easy and it's not always pretty - usually it's pretty ugly. Missed deadlines, long nights, uncertainty. Most of the time though, the rest of the world isn't privy to this. Most projects aren't created with the world watching every step, examining every decision and discussing it endlessly on YouTube. But Intellivision invited the world in when they campaigned on nostalgia and asked regular "mom & pop" people to pony up $1,000 investments - which is a very small amount in investment terms for what is needed to get the project done, but is a very large amount for most regular people. They should have sought private capital from groups of accredited investors who can lose $100,000 in a project and walk away unscathed as if it never happened. Instead they went to the public with their Kickstarter campaigns etc. and asked regular people - namely classic gamers - to "invest" in their childhood dreams. If it's an investment you're after, longing the S&P 500 or hanging onto SPDR ETFs for a decade or two would be a much safer bet (and likely more profitable!) than "investing" in Amico. It seems like most of the people "investing" in Amico shouldn't be investing at all. The people behind Amico should see that and know better. Because they've taken money from classic gamers and regular "mom & pop" people, they've opened themselves up and invited the world in to watch what they're doing. Everybody gets to follow the events, the updates, discuss them at length, create "Amico news" and pick apart decisions. This doesn't happen with other products like Legends Pinball, AtGames Atari Flashback 10, 1UP Arcades, or a new kind of toilet paper dispenser. Simply because those projects never asked regular people for small investments, and they never invited the world in to see what they were doing. There are some exceptions to this - one of the closest to the Amico being the Evercade VS. Beautiful system, reasonably priced, no "dog and pony show", no grandstanding, and they're shipping their product and get positive reviews. None of this is Preston Tucker though.

We're awarding the Activision Crackpots Badge as an achievement for all players who score a patch-worthy score of 75,000+ Points in our Crackpots Squad Challenge through March 14th! Good luck!

@nosweargamer has an excellent overview of Crackpots for the Atari 2600. It's a great place to start if you're new to the game!

Let's get the word out about this High Score Squad Challenge! The more people participating the more fun the challenge! Spread the word and invite friends to play!

Crackpots Atari 2600 Controller: JOYSTICK / KEYBOARD / PLAYER'S CHOICE Difficulty Level: Default Play on: Real Hardware / Dedicated Console / Emulation OK! ✔ Squad Challenge ends 11:59 pm PST March 14, 2022 Objective Play for the highest possible score using the difficulty settings defined in the challenge. Post a photo or YouTube video of your score in this thread. Scores must be achieved between March 1st through March 14th, 2022. Screen captures are not allowed as they are more 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 / Mini console, or emulation, using any controller or keyboard, following all rules and game settings defined in the challenge. Choosing between real hardware or emulation, and choosing which controller to play on is part of formulating your strategy. Enhancements, rewinds and hacked versions of this game are not allowed. Difficulty Level We are playing Crackpots on Game 1 (1 Player) using the Default difficulty settings. The Difficulty Switches are not used in this game. Fair Play Your integrity is everything. 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 we will not allow cheats, hacks, cartridge frying, enhancements, rewinds, deceitful photo manipulation, subterfuge, or any other unfair advantage. 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 119th Squad Challenge! For this challenge we're playing Activision's CRACKPOTS designed by Dan Kitchen and released for the Atari 2600 pretty late in the game in 1983. Crackpots begins with an infestation! A bug barrage is swarming out of the sewer, chomping away at every building in town. Entire neighborhoods are now crumb piles! Over in Brooklyn, Potsy, the rooftop Gardner, is defending his beloved building with his only weapon - potted petunias. Be a good neighbor, help Potsy take potshots at the insect invaders... Quick! When too many bugs crawl into the windows, they'll start eating you out of house and home! ROM and PDF Instruction Manual are provided below. Crackpots.pdf Crackpots.a26

I'm thinking that may be my #3 as well @TrekMD Can we all agree "no cheating" on this question with answers like "Namco Collection" 😂

Haha that's great! You'll have to give us updated pics soon 🙂 Keep working on your strategy @RickR it's more puzzle than action. There's a lot of strategy with bomb placement, power-ups, etc. One strategy I use that works for me but not for everybody: I'm careful in the beginning to only detonate blocks that I need to move out of my way. I don't just blow everything up on the screen and let the little buggars run wild. My strategy has been to keep them trapped in their little spaces, and "snipe" them one by one. I try to keep them compartmentalized and not let them run free. If they are in a tight space they're more easily blown up by a single bomb, and their path is predictable. Once they escape their little compartment, or the "maze" area, they can roam free and you lose the ability to predict their behavior or box them in.

Looks like you were already at 11,300 @RickR 🙂

EXCELLENT topic @MaximumRD!! I'm going to have to give this one some thought... For my picks, I imagine Out Run (arcade) and California Games (Atari Lynx) will have to be up there somewhere.

Now that everybody's had some time to play Bomberman '93 what are your thoughts on the game, and on the TurboGrafx-16 in general? How does Bomberman '93 compare to other games in the series? How does Bomberman '93 and the TurboGrafx-16 compare to the Nintendo Entertainment System?

I may give it one last shot today, otherwise I'm going to be very busy until after March 1st. I'll have a new Squad Challenge up on time. I'd love to see one of you guys take the top spot for Bomberman '93!

I want you guys to beat my score! Nobody wants to pin the tail on their own donkey at their own birthday party. I hope you guys keep playing and leave my score in the dust. That was a great pop-up stream @nosweargamer, I've really enjoyed your livestream events lately and it's cool that you're covering our High Score Squad Challenges

I'd love to get my hands on one

Thank you! GOOD LUCK on your score @RickR I'd love to see you break the 100,000 point mark! YESS!! I've felt that way about the TurboGrafx-16 and the TurboDuo from the very first time I played them. Sometimes it can feel a little anemic next to a Sega Genesis or Super Nintendo, but there are so many great games and it feels like an NES pumped up to the max! I'm so glad to hear you're enjoying the unappreciated world of TurboGrafx

I still don't understand how we never got Crystal Castles on the Atari 7800. Perfect system for that game and should've been a release title.

My New High Score: 114,100 Awesome game. This is hands down my favorite Bomberman on the TurboGrafx-16, including Bomberman '94 which came a year later.

LETTSSSSS GOOOOO