greenween

What a great turn out. If my thumb had not been banged up I would have joined in for sure. On to the next. 

Congratulations Scott Stilphen!
 
Congratulations @Scott Stilphen! Your Super Breakout score took top placement in our Final Standings! In my opinion games like Super Breakout really shine on the 2600. It was designed to do Tank (Combat) and Pong, and everything else that came out for it was seeing what else the system could do. I thought Super Breakout played like a dream. I was fortunate to be playing with a fresh set of Paddles on original hardware, everything was smooth and I love that analog feel. Some of these early 2600 games are my favorite, they get down to the root of "easy to learn hard to master" games that made Atari so successful. 
I thought this Squad Challenge was particularly fun, and I was thrilled to see so many people participate. I made a mistake in setting the challenge to end at 11:59 PM PST on the 15th instead of the 14th, new Squad Challenges are always posted on the 1st and 15th of every month and it will continue that way. It should be noted that AtariLBC posted a nice starter score of 888 points, but poor guy, his brittle paddle knobs gave out as he was trying to improve his score. I’m sure we all would’ve loved to see how far Atari LBC could’ve gotten with a fresh set of paddles!
Congratulations again to Scott who clenched the top spot at the very end with a 1st Place score of 4,227 points! @chas10e claims 2nd with 3,369 points, and @greenween takes 3rd with 3,041. @RickR, myself, @RadioPoultry and @Gianna all came in very close to each other, and @Kid A @kamakazi20012 @atarilbc @TrekMD and Ms. Greenween all joined in on this one with their best scores, hopefully having fun in the Squad Challenge too! Congratulations to Scott for an exciting run, and to everyone who joined in this Squad Challenge and shared a score! I'd like to encourage Scitt 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 an Atari 2600 challenge. Be there!
 
 

 
 

 
 

I completely agree! I found myself most often playing at night, on a 1990's Sony Trinitron that is great for playing these games on original hardware. There's something about the warm glow of the phosphorescence of the screen and the scan-lines, the ball leaves a trail behind it in the dark like a shooting star. It's most noticeable when playing in the dark. That trail really helps point the direction of the ball and where to catch it.

I'm with you Rick! I managed to get 382 and "fair". WTH were they thinking? I always defend the 5200 but this pack in was just idiotic. The 2600 version with the paddles is better in every way. 

Even at 10 years old could see the flaws. Didn't really care though and spent many hours playing. I went to a friends for the weekend and he had the 5200 version. I suddenly didn't want to play my 2600 version. Ms. Pac Man however was great!

Despite the fact that the original A2600 Pac-Man could have been better, I really enjoyed it as a kid in 1982 and further on in my childhood years. The highest score I achieved in this game was over 20,000 points. I knew a guy who was a friend of my dad's that got over 100,000 points in this version of the game. He said that the ghosts later turned into question marks and all that. It probably ran out of general memory and started glitching out. That happens sometimes when you get too far in a game with limited memory. I almost always beat out my friends and my dad in this version of Pac-Man. I could really fake out the ghosts. It was really fun. Ms. Pac-Man was much better than Pac-Man, for sure. I got good at that as well. I probably am out of practice now, but back then I was pretty good. Ah, the memories…
Thanks for letting me share. :O)

Even at 10 years old could see the flaws. Didn't really care though and spent many hours playing. I went to a friends for the weekend and he had the 5200 version. I suddenly didn't want to play my 2600 version. Ms. Pac Man however was great!

I'm with you Rick! I managed to get 382 and "fair". WTH were they thinking? I always defend the 5200 but this pack in was just idiotic. The 2600 version with the paddles is better in every way. 

My recollection is:

Electronic Games magazine panned the game, and I'm pretty sure I read that before buying. 

I know that I had to save up to buy it, and I remember the purchase day and store well.  The Pac Man box barely left my hands at the check stand.  We got home, and I played and played.  The flaws were obvious.  Wrong colors, wrong sounds, Pac Man only facing side to side.  But I played and kept track of high scores.  Friends played too.  We had fun playing for high scores and also ripping on the game as we went. 

Answering your question isn't easy.  I knew it wasn't great.  But I had fun playing it anyway.  I don't think the game ruined the gaming industry.  But for me personally, it marked the end of the 2600.  My thought being that if that's the best that system could do, it was probably time to move on.  Looking back, I'm pretty sure that was the last game I paid full price for.  I didn't start buying 2600 games again until they were all on clearance.  Pac Man and Defender were the two that stick out in my mind as "not good enough". 

I moved on to an Atari 800XL, which had an awesome Pac Man and Defender. 

PS - I think I was 13 years old when 2600 Pac Man came out. 

I never got it only because I owned a 5200.  But I do remember a neighbor down the road getting it and inviting me over to play it.  I already had Pac-Man for my system so I didn't expect anything different.  Once I arrived in went pac-man and on went my dissecting.  Nothing was right, I dogged it, but at the same time I found joy in playing it.  It was a different pacman. Once I got home, though, I was never so happy to seev my pacman again.

We played the heck out of it, so yeah, it was fun.   But we made fun of it at the same time.   The sounds were not very similar to the arcade.  We would repeat, "Gonk, gonk, gonk, gonk", while playing to make fun of the lame dot eating sound.

Today, I took the opportunity to try 5200 Super Breakout.  It's a fun game, but I'm sorry to say, I found it really hard to play with the joystick controller.  I feel like the rubber boot on the stick fought me the whole time, and it wasn't easy to be precise in movement.  I tried and tried.  The best I could do is 318!  "Fair" is that the game told me. 
The fact that Atari made this the pack-in game is (again, I'm sorry) horrifying.  What were they thinking?  Colecovision came with Donkey Kong.  I'm so glad they changed the 5200 pack-in to Pac Man later on.  Much better choice.
 
 

2,559
 

Last photo 4,227

1,170 

1,832

My wife had never played before. She's already hooked! 546 after a few tries.

My goal for today was to break 2,000. 3,041!

I got in the zone for sure! Still plenty of time left Rick. I'm going to plan on this being my highest score for this challenge.

Amazing score Scott Stilphen!!! The scores got really impressive on this one. This is a tough one just to hit 1,000 on for me, but when you get in that zone you can kill it.

Finally broke 2000:
2378

Something I hadn't noticed before before is how the change in direction of the ball works. I had always assumed when the ball moved faster horizontally, it was because I had hit it on the very edge of the paddle. Instead, it happens automatically after you hit the ball the first 8 times with a new paddle, and resumes normal movement after another 8 hits. The arcade game seems to work the same way. Kind of disappointing, honestly. The player really doesn't have that much control over the ball. Still, I remember playing a DOS clone of Breakout where you had no control of the ball's direction at all, so it's better than that, at least!

My New High Score: 2,504

High score: 2192

Well, for starters, I have been hanging around here since about 2014, I believe. So, it has been a while. Almost 1,300 posts later, I am still here. I am an avid collector of Atari games, VHS tapes and DVDs, a Mac-head since 1993, an animation buff, and avid learner of anything. Glad to have been here for the last six years or so. Thanks for having me. 🙂 

My copy arrived a few days ago and I'm really liking it.