Sabertooth

GRAVITAR: RECHARGED
Atari VCS
Controller: MODERN / CLASSIC / PLAYER'S CHOICE
Difficulty Level: ARCADE MODE
Play on: Real Hardware ✔
Squad Challenge ends 11:59 pm PST November 30, 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 November 1st through November 30, 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
This is a Club VCS Exclusive Challenge. All Club VCS players are welcome!
 
Play Rules
Games may be played on real Atari VCS hardware. 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 Gravitar: Recharged in the "ARCADE" mode. Play as long as you can for the highest score possible!
 
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 ninth Club VCS Recharged Squad Challenge!!! For this challenge we're taking on Gravitar: Recharged!
Gravitar: Recharged is a modern take on Gravitar, the 1982 arcade game.  The original Gravitar combined the thrust and rotate control of shooters like Asteroids with the gravity physics of Lunar Lander.  It was a difficult game that required precise control.  While not a huge success for Atari, it did receive a release on the 2600.  
Gravitar: Recharged taps down the overall difficulty of its predecessor, improves controls and updates the graphics.  The first of the second wave of Recharged series titles, it introduces a new graphic style and optional score modifiers in Arcade mode.  
Test your skills as a pilot on your way to a high score in this squad challenge!
 
Club VCS Recharged Squad Giveaway
This is the fourth game of our second Club VCS Recharged Squad Challenge Giveaway!
1)  All challenge participants will receive one (1) entry for each challenge in which they submit a valid score!
2) The top scorer of each challenge will receive two (2) additional entries - for a total of three (3) entries in a single challenge!
3) On Twitch or Youtube?  Stream or record and post your ClubVCS high score attempt for one (1) additional entry in each round.  You must post a public link to the video in the Challenge.
BUT ARE THERE BUTTONS? 
Yes! We've made another set of ClubVCS buttons to celebrate the games in this series. There will be two ways to get a button set.
1) Win a challenge.
2) Post a valid score to all challenges in the 5 game series.
Only one button set will be mailed per member during the series.
This contest is open to everybody, including Atari I/O Moderators, with a U.S. or Canada  mailing address. It's really easy, all you have to do is participate be a Club VCS member and participate in our Recharged Squad Challenges.
 
 

 

Congratulations STIRRELL!
 
Congratulations to @stirrell, the winner of our Donut Dodo Recharged Squad Challenge! 🍩🦤
@stirrell makes an impressive debut at ClubVCS to take the top spot on the Squad Challenge podium with a phenomenal 1st Place score of 251,617!  @Stlrs95 showed his donut grabbing prowess, placing second with and impressive score of 209,064.  @Mockduck finished third with a sugary sweet score of 177,551.  @Sabertooth, @RickR and @Yorkies TV rounded at the board with scores of 44,077, 22,105 and 19,752, respectively.
As the winner of this round @stirrell will receive a set of Recharged Squad buttons and 3 entries in the controller giveaway! In addition, Donut Dodo developer Pixel Games has generously offered to send a signed, sealed copy of Sir Lovelot for the Switch to the winner of this challenge!
@Mockduckwill receive two entries since he posted his attempt via YouTube.  Everyone else will receive one entry!
I'd like to encourage @stirrell to post his high score on the Scoreboard, and let's make sure this Challenge continues on!
Thanks also to @Marco1019 for getting the word out about this challenge! 

Congratulations to stirrell on his big win!  And a big congratulations to the rest of the Squad!  Donut Dodo is an excellent homage to the golden age of arcade gaming.  It could easily stand alongside giants like Popeye, Donkey Kong and Burgertime in any early-80s arcade.  I encourage every VCS owner to give it a try!
NOTE: Our next Recharged Squad Challenge is Gravitar: Recharged! Be there!
 

This game is killer using a mouse for targeting and a Classic (for me anyway) to fire. You can't fire using the mouse because of the AtariOS issue with mouse button freezing. But it's waaaaaay easier to target with a mouse than a joystick. 

I have a HOKEY in my concerto that I picked up at PRGE. However, I have seen some graphical glitches on a few games like Commando and speaking of that, the audio is still not quite right in some places with the HOKEY in place. Fred has confirmed these issues and states he is looking into it. In the meantime, I've put a spare HOKEY into my older Mateos 16 in 1 cart as for what I use that for these days, the HOKEY is fine for it and will stick with using my DragonFly for actual multi game playing until the 7800GD comes out.
HOKEY is a great thing to see and have, but it does require some specific tweaks to make it work on a game by game basis. All of the new homebrew releases for the 7800 at PRGE that required POKEY audio in fact used HOKEYs in them, but each game required the HOKEY to be tweaked to sound correctly and I think on some of the games, the code on them had to be altered for the HOKEY to work. So even popping in a normal POKEY into those games might not work due to the changes needed for the HOKEY to work in them. But I'm not cracking open my Popeye or Petscii Robots carts to test that.
I do hope that whatever small issues remain with the HOKEY, Fred is able to iron out soon and able to provide a means to update the current ones. 
 

I thought I'd just share how easy it is to add a POKEY sound chip to a Concerto cart to get the improved sound on games like Ballblazer.  I realized I had a donor 5200 board and pulled a POKEY from that.  It simply plugs right in to the socket on the Concerto and works straight away.
Some notes:  User batari at the Atari Age forums created the Concerto cart.  He also is selling a drop-in replacement for the POKEY called "HOKEY" for a really low price.  Also, the production Concerto carts being sold now have the option of having  HOKEY included.  Clearly that's the way to go.  My Concerto is "pre-production", and it has worked really well for me. 
 

From Atari (via Discord):
**MISSILE COMMAND: RECHARGED - OUT NOVEMBER 1st** 
Next in the popular line of remakes from Atari and SneakyBox comes Missile Command: Recharged! This remake takes what the original and the first remake from a year and a half ago brought to players, and gives it a much needed face-lift, as well as many features that were either missing, heavily requested or later implemented in the remakes to follow! 
You're earth's last defense against an oncoming rain of death from the sky! Mount your cannons and open fire upon the attackers, while making sure to protect your cities! Once the last city falls, you're done for! Obtain power-ups, adjust your aim, and invite a friend to join you - do everything you can to keep the enemy away! 
How long can you survive the onslaught? 
Watch the first trailer here:
 

Out now!
 

I shipped an ebay item media mail from Oregon to the east coast...and it arrived THE NEXT DAY!  Yes, USPS has been on a roll lately. 
 

They've already received my original carts.  I also got the new manual.  It has a "dimple" but that's fine.  I'm going not going to bug them to send another one. 

My replacement Aquaventure manual arrived the other day. It is funny because I doubled checked all of my emails from AtariXP and none of them mentioned the manual and only the replacement carts. So I'm not complaining just odd that I didn't receive an email regarding it being on the way or anything.
In other news, I shipped my original carts back to them on Saturday, and they were already delivered by Monday?! USPS has been on their game with my shipments lately. I shipped a console back out to its owner on Monday afternoon and the owner got it yesterday morning?! It wasn't supposed to be delivered until today, so quite impressive times. And that was from here in Oklahoma to Connecticut.
I need to look carefully at the replacement manual, because it actually seems like it it might be smaller and more cut down content wise than the original was? But I only took a cursory glance through the original. Enough to verify the missing page anyway in my original.
 
 

Some of the mini games are frustrating, which can make progress frustrating, but overall I got through it pretty quickly and had a good time with it. I like it a lot more than the general reviews I've seen, it got poor reviews on Steam and some video makers like Jeff Gerstmann. 

I wonder if it is worth their time to release on the VCS, the version we have on the VCS is quite good, but I dunno it sold very well.

Second VCS is hooked up to my computer, third VCS is being used as a livestream box for the church I go to.

Yeah, looks like 177,551 will end up being my best: 
 

44,077 with a Modern.
I definitely need practice.

This game is tough!  Best I can do on day 1 is 14,000, which doesn't make the high score list. I'll keep trying later. 

I use this form in past to send game suggests. In this case I also contact the Batovi Studios Facebook page of the game , and I Will see if the Batovi team give me some feedback if they dont send any info to me then I can send a form to see if Atari Will be or not the game in store. I also put this same info on Discord of Atari to try to see if anyone have info about the game state on VCS. Thanks for your help.

@socrates63 Oh yes I was most certainly there indeed! My wife and I were the other two folks working the AA booth to help out Al and April. You also have a Sears INTV that I installed an earlier RGB upgrade board into in addition to the 5200 btw. Although we should talk about possibly having me replace that older board out sometime with one of the newer ones that works much better on today's scalers.
As for PRGE I had a great time but it was also a lot of work for me this year. As some of you may or may not know, I had suspended my services to the public over the summer. The reason was because Albert commissioned me to work on a lot of consoles to have ready for PRGE this year. In total I upgraded and serviced 22 consoles that were all present at PRGE and setup for people to play and check out the new games on. So yes, it was more work than usual for me this year! I wasn't able to take many pics at all because I was so busy running around that I just didn't think about it honestly. But I did get a few pics of the setup after we had finished up late Friday night. Sorry for the bad lighting, but it was actually only about this bright during setup.




I didn't pick up nearly as much as I usually do when I attend events like this. But that was mostly because I was limited on space in my suitcase for the return home. And as many of the games didn't have their boxes ready for the show, I decided I would grab them later when they are being sold in the store next month. What I did get, I will post in the new pickups thread.
I do believe this was the most systems that AtariAge has has setup at once for any event. I think it was 40 systems in total? There were 5 Jaguars setup, 4 5200s setup, 7 7800s setup, and the rest were 2600s. It was one of the most visually impressive setups at the event this year!

Welcome to the I/O forums!

LOL  I need to take pics.  The best part is that most games had no boxes.  I would not have been able to fit it all in my carry on bag! 

Pretty much arcade perfect near as I can tell and all the quarter munching difficulty that comes with it too! I'm likely to live stream some of the new games over the weekend to give others a look in more detail. But I wasn't even able to finish the second board on my play of it a bit last night.
 

The Collectorvision stuff is supposed to be secret, so it is not supposed to be posted. 

There's a similar debate about the Collectorvision Club contents...whether anyone can show pics or videos.  I have no idea what the rules are, so I'm staying away from the drama. 

Videos are already on YouTube spoiling the surprise.

Thanks for sharing the side-by-side @CrossBow .  Fortunately, my originals weren't nearly that rough. It's amazing that Atari's manufacturing partner shipped anything like that out the door.