reviews

Last time I did a not-so-old game for Throwback Thursday, so I'm making up for it now.  This is one of the first games I ever remember playing on my dad's old Atari 800.  I still find it ironic that my dad think I waste my time with video games when he's the one that introduced them to me in the first place. 

Released in 1982 (two years before I was even born), Miner 2049er put you in the shoes of Bounty Bob.  At first, the game play looks very similar to Donkey Kong.  You climb ladders from one girder to the next, however you are in a mine this time.  Instead of simply having you reach the top, though, you have to claim every single piece of tile by walking over it all the while avoiding radioactive critters and collecting mining supplies.  When you collected the mining supplies, it gave you a Pac-man effect, where-in the baddies would turn color and you can now kill them by running into them for a short period of time. I always assumed this is because you ended up bashing them on the head with said item (i.e. a shovel).

This game was very mulit-layered for it's time.  As you progressed, you were not only confronted by more critters, but also had to navigate through tough jumps, elevators, and chutes that would often send you back to the bottom of the level against your will.  Sometimes, annoyingly, right in the path of a nuclear rodent you were trying so hard to avoid sometimes.  It's the first game that I can think of that with an actual, visible goal.  All other games up to that point either were just to see how many points you could get or kept going on and on without giving me a hint of how close I was to the finish.  It's what introduced me to the painful annoyance of "almost, almost.....just have to make this jump and I got it......FUCK!  GOD DAMN ALIEN!" mentality we gamers have been experiancing for years since.  

I would love to go back and pop this game in sometime just to see how it stands up to my childhood memories.  Sad truth is, though, that it's sitting in a drawer in my dad's closest.  Try as I might, I cannot get him to sell me that damn thing.....  So, to be honest, my score is simply a refection of my nostalgia and not the actual game play at this time.   

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