Of Import: Golden Axe (PC Engine)

This week, we're looking at another one of those unexpected licenses -- Sega was apparently feeling generous in the early 1990s, or greedy, as it allowed a number of its arcade and Mega Drive hits to appear on competing platforms.  In 1990, with the Mega Drive in full swing, Golden Axe appeared on the PC Engine CD-ROM format in Japan, courtesy of Renovation Soft.  It never came to the US, but the text is in English and it's perfectly playable on a TurboGrafx-CD system.

Unfortunately, there are good reasons this release never saw the light of day in the more punishing North American market; it looks pretty much like Sega's Golden Axe, but it's not as much fun to play.  The conversion effort makes a lot of odd and apparently pointless compromises.  For some reason, there was sufficient production budget to add an animated intro, and character-specific opening segments (with some reused artwork.)

But it was too much trouble, apparently, to render the arcade game's spooky, death-shadowed character selection screen properly -- instead, we just select from three big, static portraits:

And while the game is recognizable as Golden Axe, it's not particularly attractive.  The background graphics are flat and colorless, and the character sprites all look like they've been converted over from a Commodore 64 original, with wide pixels and smeared coloration obscuring anything that might look like detail.  The level designs are faithful to the original game, from what I can tell, but they feel shorter -- battles are quick and clumsy, and enemy behavior is fairly predictable.  Most of the challenge comes from trying to line up an attack properly.

Jumps are even harder to line up -- I lost Gilius' steed, and the rest of Gilius' lives, trying to make it across what should be a very manageable gap, shown below.   Most annoying, sometimes he would pause on the other side, then fall, making it seem like his toe caught hold and yet the game decided to send him plummeting to his death.

As is often the case with Japanese arcade games, the text is completely in English, if sometimes not quite right -- Death Adder is apparently "OUR SWOWN ENEMY":

The sound effects are dismal, with all three characters' attacks accompanied by the same flatulent-sounding noise.  The game's only real audiovisual attraction is the CD-Audio arrangements of the familiar Golden Axe themes -- these were remixes before there were such things in video game land, and fun to listen to if you're familiar with the strangled version rendered by the Genesis' limited sound capabilities.

Tyris Flare threatens the locals.

At least I learned where the jaunty closing theme from the PC Engine City podcast comes from -- it's the Game Over music for Golden Axe:

I could continue, but I think that's more PC Engine Golden Axe than anyone should have to endure.

---

There are superior and cheaper domestic versions of Golden Axe available, but if you simply must have the PC Engine CD edition, you might be able to find it here.

The LoadDown - 06/23/2011

Things remain fairly quiet on the downloadable front recently, with little happening on the HD platforms.  At least Nintendo has some news for us. 

(And while I don't cover PC games here, as there's just way too much going on to keep up with, as an adventure game fan I must note that Telltale Games' final episodic chapter of Back to the Future: The Game is out today!)


WiiWare -- One new game, The Mystery of Whiterock Castle, a casual hidden-object adventure.

Wii Virtual Console -- Nothing new here this week.

DSiWare --  For both the DSi and the 3DS, several new games this week.  Pro Jumper! Guilty Gear Tangent!? is a very nicely animated cartoon platformer starring Chimaki from the popular fighting game series Guilty Gear.  Stratego: Next Edition is a portable version of the classic strategy board game.  And Delbo is a puzzle game that plays like a stiffer, cruder version of Bust-A-Move/Puzzle Bobble.

3DS eStore -- In addition to the dual-platform DSi/3DS games above, the 3DS gets the Game Boy sports contest Tennis in its original 2-D format.

XBox Live Arcade -- Nothing new here this week, perhaps to build anticipation for Summer of Arcade beginning July 20th.


PS3 on PSN -- Another quiet week here; Sony seems to be going with a bi-weekly release schedule lately.


PSOne Classics -- Nothing new here this week either.

Arcade Memories: Thumb Fun

I grew up in a fairly small town, so my 1980s arcade memories must range farther afield now that I've covered the three local establishments of my misspent youth.  But I did do a little video gaming during family trips slightly father away, at Thumb Fun, a small amusement park with an arcade that used to operate in Door County, Wisconsin.

Thumb Fun was primarily an amusement park -- it had a bouncy castle, and go-karts, and a haunted house, and a bunch of other rides and attractions I've forgotten about.  The name was derived from the "thumb" shape of the region where the park resided, but it applied particularly well to the park's small arcade, housed in a low-slung wooden building that, as I remember it, was just a few steps above the cable-strewn game tents set up by traveling carnivals.

I remember it being noisy and crowded in the Thumb Fun arcade -- especially when the weather was inclement -- but I did play some fine games there during my two or three visits to the park.  I don't recall seeing Atari's cult classic color vector game Major Havoc anywhere else at the time, and it was also the first place I encountered the phenomenal Star Wars, with its engrossing wireframe 3-D graphics, music and digitized samples from my favorite movie ever.  I may have seen Space Duel there also; the owner seems to have had a certain affinity for vector graphics.  Other memories are fuzzier, probably because my visits were limited, and everything seems to have faded into a general 1980s pastiche.  I think I first played or at least saw Sega's Congo Bongo there; I vaguely recall that the Thumb Fun arcade had Jungle King (the Tarzan-infringing version, before it became Jungle Hunt), and of course many of the usual now-classic games were on hand but don't stand out in my mind.

Like the other arcades of my youth, Thumb Fun is sadly no more; Internet research reveals that in 1998 or thereabouts, the park was still doing well but the land had become too valuable to keep.  Thumb Fun's owner shuttered the park, selling off the rides, games and other equipment so that everything could be torn down and new condominiums put up.

At least Thumb Fun's arcade, or the version in my memories, at least, never had to suffer the indignity of ticket redemption.  I would guess this was because there was plenty of Skee-Ball available elsewhere on the property.

Adventure of the Week: The Devil's Palace (1980)

It's been a while since I've played one of Greg Hassett's early TRS-80 text adventures, so this week we're playing through his 1980 game, Devil's Palace, dedicated to John Flanigan and Harry Collins.  This one was published by a company identified as Adventure-World, of P.O. Box 914, Chelmsford, Massachussets, which sounds a lot like the address of Mad Hatter Software, another publisher of Hassett's work.  The computer game industry was in its infancy, and company names were often in flux, so I'm inclined to think these were both the same company behind the scenes.

Hassett was a precocious young programmer who graduated rapidly from BASIC to machine language during the few years he was active in the game industry, before going to college and launching a real and very successful career.  His games are generally treasure hunts or explore-and-escape contests, sometimes with maddeningly random puzzle solutions, and always rife with misspellings.  The Devil's Palace is Hassett at his most random, with almost no plot and few puzzle solutions that make any sense.  But the game does have a certain retro charm.


I tried to solve this one on my own last year, but got stuck early on, so I was grateful to find Dorothy Millard's solution posted at the CASA Solution Archive so I could knock this one off of my uncompleted list.  As always, I encourage interested readers to explore The Devil's Palace before continuing here, but I will warn you that I was not able to get the SAVE GAME command to work under emulation; or, rather, I could SAVE but not RESTORE.  So you may wish to play on real hardware, or use an emulator with independent save state capabilities.  In any event, the ensuing discussion will contain plenty of...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

The game begins outside of the titular Devil's Palace, giving us a chance to explore, although even this relatively open portion of the game is still pretty linear.  The fabled three-headed dog Cerberus lurks in a clearing to the north, though he's not actually dangerous.  We can CLIMB TREE in the forest to see a strange palace somewhere to the east or north, and find a bird's nest that contains a strange whistle.  If we BLOW WHISTLE early on, a vulture swoops down, picks us up and drops us into molten lava, and it's Game Over -- there's no land of the dead allowing easy resurrections here.

The game's map is sizeable, with a lot of rooms underground, and a little bit mazey, with some loops and off-kilter connections, but it's not annoying.  A few sections of the game are very linear -- we solve one puzzle and are moved to another room with a new puzzle to deal with and no way to go back where we came from.  And there's one genuine maze, but the solution is provided directly if we're keeping an eye out for clues, so we really don't need to map it.

A loose cobblestone reads MAGIC WORD: "ETNAD".  This is more of a directive than a hint -- it's DANTE backwards, obviously, but when the magic word is called for (on more than one occasion) we must SAY ETNAD as stated and leave the illustrious 14th Century Italian poet out of it.

A black tar pit contains a fossil (which RESEMBLES A TRILOBITE) and a rotten vulture egg, both of which we will later need -- but if we discover this without having taken proper precautions, we find that we're now stuck in the tar pit and can't get out.  We need to tie the bit of vine found along the cobblestone path to a nearby boulder -- that is, we must TIE VINE - TO WHAT? - TO BOULDER.  Now we can pull ourselves out of the pit, just this once, and watch the vine disappear into the tar from a safe distance.  I ran into a related bug here -- TIE VINE / TO WHAT? / STONE proves mysteriously fatal, as we are suddenly prompted, WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY AGAIN?



There are some bones in a small depression near the tar pit -- we need to LOOK BONES to find a scroll, which reads, "(JOTFSU GPTTJM) - 1".  This is a simple cipher -- subtracting one character from each letter yields INSERT FOSSIL, though one could go mad trying to figure out where to insert it at this point.  INSERT FOSSIL generally yields NOWHERE TO INSERT IT HERE!, while  INSERT [anything else] yields the default NOTHING HAPPENED.  None of these textual clues need to be discovered if we have played the game before; the game is not picky about where or when we learned the necessary information.


We can't EXAMINE DRAWBRIDGE in front of the palace, but we can safely BLOW WHISTLE here, causing the drawbridge to come down, or go up; we will want it to be down. But we can't simply CROSS DRAWBRIDGE, as A STRANGE, EVIL FORCE THROWS ME BACK!  And SAY ETNAD doesn't help.

We can go back to Cerberus with the bones, and while we can't GIVE BONES we can FEED CERBERUS, so that The Cerberus [sic] eats my bone and runs away, revealing an iron grate.  But we can't ENTER, GO, EXAMINE or OPEN this new object.  CUT GRATE yields I don't have the right tools, which might be a hint, but isn't, and JUMP GRATE produces THAT'S HAZARDOUS TO MY HEALTH! NO WAY!, which seems a bit of an overreaction.

This is where I became stuck for a while, until the walkthrough was posted at CASA and I learned that -- aha! -- if we BLOW WHISTLE in the tree after lowering the drawbridge, we don't get dropped into the lava.  It hadn't occurred to me that the bird was dropping us into the castle's lava moat.  This is one of those old-school adventure traditions, in which the player must try something that is known to be fatal, in the hopes that perhaps something has changed; it's a design approach that I'm glad to see has fallen by the wayside in the modern era.

Once we're in the tall, dark room on the other side of the drawbridge, where there's nowhere to go and not much we can do, BLOW WHISTLE causes the floor to rise to meet a door seen far above.  There aren't many options here either, so we must KNOCK and tumble into the palace, where we discover such misspelled delights as a CUBICAL and A FABULAS POOL OF LAVA.

We find ourselves in a strange, warm room that has visible exits to the east and downward, but we can't use either of these paths as they lead into molten lava.  At least in this case the game prevents us from blithely walking into the lava, saving a good deal of SAVE/RESTORE frustration.  There are carvings on the wall of prehistoric animals, with a trilobite-shaped concave carving among them.  (never mind that early humans almost certainly never saw a trilobite.)  We can INSERT FOSSIL here, clearly, to yield a MING STATUE OF A CAT.  On the cat's bottom, we read, "MADE BY MIMI STATUE INC."  And there's another small bug here -- if we INSERT FOSSIL repeatedly, the statue is wrested from our inventory and returned to the room each time.

So now we have this Ming statue of a cat, and experimentation establishes that we cannot productively EXAMINE STATUE, READ STATUE, THROW STATUE or BREAK STATUE.  So I consult the walkthrough again, to learn that if we RUB STATUE -- really? -- a BEUTIFUL [sic] WINGED CAT TAKES ITS PLACE, and carries us across a stream (what stream?), and then vanishes.  So that was a straight verb-guessing puzzle, a sheer hintless dictionary roadblock of the sort that probably kept text adventures from reaching a broader audience.

Anyway, from the precarious ledge where we've been dropped off, we can apparently go down.  But that just leads us into lava again.  EXAMINE LEDGE here establishes that it resembles cobblestone, so that's an indirect clue that this is where we are supposed to SAY ETNAD, spinning the ledge to deposit us into the (D)ANTE-CHAMBER, which is exactly the sort of pun I love; I tip my hat to Mr. Hassett, and forgive him for the whole statue rubbing business.

This new area is more mappable than the series of rooms we have just passed through, and much less linear, although we really do have to accomplish key tasks in the right order, lest we find our game in an unsolvable state.  A dead end contains a chest, which is locked, and we don't have the key, per usual.  So we should wander around a bit, if we can do so safely. 

It is not safe at this point to discover that there's an eight-foot tarantula occupying a web in the Eerie Crypt's west end; an iron gate closes up after we enter its lair, so we can't go back the way we came, but trying to go east is fatal, as I ENTER THE WEB, BUT I GET TANGLED UP! THE SPIDER APPROACHES AND BEGINS TO DEVOUR ME!  So we shouldn't go in here until we are prepared; this is not the same grate that we saw in the Cerberus location aboveground.  If we are prepared, we can BURN TARANTULA with the GLOWING TORCH found elsewhere, and travel to the crypt's eastern end, which contains an upright coffin.  But if we go S from this location, to explore the available exits, it's a one-way trip and we can't get back to this area to do something more productive.  So we need to be doubly-prepared to enter the Eerie Crypt, with no way to predict what we will need to do when we get here. 

In the STRANGE, GLOWING ROOM, the writing on the wall reads NNSWDNEE - these are almost certainly maze directions, but where should we use them?  We need to enter the labyrinth through the aforementioned coffin, and follow the directions provided. This ultimately leads us to a foyer, and we can go U to a platform.  We PULL LEVER here to slide to a room with an elevator, as it becomes apparent this is another linear funhouse-style progression.  In the ROOMY ELEVATOR is a crystal key; hopefully it will fit the chest at the dead end south of the (D)ante-chamber.  Finally, we PUSH BUTTON in the elevator, fall asleep and wake up in the glowing room again.

Opening the chest reveals... magic sandals?  It's not a treasure, but we will figure out what to do with these later on.

A balcony has a railing, and examination reveals that one spindle is covered with fingerprints.  TURN SPINDLE causes the whole assemblage to slide along the wall of the palace, allowing access to the Dining Hall.  Here we can GO TABLE, and see that there is a DUCT MESH there; it's not a familiar term but I can kind of picture it if I mentally squint a little.  Movement in any direction allows us to get off the table, and the Kitchen to the north conveniently has a pair of tinsnips on the shelf.  Now we can CUT MESH to open the air duct, and enter the Devil's Sitting Room, where we find a crown.  We can WEAR CROWN, though inventory does not show it as worn; as far as I can tell we just need to carry it with us for later use.

We find a MACHETTI along the way -- spelling, Mr. Hassett! -- and enter a Crystal Room, where we discover a ruby and a crystalline figure.  The crystalline figure won't let us take the ruby, though it's not really apparent how it's doing so.  BLOW WHISTLE here is fatal but potentially informative, as THE CRYSTAL ROOM CRASHES DOWN ON ME! I DIE!  But blowing the whistle is always worth a shot in this game when all else fails.  I was surprised to find that I could GET FIGURE -- I had assumed it was larger -- and can then GET RUBY.  But now the crystalline figure returns to the room,  the game tells us that CRYSTALLINE FIGURE IS STARING AT ME, and it starts following us.  We  have a little bit of time to experiment with this turn of events, but the CRYSTALLINE FIGURE DIVES AT ME AND KILLS ME! as soon as we try to leave the immediate area.  So that's not entirely a solution.  What we can do is lure it into the laboratory nearby and BLOW WHISTLE there to make the figure vanish.

This STRANGE, CONVOLUTED LABORATORY contains a laser and a paper reading "INSERT RUBY, THEN FIRE LASER. MAGIC WORD: MIJUKEL."  I'm not sure what this magic word means, and I never had to use it.  We do need the ruby though; after we insert it, and FIRE LASER, then LASER BURNS HOLE IN WALL!  The resulting hole lets us reach a small connecting chamber, beyond which is a crystal wall that we can breach by again blowing the whistle, leading us into a VAST NETWORK OF CAVES AND PITS, though it's not truly a maze.

A very narrow ledge has a CHANDELEIR [sic] HANGING ON A ROPE.  With the machete, we can CUT ROPE, and CHANDELEIR [sic] FALLS, TURNS INTO BRIDGE BELOW.  I did not see that coming.  MY MACHETTI [sic] FALLS INTO THE LAVA TOO! -- so that must be its one and only intended use.  (Some versions of the game may require us to DROP MACHETE, apparently -- at least Ms. Millard's walkthrough indicates we need to do this explicitly.)

Below, we now find a DIAMOND BRIDGE spanning a lava stream.  But we can't just go E, we have to GO BRIDGE.  And of course,  THE SHARP DIAMONDS CUT MY FEET.  I FALL OFF THE BRIDGE AND INTO THE LAVA. NATURALLY, I DIE.  This is where the magic sandals will come in handy, but we'll come back here in a bit after exploring elsewhere.

We find ourselves at a DEAD END. COULD THERE BE A ROOM UP ABOVE?  This is a hint that we need to fetch the LADDER from the room carved out of bedrock; now we can access the Devil's Throne Room, WEAR CROWN and SIT THRONE to reach a SECRET MEDITATION ROOM (apparently this is a fairly mellow Satanic being) where we can acquire a MAGIC WAND.  The exit E takes us back to the Dining Hall again.  Fortunately, it seems that the sliding balcony is accessible from either of its destinations -- we aren't stuck here with the balcony slid over where we last left it.

With the magic sandals, we can cross the Diamond Bridge and find a glowing ember at the brink of a lava stream on the other side.  But we can't pick it up safely.  To the east is a dead end chamber with IMPRESSIONS OF FEET on the ground - if we INSERT FOOT with the sandals on, it gives us a non-fatal shock, but if we REMOVE SANDALS (which also drops them) and try again, a hidden vault opens revealing a HUGE EGG-SHAPED IRON VAULT.  Is this a clue?  Are we finally going to do something with this rotten vulture egg we've been carrying around?  There's a BEUTIFUL [sic] GARDEN inside the vault, where we find the pair of tongs we need to pick up the glowing ember.  The garden is decorated with paintings and carvings of eggs, but there's still no obvious application of the rotten egg.  I'm just glad it has survived all these falls and tumbles without breaking open and stinking up the place.

Now we can go back to the iron gate that closed when we entered the Eerie Crypt, using the wand to open it so we can traverse the labyrinth again.  This time, rom the foyer we go south to the FIREHEAT CHAMBER.  There is a thick water-pipe here, and a small platform, and a conundrum because obviously we're supposed to do something here, but there are no real clues available.  I consulted the walkthrough again to learn that we must DROP EMBER, at which point -- unpredictably and inexplicably -- the PIPE TURNS INTO A TRANSPORT TUBE, EMBER VANISHES.  Really?  Really?!?

Oh, well.  GO TUBE takes us to the TOP OF A VERY HIGH TOWER.  There is a sceptre here, but we can't GET SCEPTRE because, once again, A STRANGE, EVIL FORCE THROWS ME BACK!  We're running out of options, so what the heck, let's... DROP EGG?  Oh, good!  The EGG DROPS, BREAKS, VANISHES. FEELS GOOD IN HERE NOW!  Oh, my.  Apparently the Evil Force dislikes the smell of rotten eggs even more than I do.  Or perhaps it's just a magic egg.

Having accomplished that feat of exorcism by sheer dint of trial and error, we are thrilled to discover that... now we are trapped here.  LOOK TOWER yields only, in one of those irritating adventuring moments where the parser makes its implacable presence known, WHAT IS "TOWER"?  SAY MIJUKEL does nothing useful, so we give up and SAY ETNAD again, which brings us back to the (D)ante-chamber.  From here we can navigate over the diamond bridge and through a tight crawlway, eventually reaching a grate which is, I believe, the same one we encountered outdoors.  Hear, the game tells us that I HEAR SOMEONE REPEATING OVER AND OVER: "OPEN WITH SCEPTRE... OPEN WITH SCEPTRE."

That's probably a good clue, though it wouldn't surprise me if it's a trick.  To nobody's real surprise,  OPEN GRATE yields I DON'T SEE IT HERE.  Sigh.  But WAVE SCEPTRE blows us into the outdoors, where we are overwhelmed with VISIONS OF BEUTY [sic].  And we are now victorious, apparently, though it wasn't really clear that we accomplished anything at all!

This was quite a convoluted adventure, with lots of guessing and hints required to come up with the expected solutions; only a few are truly hinted at, and the plot is muddy at best.  The puzzles are often nonsensical, and so is the map; we have to explore a bit, including experiencing fatal dead ends, to find the right sequence in which to do everything.  Thanks again to Dorothy Millard for her invaluable walkthrough.

We still have several more Greg Hassett adventures to tackle, and I'm sure we'll revisit his oeuvre as time goes on.  I'm trying to get back to some of the series I have started but never finished, filling in  a few holes on the Adventure Games Index page.  But I can never resist sampling a new series by a new author, so it often takes me a while to make these return trips.

At Random: Turtles (Odyssey^2, 1983)

Magnavox's Odyssey^2 console struggled for years against strong competition from Atari and Mattel, and it wasn't until 1983 that parent company North American Philips made a last-ditch effort to get serious with an authentic licensed conversion of a coin-op arcade game: Turtles.  (Also notable as one of the very few Odyssey^2 game titles that does NOT end in an exclamation point.)

The original arcade version of Turtles was created by Konami and distributed in the U.S. by Stern Electronics.  It was never a big hit here (despite Magnavox's box copy calling it a "superhit arcade game"), and must be somewhat rare, as I've never played the original in authentic arcade cabinet form.  But it was a decent game with cute characters, and the gameplay was well within the O^2's limited technical capabilities, though at 8K in size, it was one of the largest ROM cartridges ever released on the console.  It was not an exclusive -- there were two handheld versions by Entex, and even the Emerson Arcadia 2001 got an official conversion.

But Magnavox was really trying with this one -- unlike every other Odyssey^2 game I have written about recently, this one has an actual title screen.  It even replicates the arcade game's opening cartoon, as mama turtle enters the office building in search of her little ones:

The screen layout was, of course, changed from the vertically-oriented arcade game to the Odyssey^2's standard TV screen format.  And the look of the original coin-op is only approximated here -- the mazes are rendered in the usual box-and-line style seen in K.C. Munchkin and other Odyssey^2 titles, and the sprites are greatly simplified.  Mama turtle is rendered as two sprites in different colors, allowing her to have a green shell and pink head and legs, an attractive rarity on the Magnavox system.  The enemy bugs, on the other hand, use an old Odyssey^2 trick, deploying the system's built-in ball and X shapes in alternation to create a semblance of movement.

Sounds are also sparse and simple, though the program does a pretty good job of replicating the raspy "death noise" from the arcade game whenever mama turtle has an unfortunate encounter with a bug.  And with the add-on Odyssey^2 The Voice accessory, the action is accompanied by a rendition of the original arcade music.

It's a maze/chase game -- the player's goal as the mama turtle is to rescue each of her babies by carrying them to safety on her back while avoiding marauding beetles.  She must enter the six cubicles to find the baby turtles -- and she must remember which ones she has already rescued, as they can't be seen from the outside and revisiting a cubicle wastes time.  Some cubicles do not contain a baby, but release a fourth bug which she must now avoid.  Once she picks up a baby, a "home" icon appears, and mama must deliver the baby to safety:

The bugs also get smarter as the game goes on, indicated by color changes.  But mama turtle is not completely defenseless - she can drop "bug bombs" in her wake that temporarily paralyze one of her pursuers, and pick up replacement weaponry in the center of the screen.  If she manages to rescue all the babies on one floor, a brief intermission shows her climbing up to the next floor of the building, with the bugs in hot pursuit:

The basic gameplay never changes, but it gets more difficult, and we also see some maze variations as we go -- this is the third floor, which retains the cubicle layout but changes the wall structures a bit:

There's no defined end to the game, at least as listed in the manual, which continues to cite the standard Odyssey^2 victory rule: the "winner" is the player who earns the most points in some predetermined amount of time.

From a historical perspective, this game confirms the host system's technical limitations -- the O^2 was not nearly as flexible as the Atari 2600 -- but if Magnavox had invested more of its resources in software that pushed the system, it might have had more success in the industry.  It may have been too little, too late, but Turtles is a fine, addictive little arcade game, and one of the few true gems in the Odyssey^2's library.

Cover to Cover: Intellivision Spring 1986 Catalog (pp. 8-9)

More from Triton Products' Spring 1986 (!) Intellivision catalog, featuring post-crash products for the diehard Intellivision fans still using their consoles, as we examine pages 8, 9, and the order form bound into the center of the catalog.

Page 8 continues clearing out some old Mattel-produced warehouse stock, and lies adjacent to the postage-paid order mailing envelope:

Chess is one of the rarer Mattel-published titles, and was already fetching a slightly premium $13.95 price for new copies.  Football, Basketball and Soccer have been stripped of their original NFL, NBA and NASL (North American Soccer League) affiliations, likely because the related licenses had lapsed since these titles were originally manufactured by Mattel.  Again, I must correct my earlier statements concerning page 3 of this catalog -- I assumed that World Cup Soccer was just a two-player update of Mattel's old Soccer game, but like Tennis and Championship Tennis, this appears to be a completely separate product.

The order form is pretty standard stuff for the pre-Internet era -- order by mail or phone with a credit card, shipping only within the 48 continental United States, Customer Satisfaction Guarantee (which doesn't necessarily achieve said satisfaction) and so forth.

The main order form page has a few interesting marketing elements -- customers are encouraged to add friends with Intellivision systems to Triton's mailing list, and if you spend $30, $75 or $100, you can get one, two or three of what I assume were the oldest, most overstocked Intellivision titles in Triton's inventory -- for FREE!

Beyond the order form, page 9 features yet more Intellivision sports games, all at Triton's minimum clearance price of $9.95:

Boxing and Bowling featured memorably large sprites, Alpine Skiing was a fairly challenging slalom game due to the realistically sluggish "steering," and Hockey did a pretty good job of handling four-on-four team play (one player per team.)  Again, the original Mattel NHL hockey and PBA (Professional Bowlers Association) licenses are no longer mentioned in this 1986 catalog.

Still more to come!

Cover to Cover: Intellivision Spring 1986 Catalog (pp. 6-7)

We're looking at a very late era lineup of products for the Mattel Intellivision console, circa 1986, a few years after the system's mainstream retail availability had ended during the mid-80s industry crash.  Pages 6 and 7 of the Triton Products Spring 1986 Intellivision catalog are up next.

Page 6 features yet more of Mattel's stock-in-trade sports titles, tradin' stock now at the low, low price of $9.95:

Golf and Auto Racing are pretty self-explanatory; note that both are solo contests, with Auto Racing pitting the player against the clock (in the two-player mode, players take turns!)

And Tennis prompts a correction on my part -- I had assumed that page 3's Championship Tennis was simply a two-player update of an existing title, but it's clear that this earlier game was a completely separate product, with a side-on perspective instead of the later game's trapezoidal "3-D" presentation.

Horse Racing isn't really a sports title -- it's a gambling game, and the player doesn't do anything to participate in the actual race.

Page 7 clears out some more Mattel stock from the warehouse -- these games were all based on licensed arcade games or pop culture properties, and have not generally reappeared in later Intellivision compilations.  They were also going for a few dollars more than the games on the preceding page:

Burgertime remains one of the finest coin-op conversions of its day, replicating the play action and music from Data East's original arcade game and using Mattel's "Super-Graphics" technique to create multi-colored sprites (by combining two or more single-color sprites!)  Mission X was another Data East arcade conversion, a Xevious-style shooter making good use of the Intellivision's ability to display complex backgrounds not possible on the Atari 2600.


Masters of the Universe was based on Mattel's own popular line of action figures, and also uses the "Super-Graphics" technique to present the simple story of He-Man flying from left to right to take on Skeletor.  The title screen features a reasonably good instrumental rendition of the animated TV show's theme song.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Treasure of Tarmin was an early console 3-D dungeon crawl, Mattel's second game based on TSR's popular pencil-and-paper role-playing system.  Movement takes place in fixed steps, but Mattel's machine was able to present a fairly convincing 3-D dungeon environment populated by scary (if blocky and lacking in detail) creatures.

Next time... more pages!