| BERZERK |
  In 1981, Sterns released one of the first Arcade games with synthesized speech, Berzerk. In Berzerk, you played as some poor hapless soul stuck in an endless maze with electrified walls, homocidal robots, and the "have a nice day" happyface known as "Evil Otto" who turns up if you loiter around too long, and he gets more aggressive the more of his robots you destroy. It was a smash hit in the arcades, so yet again, it seems it was standard practice for Atari at the time to just snap up any hit arcade games license for consoles and make one.Berzerk for the 2600 does a pretty good job though it lacks speech. I did hear that sometime in the last decade or two someone on Atari Age managed to come up with a way to add the speech to the 2600 version in hardware and it was quite good (there may come a time where some AtariAge releases might show up here). It sold really well and is quite a common cartridge in the 2600 library to have. Berzerk today is another Arcade classic that risks being forgotten because people hear of it aand go "ah yeah, that's Berzerk, a bit "basic" for my tastes but it's a classic". So it does not get mentioned much beyond Gen X.Evil Otto-Harp - My Experiences So, Berzerk was one of those official Atari releases as a kid that never grabbed my attention for any specific reason until I read the manual. I thought "oh, just another Atari "Space Game"" as it seems about 88% of the library consists of "space" themed games (Space War, Space Chase, Astroblast, Asteroids, Space Shuttle, Space invaders, Star Wars, Starmaster, Star Raiders.....and the list goes on and on). So seeing some guy gussied up in futuristic 80's garb on the cover attacking robots made me think "Probably some dude marooned on a space station fighthing alien robots from some planet that makes heavy use of the last 5 letters of the alphabet, like Snarlax or Xaxxalon. I played the game BEFORE I ever read the manual, and let me tell you, I like games like this that have that "backrooms" quality to them. Think about it, you are a man represented by a blocky single-color figure, in a maze with electrical walls, fighting robots that shoot at you, and you get chased around by a ominous yet hilarious happy face character that kills you by humping you - how the heck is this NOT a backrooms level? The rooms themselves pretty much do count as a limninal space. To this day I still enjoy this one a lot, and that's a big part of why it's still in my collection. Yeah, it's dead simple, putting it in that "short spurt" category, but overall, it has some of the hilarious qualities I like about Adventure, like the fact your main arch-nemesis is a big happy=face that bounces around like the bouncy ball from a singalong gone rogue! Seriously, that sounds like an opportunity for a viral YouTube video, LOL. Singalong with Evil Otto. YouTube Video(s) |
