| MR. RUN AND JUMP Atari, 2023 |
  It's 2025, Playstation 5 is considered the peak of Console Gaming right now, or the Nintendo Switch. Games have photorealistic graphics, and stereo sound with real instruments. The days of simple run' n' jump games with minimal instrumentation and imagination just don't exist anymore...Atari's dead, long gone. Nobody under the age of 25 even knows what an Atari is (let alone how cool they are)....
Then a guy at a company called Graphite Labs decides to develop an Atari 2600 homebrew game, John Mikula. And somewhere around the bend here comes the long thought dead, once eponymous with gaming - ATARI - now with Wade Rosen at the helm, and I'll be darned if Atari didn't do what I thought Hasbro should have had them doing all along years ago: Banking on their legendary status of good, simple to learn, hard to master, video games that don't consume your life, come on physical media, and are tough as nails! All of a sudden 2023 comes along, and the Atari 2600+ comes out In Mr. Run and Jump, you play, well....Mr. Run and Jump, you play some long nosed humanoid figure, running through the "dark world" after your dog "Leap" who apparently got loose. You have to run around crazy obstacles in feats of timing. It's basically sort of a puzzle-platformer, which is a really neat twist. It seems to me this title has really rather well taken off, which is awesome. I'm hoping Atari can maybe bring back the good ole' ways of gaming with a modern twist. Some of these new homebrews (next up will be Andrew Davie's Boulderdash which I ordred from AtariAge earlier this month as well in it's last physical release) are freakin' black label NES quality! That's saying a lot about a console released in 1977 with only 128 bytes of RAM and no GPU. The First New Atari 2600 Game Released by Atari in over 30 years - My Experiences I got this for Christmas, it was something I asked for, and did not expect to have show up, because the people in my life see it as ridiculous that I play video games as a middle aged man. By their standards, I should be cutting my hair, taking up golf, and working on a stock portfolio (actually the last one might be in my future plans....because who says all of us need to be boring 32 year old business types!). First 2600 game I've had new in box since I was 8 years old. There's no manual, but does it really need one. First off, this is the NEW-School of Atari 2600 Programming! Title Screens, some decent title music that musically takes the limitations of the RIOT chip into account (therefore sounds in tune), and of course smoother animation than any NES game. I think the intention here is to throw you right in the midst of the game and say "you figure it out", like those lonesome Saturday nights in Opelika with a Papa Johns large pizza and a shoebox of games in between learning Cars covers. Just the sound of the RF hum and the crickets outside, no manual, your imagination, and you figure it out as you go along. I've been sitting in the livingroom off/on in between phone calls for on-call I.T. Chaos playing this one quite a lot. It's a nice little puzzle game, and it's a fun time waster. And it won't consume your life! I don't need to sit for 11 1/2 hours playing it, I can sit there for 20 minutes or 2 hours if I like. I can even leave it on and come back tomorrow for some more and pick up where I left off with no score if I want to. VIDEO COMING SOON!!!
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- a 2600 Jr. sized Woody 4-switch ROM-Dumper/Emulation lookalike of the 1980's classic ost of us had, but it also plays 7800 games.