First off, you now have a huge map of actual, scrolling, screens - so this tenchically kind-of-counts as a scroller, albeit it scrolls veritcally and changes screens horizontally. Now you have to rescue your wife Rhonda and your pet tiger (aka the Monkey With Shakey Knees - hee hee) Quickclaw who are trapped in this maze of catacombs beneath the surface of the jungle. In there you have frogs, bats, scorpions, other random bugs, and electric eels to deal with. But the darned thing also has save points - a big deal for a game from 1984, let alone the 2600.

But the biggest part of it all was the music. David Crane had somee custom silicon baked up to give the Atari 2600 the ability to produce three channels of properly intonated music that plays through the game, and has SITUATIONAL changes. IE, the game starts in a major key with a few funky minor shifts to give that "edginess" to the adventure song, which then slows down to a more relaxed tone as the game goes on, going back "excited" again if you get a trasure or save, and going into a negative, sad minor key variation of the theme if you are hit by an enemy and sent back to the beginning/last save point. The audio design is friggin genius. It's one of the only Atari games with background music, and the only one you won't want to gouge your eardrums out after listening to for awhile.

If there was a title anywhere close to Dragon Warrior IV for the Atari 2600, it'd be this one. It's unusually big, has a great tune that pushes the envelope, a rewarding design, and is actually fun to play for more than 15-20-30 minutes. But it also was stupidly expensive everywhere I looked for it - loose copies costing $50, some even as high as $75 back in the 90's and early 2000s. I found my copy for $7.99 at a liquidation thrift shop in Everett loose right before my wedding in 2013. Yes, that's how long I looked for this one. I had played it on emulators up to that point but nothing beats the true vibe of playing these on a real 2600, through a real RF setup, with a real CRT TV, and a real CX-40 or other "of-the-time" joystick to me. And unlike the other games for the 2600, I don't want or need a record or tape playing if I'm not babbling over it for youtube.