Christmas Comes ...
What to get for Christmas? Well, here are a few software items that are available in America NOW (mid-November) and may have reached these shores by the time you read this. Phone your local, or not so local, retailer for more details (mention PAGE 6 please). First, another blockbuster from Chris Crawford,
EXCALIBUR from APX is set in Arthurian England and requires you to play the role of Arthur in his quest to become King of all England.
I have a full review of this from the U.S. and it sounds magnificent. I
remember over a year ago chatting to someone who had been over to Atari and they were ecstatic about this one, having seen only the titles! If any reader who can play Eastern Front gets hold of EXCALIBUR, please, please review it for us. Next is
ACTION!, a new original language for the Atari which comes as a 24K bank-switched cartridge. It is a structured language similar to C and runs 100 to 200 times faster than Basic.
QUASIMODO is from Synapse and is a Donkey Kong type game but much more elaborate with 'incredible graphics and sound'. Also from Synapse watch out for
ENCOUNTER which was written here in England and is a SUPERB arcade game reminiscent of
Battlezone. This one should be in every arcade-freak's Christmas stocking. Atari's
POLE POSITION is just GREAT and should SURELY be out by now, if not someone at Atari wants his head examined. This is the type of top-level game that only the Atari was designed for which brings us neatly to ...
Several of the original design team, including an ex-Atari president have formed a new Company called MINDSET which will be producing a new 68000 home computer with three custom graphics chips. This new machine is supposed to be several steps ahead of present home computers. The 68000 is a 16/32 bit chip. Do you know what this means, folks? It means that Warner Bros. and Atari have got some hard work ahead of them next year, that is of course if Warner Bros. still own Atari, but then that's another story ...
!
(U.S. news items courtesy of Mike Dunn of A.C.E. Newsletter, Oregon)
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