2004-07-03
Tree Wave and Star Fire
I received my order from Atari Age earlier this week - so I'm now the proud owner of Tree Wave's "cabana ep+" CD that I was talking about earlier. It has a couple of extra tracks, and a couple videos as well that you can watch if you put the CD in a modern computer.
One of the videos (apparently performed live) appears to be a game of Atari 2600 Combat, synced to the music - perhaps it's been rigged to react to the music? The first time I watched the video, it didn't interest me much, though it got better towards the end, as the pace kept speeding up, and all 27 game variations were being run through in a matter of a second or two, some really neat video effects start to happen. Subsequent viewings were more interesting.
The video for Sleep is great - I've watched it many times - the screen is split into 4, and each mini-screen focuses on a different thing - the video output from the Atari, the dot-matrix printer (and later, a guitar lying on top of it), the video from the C64, and a camera filming what appears to be a home movie, that the vocalist appears in front of when she's singing. Great tune, cool video.
I also bought a new Atari 2600 game in the same AA order, Star Fire by Manuel Rotschkar. There's a lot of new games to choose from nowadays, but Star Fire won out because of the cool Star Fire Elite Squadron promotion they're running. The first 50 people to buy the game and send in a picture of their score of at least 3500 gets the offical patch and Acceptance Letter.
It took me about 1.5 hours of play to break 3500 - and when I did, I actually got all the way to 4027. It's a first person shooter - you're inside a space ship, shooting at things that look suspiciously like Tie Fighters and other famous sci-fi ships. It was quite an enjoyable session, and it was quite exciting to know I had won the patch - I'm eagerly awaiting it's arrival in the mail.
This idea of patches was started by Activision years ago. I didn't own an Atari at the time, so I never had a chance of winning, though I do remember breaking 20,000 on Pitfall! back then on someone else's machine, and wishing I could get the patch. I wonder if Ron or Darren ever got one?
So, it was great to have the chance 20+ years later to do something similar!
One of the videos (apparently performed live) appears to be a game of Atari 2600 Combat, synced to the music - perhaps it's been rigged to react to the music? The first time I watched the video, it didn't interest me much, though it got better towards the end, as the pace kept speeding up, and all 27 game variations were being run through in a matter of a second or two, some really neat video effects start to happen. Subsequent viewings were more interesting.
The video for Sleep is great - I've watched it many times - the screen is split into 4, and each mini-screen focuses on a different thing - the video output from the Atari, the dot-matrix printer (and later, a guitar lying on top of it), the video from the C64, and a camera filming what appears to be a home movie, that the vocalist appears in front of when she's singing. Great tune, cool video.
I also bought a new Atari 2600 game in the same AA order, Star Fire by Manuel Rotschkar. There's a lot of new games to choose from nowadays, but Star Fire won out because of the cool Star Fire Elite Squadron promotion they're running. The first 50 people to buy the game and send in a picture of their score of at least 3500 gets the offical patch and Acceptance Letter.
It took me about 1.5 hours of play to break 3500 - and when I did, I actually got all the way to 4027. It's a first person shooter - you're inside a space ship, shooting at things that look suspiciously like Tie Fighters and other famous sci-fi ships. It was quite an enjoyable session, and it was quite exciting to know I had won the patch - I'm eagerly awaiting it's arrival in the mail.
This idea of patches was started by Activision years ago. I didn't own an Atari at the time, so I never had a chance of winning, though I do remember breaking 20,000 on Pitfall! back then on someone else's machine, and wishing I could get the patch. I wonder if Ron or Darren ever got one?
So, it was great to have the chance 20+ years later to do something similar!
