Reviews

BoinkOut has been a longstanding favorite Atari game of mine. It is no doubt that this review will be at least somewhat biased. BoinkOut is a game that surely many people have played for their Atari computers. BoinkOut 2 is the latest revision of this game, adding sound, GEM XIMG backgrounds, more speed and additional timing features. It was more or less brought up-to-date. The one thing I can’t help to notice during my hour (or more ;) ) of testing this game, is that even though everything seems to be updated and new.

HTML Help 2.5 was released on New Years Eve of 2001. At first glance this product seems to be very well put together, by Matthias Jaap, master of HTML editing and Atari. During my first use of this package, I noticed that it was not quite what I expected. This program is not designed to write HTML pages at all, but instead was designed to assist in HTML delivery efforts. It does such things as convert between unix, MSDOS, and Atari newline styles.

Updated August 3rd, 2005. In addition to being completely free, Aniplayer is the most supported media player for GEM computers. It features modes to suck out the most performance for playing videos and supports many types, that, were simply not supported on linux until well after Aniplayer supported them. Didier Mequignon is the creator of this excellent media player and has worked almost singlehandedly from my understanding coding the efficient codecs.

As many Atari fans know of, the Atari Jaguar contained a friendly little enhancement called the Virtual Light Machine. This Falcon only program is Escape’s attempt to re-create the VLM for our machines. The program is modular and several third party modules have been created to create spectacular 3d effects that pulsate, shape-shift, and otherwise contort to the music. As fantastic as this thing is, it gets even better by being full compliant with every multitasking system available for the falcon.

ChuChu Rocket is a game which to the best of my knowledge was originally released for the dreamcast. When I review a game I tend to take into consideration things that others may not. Will the game run under MagiC, will it run under MiNT. If it does not allow proper multitasking to continue, will it exit cleanly. Although chuchu rocket admittedly does not run under MagiC, I must admit I am impressed.

At first this demo would not work on my falcon. The more frustrated I became, the more I really wanted to see this demo. I was recommended to watch it by more than one person in order to “be impressed”. That was the case. The demo runs approximately 5 minutes, maybe more, providing amazing effects coupled with wonderful creative music. It even managed to impress my girlfriend, which is an absolutely diffiicult thing to do.