"Adventure" is the name of two landmark games. The first is the classic text adventure, also known as Colossal Cave. The second, and perhaps better known to console gamers, is the Atari 2600 game that featured colorful castles, malformed dragons, and invisible dots.

There are plenty of shirts that celebrate the era that produced these games — BustedTees.com and 80sTees.com have practically made it their stock in trade. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover what could be the best Eighties t-shirt ever made coming from Despair.com:

Can you say "WANT"?

A remake of Adventure was published earlier this year. Followed by this shirt a few months later, it seems that this game in particular is enjoying the renaissance brought about by the retrogaming craze.

As recently noted, Adventure is famous for having the first well-known Easter egg. But this classic game was groundbreaking for more than its hidden features. The gameplay itself established the precedent for the likes of The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. It's also a fun game in its own right — especially for a program written in only four kilobytes of code and with only 128 bytes of memory available for it to use. (For comparison, a standard DVD holds about 4,928,307 kilobytes, and a computer with 2 GB of RAM has 2,147,483,648 bytes.)

Like many genre-defining titles, Adventure has lived well beyond its years, thanks to the dedication of fans. An unmodified port of the original was recently released for the iPhone (iTunes). When the Onion was playfully suggested that a sequel was in the works, it wasn't far from the truth. Adventure was published in 1979 was for the Atari 2600; 28 years later a homebrew sequel was released for the Atari 5200 console to generally positive reviews. A version of it was even included in the Atari Flashback 2 console.

However, these ports and sequels have either not advanced the game or have not been widely available. As of today, a new take on Adventure overcomes both these hurdles. First announced five months ago in the Penny Arcade forums, a remake of the original game is now available for download. Created from the ground up to feature 16-bit graphics, voice acting, time trials, and more. What's not being discussed is whether the game features any Easter eggs!

Adventure 2600, released today for Windows. Here, the hero has used the purple bridge to evade Grundle the green dragon, gaining access to the Black Castle.

I've often reminisced about exploring the catacombs of the white castle, laying the purple bridge, or getting caught in the belly of a dragon (or duck) while the bat spirited us off to parts unknown. With the release of this free Windows remake, a new generation of gamers can share in this foundational experience. (If you want to try the unadulterated original on your PC, see the links in my previous post.)

(Hat tip to Gamebits contributor Robert Boyd)

In time for the holiday weekend, Computerworld has published a video gallery of ten Easter eggs in action.

The name "Easter egg" comes from the Easter tradition of hiding chocolate eggs for children to find. It has a similar meaning in software: an undocumented, hidden feature or message that users may stumble across.

The first software Easter egg is popularly thought to have occurred in 1979. In the early days of software development, programmer identities were jealously guarded. Software studios didn't want their staff to gain celebrity status, their names eclipsing those of the brands they'd created. Warren Robinett, then a programmer for Atari, didn't appreciate this lack of acknowledgement. He couldn't get his name in the manual for the Atari 2600 game Adventure — so he sneaked it into the game itself.

Read the rest of this entry at Computerworld.com »

Hello again, Gamebits readers! Last week, Hiphopguy23 presented to you five Atari 2600 games that stood the test of time. Here now is the flipside of that list: five Atari 2600 games that now stink.
 
5) Combat — Play this game only for nostalgia purposes.  The tanks move so slowly and are frustratingly difficult to maneuver. When you do finally hit your opponent, it will feel like an act of luck more than an act of skill.  Not to mention that you can often times kill you opponent "multiple" times by repeatedly hitting fire after hitting them once.  No fun.
 
4) Raiders of the Lost Ark — Hiphopguy23 is just as excited as the next child of the Eighties to see Indiana Jones in his latest movie!  However, this game did not bring the thrill back.  Atari was notoriously bad at creating puzzle games (remember the awful Swordquest series?).  This game is no exception.  Even with the manual, you end up stumbling around confused at what Indy is supposed to do.  You could look online for the solution, but then what's the point in playing?  Also of note, the ending is highly unsatisfying.
 
3) Pole Position — First of all, Atari made a poor decision to use the joystick for this when it would have played better with the paddle.  Second, two players can not race side by side which spoils the thrill.  Also, the graphics are terrible; the racecar looks like a blob of pixels.  The track is repetitive, there is hardly any replay value.  This game is just a complete mess.  Hiphopguy23 much prefers Night Driver, even though that game is not much fun either.
 
2) Pac-Man — Ugh.  Atari really dropped the ball with this abomination.  The game play is sluggish and the controls are weak.  There is only one screen to navigate, resulting in boredom after a few plays.  The four ghosts have no distinct personalities.  Hiphopguy23 has even gotten stuck in a looping bug while playing.  Atari only got a touch better with Ms. Pac-Man.  If you really want the Pac-Man experience, Hiphopguy23 highly recommends Jr. Pac-Man  Jr. Pac-Man is everything Pac-Man was supposed to be: slick controls, rapid play, multiple screens, and ghosts with different personalities.  Highest recommendation for Jr. Pac-Man

1) Donkey Kong — Hiphopguy23 was thrilled to pick up this title after seeing King of Kong.  Sadly, the Atari port was a total disaster.  There are only two levels.  On the first, which is the iconic girders and ladders with barrels coming at you, the pace is slow and the joystick controls are oftentimes unresponsive, resulting in many frustrating moments.  When you defeat this screen, which is more relief than exhilaration, you are presented with the second screen, which is hard to describe.  There are more girders and you must run until the floor drops out, while being chased by what look like ducks.  This screen is easy to beat by following a boring pattern.  Then you are back to the original frustrating screen again.  If the arcade version were based bad, Steve Wiebe would have given up on day one.
 
Well, that's all!  Quite the trip down memory lane.  Here's till the next time that Ken allows Hiphopguy23 to come back!  Happy gaming!

Hello, Gamebits readers!  Guest columnist Hiphopguy23 here.  Ever feel like dusting off that old Atari 2600 and getting some 2-bit action on?  Well, Hiphopguy23 did just that this past Memorial Day weekend, and he is here to tell you which Atari games still hold up 25-30 years later and which should be shelved indefinitely.

5) River Raid — This game is as simple to learn as they come.  Left and right move you side to side, forward will accelerate and back will brake.  The button fires your gun.  However, you can get caught playing this game for an hour.  There seems to be an endless amount of screens to conquer and they all get progressively tougher, with narrower passageways to navigate and less and less fuel tanks available.  River Raid is definitely a classic.
 
4) Centipede — Here is another "pick up and play" game.  Fire at all the annoying bugs in your garden, including the rapidly descending centipede.  The centipede and spider get faster and faster as the levels progress, making this game a challenge.  Even more challenging is this game's successor, Millipede.  In that game, you also have to deal with beetles, mosquitoes, ladybugs, and inchworms!  Hiphopguy23 recommends Millipede if you have great hand-eye coordination and nerves of steel.
 
3) Mario Bros. — This is the best two-player game in Atari 2600 (with Warlords being the best four-player game).  You can play Mario and Luigi cooperatively or competitively.  Either way, you will have to deal with turtles, crabs, fireflies, and even ice creatures.  In the competitive mode, a dirty trick is to wait under the POW switch until your opponent knocks a creature out, and then spring that creature back to life!  Unfortunately, Hiphopguy23 has accidentally done that in cooperative mode as well.
 
2) Frogger — Yet another "jump right in" game.  This game is brilliant in its simplicity…it doesn't even use the fire button!  Simply navigate your frog past traffic, snakes, and logs to rest at your home lily pad.  The traffic gets denser, the snakes get faster, and the logs you must jump on become shorter with each progressing screen.  Like River Raid, there appear to be an endless amount of screens.  You can easily find yourself playing for hours.
 
1) Adventure — Thirty years later, and this game is still brilliant!  Hiphopguy23 recommends playing only Level 3, where all the items are randomly placed.  Some random placements are impossible to beat, and you won't realize you are on one of them until you've been playing for 15 minutes.  Hiphopguy23 also recommends playing with the Difficulty-A switches on, as they make the dragons faster and run from the sword.  Hiphopguy23 still gets a nervous lump in his throat when the red dragon approaches!

Hiphopguy23 will be back next week with five games that didn't hold up so well. Until then, have a gamerrific weekend!

Coming soon to an Xbox 360 near you: Atari 2600 games. It appears that the former Infogrames, which has been using the Atari name since purchasing Hasbro Interactive in 2001, will be remodeling classic titles and packaging the old and new versions for Xbox Live.

Atari has had a rough few years and has sold off many of its newer properties. Just as the company was quick to abandon the name Infogrames and rely on brand recognition, this latest move is consistent with cashing in on Atari's heritage — but no maneuver can be as effective and memorable as the Atari of three decades ago. 1UP.com has a video gallery of the thirty "The Best, Worst Atari Commercials", which sure does bring back memories: I'd forgotten just how awful the home version of Pac-Man was. It wasn't all bad, though, as represented by this stylized montage:

I sometimes find myself longing for that era, despite the crude graphics — or perhaps because of them. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud outlined how the more generic an avatar's features are, the more conducive it is to player identification. That is, today's protagonists have clear personalities and representations: you're not playing as yourself, but as Master Chief, Tommy Vercetti, or Harry Mason. But, as Next Generation recently pointed out in an outline of the 50 greatest game design innovations, "The first adventure games, and most other computer games too, described the world as if you, the player, were actually in the game—not a representation of you, but you. Consequently, the games could make no assumptions about your age, sex, social position, or anything else". That blank slate made it easy to insert yourself into the Atari's nascent virtual worlds. As any fan of the Metal Gear Solid series will tell you, the proliferation of cutscenes means better storytelling, but less player interaction.

Are games and movies true melding? Or is one simply transforming into the other?