Atari 8-bit: The Seven Cities of Gold
3One of the most expansive games on the system, with quite possibly the largest game world, The Seven Cities of Gold casts you as a Spanish explorer on a quest to chart the new world and enrich the nation. Please the crown by bringing back gold, or blow them off to focus on exploring instead. Part exploration, part action, part diplomacy, part resource management, there's a little something for everyone. The game tracks your exploration progress, rates your performance, and even has an automap, remarkably enough.
There's a massive world to explore, and quite a bit to do, but the sheer size of it means that you have to load the game program from one disk, then switch to another disk for the map and save data so you can play. If the standard map data, an approximation of the Americas circa 1492, isn't enough, the game even includes a random map generator to give you entirely new worlds to explore! Be warned, however, that it requires a spare disk to write to, and can take over 15 minutes to run. Still, the very existence of such an option is almost mind-blowing.
Though arguably a bit ahead of its time, and perhaps overly ambitious for the hardware's capabilities, The Seven Cities of Gold still plays quite well, and remains one of the highest-rated Atari 400/800 games.
To correct a misconception I had while recording, you don't actually need to travel to 30 degrees north to return to port. The game may give a message about your home port being there, but keep sailing east and you'll return to port at any latitude (though, as I later found out, your expedition may be lost if you try that on higher difficulties, so think twice about it!). On a related note, the game world has hard limits on the far ends of 60 degrees north and south latitude (solid ice fields you can't explore), and sailing too far west (well beyond where land can actually appear) results in the expedition being lost, which restarts you in your home port some time later minus any resources that went on the trip and any exploration not reported back.
And for anyone interested, I've started a longer exploration of another random map, with the playlist available at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfL5ffNrH6V-GvOWLqasSTb_w5IRNvX2w
More information: http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-seven-cities-of-gold-_s4599.html
Other Videos By Erifellen
| 2021-10-24 | Atari 8-bit: E.T. Phone Home! |
| 2021-10-22 | PC Games: Commander Keen 1: Marooned on Mars |
| 2021-10-20 | Atari 8-bit: Castle Hassle |
| 2021-10-18 | PC Games: Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure |
| 2021-10-14 | Atari 8-bit: Linking Logic |
| 2021-10-12 | PC Games: The Faery Tale Adventure |
| 2021-10-10 | Atari 8 bit: Peanut Butter Panic |
| 2021-10-08 | PC Games: F. Godmom |
| 2021-10-01 | PC Games: Paganitzu |
| 2021-09-30 | Atari 8-bit: Dragonriders of Pern |
| 2021-09-29 | Atari 8-bit: The Seven Cities of Gold |
| 2021-09-27 | PC Games: Jetpack |
| 2021-09-26 | Atari 8-bit: K-Razy Antiks |
| 2021-09-24 | PC games: Llamatron |
| 2021-09-21 | Atari 8-bit: Mountain King |
| 2021-09-20 | PC games: The Colonel's Bequest |
| 2021-09-18 | Atari 8-bit: AtariArtist bonus episode - The Easter Egg |
| 2021-09-18 | Atari 8-bit: Coco-Notes |
| 2021-09-17 | PC Games: Hugo's House of Horrors |
| 2021-09-16 | Atari 8-bit: Archon |
| 2021-09-13 | Interactive Fiction: Enchanter |
Other Statistics
The Seven Cities of Gold Statistics For Erifellen
Erifellen currently has 153 views spread across 18 videos for The Seven Cities of Gold. His channel uploaded 14 hours worth of The Seven Cities of Gold videos, roughly 7.55% of the content that Erifellen has uploaded to YouTube.