Kaboom!, 1981 Activision/Larry Kaplan/David Crane (20 From Atari 2600 #12)
14I APOLOGIZE for the horrid gameplay! But.. you really, really, really need some sort of paddle controller or dial for this game, and since I played it on an emulator and not on the original system, I didn't have a paddle controller. I suppose I could have bought a dial-like controller off Amazon, but they wanted $100! Yeah, no. So unfortunately you get this awful gameplay from me. At any rate.. in this game you control buckets of water, and you start with 3 on top of each other. They all move in unison and they are to catch bombs dropped by The Mad Bomber at the top of a wall. You can hit the bomb on the side; it's still going in your bucket. But if you let one slip by the bottom bucket all of the bombs explode, the Mad Bomber grins at you (funny!), and you lose one bucket. Fortunately the action slows down a bit for the next group of bombs he drops. The bombs increase by one point for each wave you complete (and revert to the last value when you lose a bucket), and the value maxes out at 8 points. The amount of bombs for each wave increases up to 150. The gameplay is quite simple, but the sound effects and the pitch increase as the action gets faster and faster really gets your blood pumping! For every 1,000 points, you will earn an extra bucket-- but ONLY if you are short at least one. Otherwise, you do not collect reserves. If you manage to get all the way to 10,000 points, the Mad Bomber shows his utter surprise with a wide open mouth! If you set the difficulty switch to A your buckets will be thinner. If you play a 2 player game, you switch players whenever a bomb is dropped. The only game variations are 1 player and 2 players. Created by Larry Kaplan with assistance from David Crane (who would achieve resounding success with Pitfall the following year). Again, sorry about the poor gameplay-- but you REALLY need paddle/dial controls. Maybe someday I'll splurge for them.