The Ultimate Coleco/Atari 2600 Tier List - ALL RELEASED GAMES RANKED

leading up to 1982 coleco already known for their handheld and tabletop video games started snapping up their rights to successful arcade games and popular children's franchises as part of their new Venture into the home video game console market and while these licenses were obtained primarily to stack the launch library of their coleco Vision they're also used to create games for the already established Atari VCS in this video I'll be running through and ranking every game coleco released for our 2600 and we're gonna get started right after this this video brought to you in part by Tommy in the order of cosmic Champions this exciting and heartwarming coming-of-age Gen X novel is available now check the link for more info hey there welcome back to Gen X grown up I'm John and I am a Gen X grown-up thank you so much for the click the Connecticut leather company was founded in 1932 and became Calico Industries in 1961 but the company didn't hit my radar until the early 80s when they started rolling out those tabletop arcade games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Frogger all of which were on my Christmas list that year now today it's not uncommon to own multiple home game consoles but when I grew up once you had one you had one so when coleco launched the coleco vision in 82 man it looked great but I already had an Atari so I knew it wasn't going to be in the cards what was in the cards though was the promise of games for my Atari published by Calico and some of the same titles too like Venture and time pilot Smurfs and especially Donkey Kong now just as in my previous ranking videos I'm going to evaluate coleco's releases from the perspective of little Johnny the 10 year old me how would I have opening and playing these games after bringing them home from the mall and to that end we're only going to be looking at games Little Johnny could have played because there are a few unreleased prototypes found over the years but there were 13 games released by coleco between 82 and 84. so those are the ones we'll be looking at ready to get started I know I am and we're going to kick things off with an educational title The Berenstain Bears so open your eyes lend an ear actual factual bear here the world's smartest man yeah I know you hear it too and the first thing you're asking is how is this sound possible on a VCS well the Berenstain Bears is one of two releases that used a peripheral called kidvid it was effectively a cassette player that plugged into the second controller Port of your Atari VCS and it could drive your console it could move objects on screen it could push the select button it could push the start button it knew what was happening in the game plus it could play regular audio through the cassette player speaker that gave you more instructions and information about the game you were playing it's really a pretty cool idea and I know little Johnny would have been captivated by how it was working but let's talk about the game the primary game mechanic of Berenstain Bears is to catch letters or numbers as they fall from a tree in between this you'll drive brother Bear's unicycle around rocks and over Bridges But ultimately only to get to the next tree you never push start you just play the tape and the tape tells you everything you need to do after you you do something it sings A congratulations song it's basically an audio instruction manual that happens in real time Baron Saint Bears came with three cassettes that equate to three different games you had the big number hunt where you had to catch the appropriate number don't touch another don't touch another we're ready now get set there is the great letter round up where he had to catch the appropriate letter A is for alligator Antelope and ape and it makes the a sound in the middle of great and then the spooky spelling bee where you were instructed to catch letters to spell out simple words like cat or dog or mom or dad things like that has a face around the mice tried to ballet now you can try to spell it the first one the technology here is astounding for the time and basically makes the VCS an early multimedia machine but the gameplay itself gets super repetitive after just a short time and I myself played it for like 30 minutes and I expected something new to happen eventually and it really was just the same thing over and over I can't imagine this would hold the attention of anyone other than a very very young game player so while I have no doubt that little Johnny would have been captivated by the technology at work here the game itself he would have got bored with pretty quickly so this one's going to start our tear off with just a c moving on to our first arcade port and that's going to be Carnival from 1982. now this of course was based on the arcade game by the same name Carnival is a shooting gallery game you know the drill you control a pistol that moves across the bottom of the screen and attempt to destroy all the moving targets before you run out of bullets either by missing shots or getting ammo stolen from you by a dive bombing duck that's right you heard me correctly the targets here are pretty huge on the VCS and that just has to do with the resolution I suppose so it's pretty tough to miss most of the targets but the key to doing well is shooting little rotating pipes at the top of the screen and that by contrast requires a Precision aiming and are not so easy to hit also I should point out this is Carnival based on the arcade game Carnival it's lacking the bonus level where the bear goes back and forth across the screen gets faster as you shoot him they even had the audacity to put the bear on the cover art for the game and the bear is not included in the game which I think is a Miss look it's a shooting gallery game a magic had one coleco had one like the previous one this one is also going to get a c well it surely didn't take very long to get to the elephant in the room the very next item alphabetically on our list is that notorious Port of Donkey Kong what can I say nice about Donkey Kong uh well the Mario Sprite is multi-colored and looks nice and the girder level has some pretty gentle slopes which is not standard for the Atari so that's pretty cool um no that's about it okay now under the problems only two screens out of four rolling Ritz crackers instead of barrels Donkey Kong looks like a gingerbread man Collision detection is unforgiving and they're only two sound effects Mario walking and jumping and that tiny in stage tube so before I get to the rating and my reasoning for it let's talk a little bit about that rumor that Calico intentionally made subpar ports of games like Donkey Kong for their competing consoles to make the ColecoVision look that much better this makes for a great story but it doesn't make sense from a sales standpoint look when ColecoVision launched in 82 there were already millions of installed vcs's so the more you could sell the better for coleco in 1985 Calico sold 8 million video game cartridges but only two million of those were for their own console the rest were for their competitors Mattel and Atari so intentionally tanking the quality of games just doesn't make sense for coleco's bottom line what I do believe though is that coleco didn't hold Donkey Kong porch for other consoles to the same high standards as software for their own machine if the ColecoVision Port looked like this it would have gone back to the drawing board but since it wasn't they allowed it to ship as is despite all the obvious room for improvement and we know historically there is room for improvement in my opinion this feels way less intentional and much more like a hey while you're at it do Donkey Kong for the other consoles too and less of a let's absolutely make a terrible port for the other consoles and so now for the rating and I'm torn here look I vividly remember ordering Donkey Kong from a catalog the interminable weeks of waiting for it to arrive then it got in the mailbox I got home tore it open through the 2600 and played it for the first time and was absolutely Crest following now what I will tell you is despite the initial negative impression of Donkey Kong I played the living crap out of it because I mean because it's Donkey Kong and so look Donkey Kong probably deserves an F but since I'm trying to evaluate this so the eyes of little Johnny and I remember Little Johnny loving to play this despite his knowledge that it was not that good I'm going to begrudgingly award Donkey Kong a d on our tier okay moving on to the sequel Donkey Kong Jr which came out the very next year and oh Calico you tried with Donkey Kong Jr you just didn't try very hard the premise of Donkey Kong Jr is your standard flip the script Affair instead of playing Mario as the hero Mario's now the villain who's captured your dad Donkey Kong and you play his son trying to rescue him now look Donkey Kong is still a gingerbread man here now you did keep that nice multi-colored Mario Sprite wait what's that you don't control Mario okay well then make Donkey Kong Jr a baffling jumble of pixels that'll do also no fruit to drop single paths through screens that should have choices laughable brackets trying to pass as trap Jaws horrible control inconsistent up down Vine speed and more where's Little Johnny enjoyed playing Donkey Kong despite its flaws he would probably cry and take this one back to the store look I must admit that music and sound effects are a slight improvement with this Sequel and we were treated to three of the four arcade screens so this is almost a c but taken as a whole it's just an embarrassing imitation of the original and it doesn't stand on its own at all so again D is the best I can do yeah I know we're not off to a rousing start here but let's move along to a game that I think is going to fare a little bit better and that's going to be Frontline the original front line of the arcade was your standard ground-based military game where you're working your way through some terrain shooting bad guys jumping in tanks blowing up bases cool stuff like that and most of the spirit of that game made it through on this coleco port there's pretty nice Sprite design and big Sprites too and as you move through the game the terrain is varied you have Jungle Desert stuff like that now it's a bit frustrating that enemy fire is just as fast as your bullets I mean later games we've learned that look that's not fair we need time to react the computer is way better but you get used to that after a while what you do is you just learn to stay out of the lines of fire you know the diagonals in north south east west kind of stay on the oblique so guys can't shoot you plus there's even a boss fight at the end of the levels before it repeats to be more difficult I think just a little more polish is all that's holding this game back from being all that it could have been it's way too easy to get hung up on the background where you can't move leaving you as a Sitting Duck for fast enemy fire but still there's plenty of fun to be found so we're gonna give Frontline a B on our tier moving on to a game heavily influenced by Pac-Man and that's mousetrap you play as a mouse running through a maze being chased by cats at times you can use one of your power ups to morph into a dog and turn the tables on your pursuers there are also these variable Gates that you can switch from open to closed and change the structure of the map now the way you accomplish this with just one button on your joystick is you hold down the button on your joystick to make the gates change and a quick tap on the button will morph you into a dog how was you're able to morph into a dog that's the interesting thing here the whole dog Mouse mechanic is handled by picking up these X's that live in the corners of the screen once you pick them up you earn the ability to turn into a dog but it doesn't happen immediately that quick tap of the button will turn you into a dog but you can wait and do it when it's most advantageous when you're in a tight spot or the cats are swarming around you I mean no disrespect to Pac-Man but mouse trap is a thinking person's Pac-Man it's the same sort of maze strategy but you have the gates you can choose when to use the power pellets and not for nothing but mouse trap on the VCS from Coco turned out to be much better than Pac-Man on the VCS from Atari so mousetrap is absolutely going to be my first s on our tier I love this game I loved it back then I love it now on that note I want to take just a second to pause here and ask for your help if you enjoy these ranking videos and want to help ensure they keep on coming would you consider supporting Gen X grown up you can click over to patreon.com gen xgrownup and for as little as a dollar a month you can show your support and help to sustain these Productions if you would it would be immensely appreciated okay let's jump right back into it with Mr do based on the arcade game of the same name you play as Mr do who must burrow through the ground to gather fruit and drop apples on your enemies my first impression of this game is it's pretty decent for a VCS title but once you start to play you feel all the trade-offs because in order to get this level of detail it makes the game feel quite cramped and the rate at which the enemies move feels almost unfair particularly because you can't burrow away from them while also collecting fruit because you erase all the ground around where the fruit was effectively leaving you with a big empty open field and your single method of attack that bouncing ball doesn't do so well in wide open quarters it just makes me feel like too much time was spent trying to as closely as possible replicate the arcade game while not being concerned with how that would translate into a fun or a playable game so Mr do from coleco is gonna get a c from me the next title up on our list is rock and rope the object here is to make your way through each level and rescue the golden Rock which is that peacock-like bird you see perched up at the top of the level now this is another arcade Port of a game that I was actually always intrigued by in the arcade but never spent any time to get good at but let me tell you I've been spending time getting good at this Atari Port look at the interesting design of the levels no blocky backgrounds like you'd expect each level is multi-colored and has a lot of visual interest there are a variety of screens three or four I think and you have a variety of things you can do with your single fire button tapping it once will shine a flashlight in the eyes of the bad guys to temporarily disable them so you can pass through them or get away holding up while hitting that fire button will launch the Rope this is the main way that you Traverse the level there's no climbing up and down ladders it's all through this rope you tether on both ends and then climb to the opposite side of the screen plus the enemies will mess with you on that rope the dinosaurs can bite it and break it the cavemen can shake it make you fall off of it plus you can pick up little Golden Rock eggs that are scattered around the level those are basically like Pac-Man's power pellets they temporarily make you invincible and also make you able to kill the bad guys if you touch them I have seen other reviews online that Ding Rock and rope for being a pale imitation of the arcade but on its own merits it's a fun game especially considering the limitations of the VCS and I can absolutely say with authority that little Johnny would have loved owning this one he said that he didn't this is going to be an s on our tier okay the next two games we're going to look at are not arcade ports at all but are based on a franchise into which coleco was heavily invested and we're talking about the Smurfs the first one is Smurfs rescue in Gargamel's Castle my first impression of this game was this looks amazing especially for a 1982 VCS game why were these developers assigned to Donkey Kong okay that I can't go back in time but I wish that had happened anyway plus you have constant music playing along I mean it's BCS music but it's music there's sound effects that are cute enough and Smurfy now I will say that deaths are frustrating look I understand that you're gonna die if you touch a spider or a bird or you're drowning a river that'll kill my Smurf but you can also die by such methods as touching a fence touching a step touching a chair all thing things that should just slow you down or make you have to do your jump again instead they kill you so figuring out what can and can't kill you as a series of trial and error experiments so I was ready to hate this game but I gave it a fair shot and I kept playing it and once I finished my series of experimentation as to what you can and can't do to die I found out there's a pretty interesting little Adventure game here now it is too bad that in a game called rescue and Gargamel's Castle there is no Gargamel you get to his laboratory and you climb up on his workbench to save Smurfette but you never get to see him but that doesn't make it not enjoyable so if you try this one and you hate it stick with it because it's actually pretty good I'm gonna award Smurfs rescuing Gargamel's Castle a bee now the second Smurf title is another of those kid vid releases that came with the accompanying cassette tapes depending on which cassette you load you actually get three entirely different games here you might play as Harmony handy or greedy Smurf as Harmony you learn about Musical a musical vacation with your good friend Harmony as handy you must sort shapes on a conveyor belt by their shape size or even color [Music] and finally as greedy you'll learn color theory as you mix primary colors to match the color you're first given is for you and yellow red white and blue and green I've gotta say that compared to that other kid vid title The Berenstain Bears Smurfs has much more variety the games you play are actually very different instead of catching different things you're actually doing very different tasks so it is effectively three educational titles in one I've got to say though on the third or fourth playthrough it does get a bit monotonous to have to listen to the cassette's introduction all over again they're gonna sing a song to welcome you they're going to sing a song to explain the game they're gonna sing a song to wish you good luck and finally you can start playing but once you're allowed to play you could do a lot worse for an educational game if the purpose of an educational title is to teach you something while making you think you're playing a game I would call Smurf save the day a success and I'm gonna rate it a b all right just three remaining and all of these are arcade ports and we're going to begin with time pilot the concept of time pilot is that you fly a spaceship that stays in the middle of the screen and can rotate around to take out enemies that are approaching from all different sides The Twist here is that as you travel through time you encounter enemies from different eras things like biplanes and then later helicopters and then Jets and then UFOs and stuff like that one little aside that I will mention here that was kind of interesting to me weird in fact is that the difficulty switches set not only the skill level but also the number of players and because of that you can only play a two-player game at the highest difficulty you have a game select switch but all right I guess luckily skill level is just code for how many enemies do I have to destroy before the boss arrives I will say that considering the obvious limitations of the VCS time pilot captures the spirit of time pilot though it does feel like time pilot on training wheels the various enemies you meet throughout the decades do all look different and do have slightly different flight patterns to which you must adapt now we are lacking paratroopers that you can rescue for bonus points and the boss takes only one hit to kill which kind of makes it a bit anticlimactic but at least the boss is there but even with these omissions this port of time pilot would have been a hit for little Johnny so this is going to be an A on our tier moving along then to venture Venture casts you as a treasure hunter delving into dungeons from which previous Adventures did not return and it's easy to see why you're presented with an Overworld map full of rooms and corridors now on this screen you can't shoot you can only Dodge the bad guys until you enter a room when you do enter the room you get a zoomed in version of that room which you must solve by killing or dodging various enemies grabbing the treasure and escaping alive now that's important if you don't escape alive you got to go back and do that room again you actually have to get out with the treasure anyhow venture has only two Overworld maps that cycle back and forth which means somewhat limited Variety in room designs but the four levels of difficulty do help to offset that repetition quite a bit and speaking of difficulty though this is a single player game you set your skill level by a combination of left and right difficulty switches rather than game select I mean did coleco have something against the game select button I don't know anyway Venture is actually a lot of fun to play and it feels like an adventure so it's going to get an A on our tier so moving right into the last item on our list alphabetically did I save the best for last well no but nor did I save the worst we're gonna now talk about zaxon listen zaxon was a grabber in the arcade for its isometric angle which was further explored by allowing you to climb and dive to align with enemies and weave your way through obstacles I'm sure Hardware limitations on the VCS is why coleco turned the game 45 degrees so the scrolling is instead top to bottom which generally works okay that arcade strategy of shooting at a wall and watching for bullet strikes to verify proper height is preserved here but beyond that judging the height of flying enemies is kind of scary sketchy and it seems that no matter their height you can collide with them if your Sprites touch not always but sometimes the outer space level between bases is preserved here but it skips The Climb dive mechanic for just a straight shoot and Dodge Affair and there's even a boss battle where you get to fight against a giant robot and shoot his Rockets you have four different difficulties to choose from and you use get this the game select switch they figured it out all that being said despite all the efforts to preserve core elements from the arcade the concessions result in a subpar experience that just doesn't have the same fun or impact as the original that makes it an okay game but not a great game and you know what that means zaxon gets a c so here is our Calico tier all completed let's pause for a moment here and see what we can learn from this pretty even distribution overall and no F's even if one or two F's might have technically been earned I did not award any F's in hindsight across their portfolio of releases clicko as a publisher was pretty average with a couple notable gems nothing wrong with that and now of course all of this is subjective and it's based on Little Johnny's point of view but I want to know what you think of my rankings please sound off down in the comments and let me know talking with you all after a video is released is fully half the fun for me so I'll talk to you there in the meantime I'll put links over my shoulders here and here to some other ranking videos that I have done I certainly hope you found something to enjoy in this video and I cannot wait to talk to you again next time bye bye you know [Music] known from the trees

Channel: GenXGrownUp

Views: 12,478

Keywords: genx, gen x, genxgrownup, nostalgia, generation x, retro, 70s, 80s, 90s, grown up, arcade, third party, rank, rating, tier, ranked, 1883, 1982, 1983, 1984, port, ports, quality, review, evaluation, comparison, atari, 2600, vcs, sequel, joystick, coleco, colecovision, donkey kong, zaxxon, roc n rope, berenstain bears, smurf, smurfs, carnival, time pilot, venture

Id: BmY4tgUq97E

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2023