#oneaday Day 425: I Got A Package

The name on the letter said, "Mary"…

Wait, no, no it didn't. It looked like this, although with less pixelated address information:

What could it be?

It's Atari goodness, is what it is! This first item goes with the Go-Moku/Renju game I covered a while back. I don't know how to play Bridge, but perhaps I can learn with this!

I never actually played this game. As I recall, it's a port of the NES game, rather than the arcade machine. There was an attempt to port the arcade game a bit later, but I don't think it was very good.

The Turtles box felt suspiciously heavy, so I wondered if it still had some goodies in it. Sadly, it seems the Panini stickers were long gone… but there were a bunch of mysterious other disks in there. They look like shareware or public domain software or something; the front one appears to be a Spectrum emulator for the Atari ST.

Indy! Sadly, it's not the good Last Crusade game — the point-and-click adventure — but I've always been curious to try this one.

Celebrity-endorsed sports games are not a new thing! Here we have "the Great White Shark" himself endorsing a golf game from Gremlin.

It's not all games; there's some programming and productivity stuff in here too. I don't know if I'll ever use this, but it's cool to have.

There are two packs like this; they look like the sort of package that came with the computer as a bundle. The cardboard case comes with full manuals for each title, plus another cardboard folder containing the floppy disks.

This is an interesting mix of stuff; STAC is an adventure game creation package that I was always interested to look at. Not sure what "Prince" is. A quick glimpse at Atarimania suggests it might be a strategy game I probably won't understand.

Here's the second of these two packs, focusing on productivity software.

Here's some educational stuff. I have quite a few of the educational packages I grew up with and that my Dad reviewed, so I thought it might be interesting to look at some more. These appear to be Atari-published, and might have been bundled with a computer.

This isn't a blurry photo; the inlay for that game is actually that badly printed. If you look at the "Atari ST" text at the top, you can see that the yellow print is misaligned with the rest of it, making the whole thing look like one of those old 3D glasses images. I have no idea what the game is.

Paranoia about viruses truly got started in the 16-bit era. Here's a delightful bit of software designed to profit from that panic.

I don't know virus history, but I thought this list on the back of the package was interesting as a historical record of some of the things 16-bit computer owners had to worry about!

Here's Yogi's Great Escape, which I covered on Atari ST A to Z a while back. Now I have a legitimate copy!

And some other Hanna-Barbera stuff from Hi-Tec, too. I'm interested to try these; their quality seems to vary quite a bit, judging by the two Yogi Bear games I've played to date.

Apparently this game is monstrously difficult, so you can look forward to me being terrible at it in the near future!

And then finally, the star of the show: a slightly dusty, slightly yellowed 1040STE, which I'm hoping has joystick ports in a better state than my existing STE.

Where did all this stuff come from? It came from Luke over at Hundstrasse, who got in touch with me on Discord the other night and asked if I wanted some stuff he was either going to throw out or donate to a computer museum. Of course I said yes, and it will most certainly be put to good use!

Luke is a member of the WordPress community and a fellow gaming enthusiast. He's a particular Resident Evil fan, and has done some incredibly in-depth comparisons of the various versions of each installment available — among plenty of other things, of course! — so be sure to give his blog a follow and drop him a nice comment.

A sincere thank-you to Luke for the kind donation — and if any more of you have any crap you think I might like that you want to offload on me, do be sure to get in touch and I'll happily help you clear out your loft… wife (and space) permitting 🙂