"It's gonna drive you insane."

Back in 1982 in my youth my first introduction to the Atari 2600 title Megamania was through the TBS aired Starcade during a commercial break. The advertisement is reminiscent of MTV videos of the 80's with music provided by The Tubes, I'll post the commercial below for your enjoyment.




Unfortunately I was not able to get my hands on Megamania until the Activision Anthology was released for the Playstation 2 in 2002. I found it to be an enjoyable but very tasking title. The gameplay is a riff on Space Invaders where you control a ship and must fire a shot upwards to hit moving targets as they descend upon you, however in Megamania the objects move much faster in a cascading effect and will reverse direction which can easily result in the loss of your ship by collision.

To add to the difficulty of the game you have an energy bar that depletes the more shots you fire but at least you can control your fired shot, move it just a little to the left or right so that it helps connect with the fast moving objects above you.

The enemies in Megamania are a little odd. You are not fighting an alien invasion in this title but are stuck in a nightmare where you must defeat bow ties, hamburgers, and steam irons. I'm guessing that Steve Cartwright must have been having sleepless nights when he was designing this title.

I've come to play this title again quite a bit just recently as the X-Box Game Room has added it to its available Atari 2600 titles. It's worth the 240 points because while it may not have the next gen graphics we've grown accustomed to it still has an outstanding and challenging game play. Feel free to look me up by my online gamer tag, Unicron2005, if you want to spend an evening blasting 8-bit foes!

Thanks to Atari Age for the pictures above, check out the box cover, the creator of the title Steve Cartwright signed it!