Today's second set of casual photos (Magnavox Odyssey 300 (1976); Electronic Arts' Foes of Ali (1995) and Absolute's Rise of the Robots (1995) for the 3DO; Adventure International's Questprobe Featuring Spider-Man (1984) for the Atari ST; and Atari's Video Chess Special Edition (1979) for the Atari 2600 VCS) are taken with my Panasonic digital camera, and, instead of telling a semi-coherent story to go along with the photos, I'll talk about each one in brief in turn. Photos to follow the commentary (I had some issues with my image processing software at work, so I was unable to finish cleaning these up).

The Magnavox Odyssey 300 (1976) is like the Lotus Esprit of the world of home Pong consoles, with killer looks to go with its long, flat frame. It requires six C batteries. By the way, be sure to check out the all-too-true proclamation on the box, "By Magnavox the originator of HOME VIDEO GAMES", which is of course referring to the original Magnavox Odyssey from Ralph Baer, which was released to the home market in 1972, the same year that Pong would see release in the arcades (and yes, it was Nolan Bushnell and Atari who would take inspiration from Baer's Odyssey, not the other way around).

Electronic Arts' Foes of Ali (1995), was a late release for the 3DO system and the type of technically impressive title that might have made a small difference in the platform's relative success had it been released earlier in the platform's run (along with a lower initial selling price for the console itself, but that's a story for another day). Foes of Ali can be thought of as the precursor or prototype for EA's later boxing games, like the recently released Fight Night Round 4. Even though Electronic Arts was one of the 3DO's primary backers, they didn't come through with enough franchise titles, particularly hockey, but they did originate many greats on the platform, most notably Need for Speed, which of course had the Road & Track license back then, and stellar sprite-based versions of FIFA and Madden.

Absolute's Rise of the Robots (1995) was another late release for the 3DO. I remember interviewing at Absolute shortly after graduating college around this timeframe and I was discussing how horrible Rise of the Robots was with them. In short, it was a multi-platform fighting game that looked great, played like crap, but sold a ton. I didn't get the job, but they were working on the sequel when I was there, which promised to fix all the issues with the first game. It didn't and Absolute didn't stick around as a company much longer.

Adventure International's Questprobe Featuring Spider-Man (1984) for the Atari ST is a Scott Adams text and graphics adventure, which means it has a simple parser, but not quite as bad as the early games, which barely accepted two word commands. I owned the Commodore 64 (C-64) version of this game, which had the Plus/4 version on the back of the disk. Presumably the Plus/4 version had more colors than the C-64 version, but I have yet to try it even though I've long since acquired working Plus/4 setups. I'm unsure of the actual release date of this Atari ST version (it's unlikely to be 1984, more like 1985), and all that's in the box is the comic and two backup disks (no originals).

Atari's Video Chess Special Edition (1979) for the Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS), is a "Special Edition" only because it was one of the early games that used a 4K ROM chip versus the usual 2K. Chess was a difficult proposition for early computers and videogame consoles due to memory limitations, but programmers typically found a way, though the CPU would often get bogged on higher difficulty levels thinking, sometimes making the player wait in the hours rather than the minutes for their turn. Some manufacturers even went so far as to require or include hardware add-ons with their chess software, like Philips with the chess cartridge and bundled add-on containing a microprocessor for the European version of the Odyssey2, which is compatible with the American console (I have that chess module/cartridge).