Developer: SEGA Publisher: SEGA Release Date: 1983

GOOD LORD I DON’T REMEMBER MEMORY LANE BEING THIS BORING…OI.

Well, it took me long enough. Here’s my first Colecovision game review. For those of you not in the know (or the care for that matter), the system was released in 1982 – the second generation of video game systems. Now, this was back in the time before lawyers were needed at every turn. The video game market wasn’t as vicious back then. Hell, Nintendo’s Donkey Kong was the pack-in game with the initial release. Of course, some could speculate that Colecovision’s ability to play Atari 2600 games may have fueled that particular legal end of the fire. Who knows.

Anyways.

While Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom certainly wasn’t a instant classic (or any kind of classic for that matter), I was a fan of the show. So I played it. So there.

And since there wasn’t much to the game, this will be a particularly short Retro Review. “So why do it Schwinghammer?!” you ask?

Because bite me. That’s why.

So that being said, let’s dive in, yeah?

Buck Rogers was a super-spiffy space man created by Philip Francis Nowlan in 1928. His name was Anthony until 1929 when he was placed in his own comic strip taken from the popular publication Amazing Stories (the Buck came from an actor named Buck Jones in the early 1920s if anybody cares). For my parents and Grandparents, Buck (Anthony?) was a important pop-icon that paced development for space technologies in the 20th century.  For my generation, he was a unknown, fairly flash-in-the-pan character in the vein of the then still new Star Wars series. For the current generation…well…you guys probably don’t know who the fuck I’m talking about.

But they’ve probably stopped reading by now, so really who gives a shit.

Anyways.

The game is loosely based (thank god) on the…interesting 1979 television series starring Gil Gerrard (with his then super awesome sidekick Twiki – below). I watched some episodes on a classic T.V. channel. Like most things in the eighties, I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. So friggin’ cheesy. If you ever catch an episode, it’s great to see all the older actors from your childhood a lot younger.

So the basic premise of the gameplay was you shooting things in your spacecraft. An enemy would show up on the horizon and you would blast it – while weaving in and out of various pillars. After that routine, you would face a bunch of enemy ships all at once, followed by the requisite boss battle. For the time, the graphics were pretty damn good (leaning ship animations…word) with nice explosions to boot. Only one difficulty level made you deal with the jump in difficulty (stage 10 made you grit your teeth). The collision detection was off at times and the graphics occasionally jumped around like a Jackrabbit on Meth. I’m not even going to get into the color pallet – Jesus.

But it was still fast-paced fun for the early eighties. I even got the Super Action Controllers (pictured below). Still have them too. Go me.

Good god I am a dork.

So if you have the luxury (luxury?) of owning Buck Rogers, go ahead and fire it up. If you can play it for more than a half-hour, I commend you. Really. Something has changed so quickly and all-encompassingly that I seem to have missed the transition. And if you’re a younger gamer that has managed to make it this far in the review – just forget you read this and see if you can rustle up an old NES from your uncle or something – I don’t think you can wrap your mind around how this was once really fun. Shit.

Damn.

Then: 7.5 out of 10 Now: 4 out of 10

Durka…