Arcadia/Starpath Supercharger

I hadn't thought about the Supercharger games in years.. I'm not that prone to starting or partcipating in threads about the pre-NES years, but this one seems fitting.

If anyone doesn't know.. produced by Arcadia/Starcade, a Supercharger was a device you plugged into your Atari 2600 like an ordinary cartridge, only it was much larger. There was a cord coming out of it, and you had to plug it into the headphone jack of a cassette tape player.

The software came on tapes, obviously.. I suppose they offered more storage space than a 2600 cartridge did. A nifty bonus of this was that the games included non-playable demos of other Arcadia games.

I spent many hours playing Phaser Patrol, the game that game packaged with the Supercharger. Similar to Star Raiders, it was a bit less complex--but a lot easier for me to get the hang of. It had this cool feature where you could turn your shields on and off with a button on the Atari console, making the protected areas of your screen lighter in shade. A neat effect..

The only other game I played was Fireball, which was basically a Breakout clone, but there were several other games, including as someone mentioned, "Communist Mutants from Outer Space." :P

I'm just wondering.. did anyone else play any of these games? Besides Phaser Patrol, were any of them any good?

edit - Sorry, that's StarPath, not Starcade. :bang:

they were fan-rereleased on CD a few years back, called "Stella gets a new Brain". Not so easy to find anymore.

I haven't played one yet but I do want to try Escape from the Mindmaster.

Tapes are by far the worst game storage format ever made.