It's time to play another Atari 2600. This may not exactly be one of Activision's most popular games for the system, but it does get more fun when you get used to it.
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Stampede is a game for the Atari 2600 by Activision that has you playing the role of a cowboy on a horse moving up and down on one side of the screen as you throw your lasso at cattle to round them up. You start out with three lives (which are shown on the upper-left corner of the screen), and you lose them by letting the cattle disappear off the left side of the screen. To keep cattle off screen, you'll need to move your horse into them to run them back to the right.
Up and Down on the joystick moves your cowboy up and down, while the fire button lets you throw the lasso and round up those little dogies. While your lasso is out, you cannot move until your lasso returns to you. If you catch a cattle, you will get points depending on what the color is. The yellow cattle - known as "light brown jerseys" - are worth 25 points. They are the fastest of the three regular colors. The orange ones - known as "medium brown Guernseys" - are worth fifteen points. The brown ones - known as "dark red Herefords" - are worth three points.
As you play, you'll notice two things that go faster than the others. The first one is the cow skull, which you want to avoid at all cost. If you run into the cow skull, you will be stunned briefly. The other one is the black cattle, known as the black angus. If you catch a black angus, you'll get 100 points. If you run into it, you will be stunned briefly, and that will cost you one of your lives. Being stunned is not good, as you can't move when you're stunned and being unable to move means you can't herd cattle back to the right side of the screen.
Whenever you lose a life in this game, the game doesn't stop, clear the screen and reset. Instead, the action keeps right on going. You'll need to be on your toes and always alert in order to see what's coming next. As a result, it is possible to lose all of your lives in an instant and have your game suddenly come to an end. Thankfully, you'll get an extra life on your "stray count" every 1,000 points, though getting that many points isn't always easy. You can have up to a total of nine "allowed strays," or lives, though that can be hard to achieve.
There are eight game modes, all acting as increasingly harder difficulties. In this video, we'll check out the first four.
Game 1 - known as "Sidekick" - gets you comfortable with the game. The cattle will move along, and the game will get faster the longer you go. The dark red Herefords (brown cattle) show up first, then the light brown Jerseys (yellow cattle), followed by the medium brown Guernseys (orange cattle). From there, you'll get either a cow skull or a Black Angus, depending on what showed up last. The game starts with a cow skull, then gives you the black angus, and switches between them whenever you go through the cattle spawning pattern.
Here, you'll learn how to get the most points: make it so that all the rows have the dark red Herefords (brown cattle), then focus on one row, usually the top row, and catch cattle there while running into the rest of the rows when they get too close to the left side of the screen in order to herd them. You'll catch on to the pattern quickly, as well as the game switching between the cow skull and the black angus. As you keep herding cattle away from the left side of the screen, you'll notice that the cattle will stop running away from you earlier and earlier, causing this strategy to break down a little bit. You'll eventually have to lasso those cattle and replace them with "fresh" ones to get them to move away further again.
This strategy was revealed in "How To Beat Home Video Games, Volume 1" from Vestron, which you can see here.
Once you get used to keeping the brown cattle on five rows while you catch cattle on a sixth, you'll eventually be able to experiment with working with two rows at once as well as learning how to switch rows if you only want to work with one. How you play this game and how you maximize your survival while also getting points is up to you.
If you try to catch every single cattle you come into contact with, you will set yourself up for failure, and your game will not last long.
In Game 2 - "Pilgrim" - the dogies move up and down slightly on the screen. This can make them a little harder to catch at times.
In Game 3 - "Cowpoke" - there is no set pattern as to which types of dogies appear when. You can get two black angus in a row - maybe even three - and the brown-yellow-orange spawn pattern is completely gone and any kind of cattle can show up. You'll have to pay attention if you want to use the same strategy that was mentioned earlier.
In Game 4 - "Wrangler" - Games 2 and 3 are combined. The dogies move up and down like in Game 2, and you have no set pattern that determines which type of cattle appear when like in Game 3.
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