"Yay. An endless poor man's Gauntlet!"

Here's a prime example of how Atari “coulda, woulda, shoulda”. What started out as a rather decent dungeon crawler on the Atari XL in 1983 titled “Dandy” received ports to the 2600 and 7800 in 1988. For me it was a pretty bland and repetitive gaming experience by the time of its release. Unfortunately, Atari was the king of porting old and tired games to their new consoles in the late 80s.

What should Atari have done better with the decisions of the release of this game? Well, the in a nutshell, it's that Atari was busy doing graphically improved ports of old games for the 7800 while still wasting time with the 2600 in 1988 which didn't leave too much time for new ideas. Dark Chambers was their inspiration for Gauntlet and since Gauntlet was so popular and just received a port for the NES, Atari gets the bright and cheap idea to port Dark Chambers to the 7800 and improve the graphics and while they were at it stretch themselves too thin and port a dumbed down version to the 2600. If they wanted to do something right for a change they would've created a brand new game maybe titled “Dark Chambers 2” and give it all the depth that Gauntlet had and released that for the 7800 and ditched the 2600 port altogether. Instead we are treated to an endless game that has little variety and feels like it was made for 1983 standards, something that'd be too much common sense for Atari or better yet for Jack Trammiel to figure out. I could only imagine what something like that would've been like on something as capable as the Atari 7800; it would've be a wonder to behold.

Gauntlet was hugely successful on the NES and despite being overly ambitious and flawed and released too early on the NES, I still played the heck out of it and it's still the better game for the fact that it was full of variety and ported right from the Arcade. The same can't be said for Dark Chambers and I think it's one of the reasons the 7800 was the poor man's console with cheap inferior ports of popular games.

The first time I played the game I was actually impressed with what I saw. Graphics are the highlight of an otherwise dull game, easily twice as good as Gauntlet for the NES. Everything looks much more refined and the characters and enemies are drawn better, detail and color and are abundant. As I played further and further in the game, (the stages are lettered instead of numbered) probably around stage W or X, I was mindlessly bored but decided to plod along to the end and at lease finish it, then, to my horror, the game froze. Later on I found out that I didn't miss anything because after stage Z the game loops back around and starts with Stage AA and keeps going as a game would do from circa 1983. After that I had no desire to play again, ever!

You play as a green elf, player 2 is a red elf and that's it, there are no character classes, no extra weapons other than a smart bomb that eliminates every enemy on stage. You can collect a sword and a gun which increases attack power, you can grab food items for health, an item to revive your dead ally and a shield for invincibility, treasures for points, and keys to unlock doors and that's it!

Along the way you get to attack hordes of enemies and enemy generators. The enemies have a strange rank system; a class 1 enemy will die when shot, when a class 2 enemy is shot he downgrades to the class 1 enemy and so on through about six enemy classes. It's unique at first but kills any chance of variety, generators work the same way. Once you realize that this happens in each new stage forever and with each stage only growing more dense with enemies and more complex in layout with more keys to find but not much in actual new and unique challenges, you then realize how quickly the tedium will set in, to top it off there's no ending in sight. YAY!

Think it ends there? Well guess what, it doesn't. The game has a so so intro theme at the title screen and that's it for music. There is no music during the game; instead we are treated to some very unfitting sound effects that sound like they are from a military game. Guess what else, you won't have to worry about dying on regular mode, it's that easy! Want a challenge? Try expert mode. You'll have to spend an hour in each stage if you want to survive though because there's too many enemies. Ooh Yay, sounds extra specially fun to me!

Sounds good overall? No, not really! In 1983 it would be considered a masterpiece, but in 1988, what can you expect? It is Atari were talking about though, king of cheap, quick and easy Atari 7800 fillers. Not the worst game for the console here or anywhere, but I'll leave it up to you to decide whether it's a good game for you or not.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/07/09

Game Release: Dark Chambers (US, 1988)