"This is better stuff on tape than the music these days"

We used to have an 8-bit Atari at my house, and yes, it had a cassette recorder, and it even used a TV as a monitor. Although I was supposed to use it for educational programs, I found a cassette tape(yes, you heard right) of loaded programs to be much more worth my time. The best of the programs was a cute little game about a fish swimming upstream to find his mate. On doing so you must guide him through a random river over or under waterfalls, which push you back and deduct ten points if you run into them, away from bears(the fish can go under the water for a period of time and the bears will give up, although this will make the fish go very slowly) and in later levels(the river is narrower too) away from birds and men waving fishing nets. Your fish has a life bar(less life each level) which slowly recedes, and he is slowed down if he runs into a shoal in the river or the side of the river. You start out with one life and are awarded an extra for each level you complete, but if you lose a guy, you start over from the beginning of the level.

Your fish moves slowly forward unless there is something in his way. You can move him around with a joystick, or you can go underwater(slowly) with pushing the joystick button and going down, or you can jump with pushing the joystick button and going up. You can jump sideways with amazing quickness, although going forward quickly can result in an early demise. What gets you points is going forward, or the life you have left at the end of the scene, which in my opinion is not weighted heavily enough.

The highlight of the graphics is certainly the ''love scene'' at the end of each level. It is quite simply not to be missed and is clearly up there with anything Disney has to offer. You can also go left or right at will onto the land(interesting how your mate does the same thing, but I don't want to spoil any details.) So I guess love can not only move mountains but it can make fish walk. The rest of the graphics are pretty good, with the one glitch being that you can swim through a person but not the pole of his fishing net. For the Atari's limited capabilities, everything looks like it is supposed to. The scenery changes color as you get closer to the end of a level, which is a useful measuring stick. There's even a water trail behind your salmon if he's going quickly. The river is perhaps a little too jagged, but there's not much to be done about that.

Salmon Run is, quite simply, a very cool game. Although the programmer made some odd choices(you start with one life,) and the game has a lot of random factors that can determine your demise on later levels and make the six digits for a score seem a bit silly--only four are needed--a lot of his other decisions were very good. I think we've(we being people who've seen very early gaming systems) all played silly driving games, but this one trumps them. This game is such an enjoyable time-waster that I wish someone would make it into a Windows Executable--though being an ''old school'' person I would not want the graphics altered.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 11/29/00, Updated 11/29/00