Hello everybody, my name is Jason and I have an almost crippling addiction to Moon Patrol on the Atari 8-bit. I’ve had this addiction for quite a while now, but was only playing with an emulator and telling myself it wasn’t the same as the hard stuff, that I could stop at any time… and then a parcel arrived on Saturday morning containing an actual cartridge and I was hooked!

In fact I’ve wanted Moon Patrol for my Atari 8-bit for a while, although it didn’t occur to me to actually look for one on eBay until R3PLAY where there was an XE Games Machine and a box of cartridges to choose from. Just nine English pounds got me unboxed cartridge without manual (that did include the shipping from America) and after a little digging around through storage boxes, out came the (t)rusty Atari 800XL and power supply. The C64′s Zipstik was borrowed and several hours of diligently patrolling the moon followed.

The sprites might be a little chunky and the otherwise nicely defined backgrounds could possibly have done with a little more variety of colour between stages considering the Atari 8-bit’s large palette, but Moon Patrol‘s gameplay is absolutely spot on and, after a day and a bit of playing with a decent joystick on the big telly in the front room, getting through the first loop without dying is tantalisingly close to being a reality and my final life is usually lost about halfway through the second. And that tune has been indelibly burnt into my bloody brain and I’ll no doubt be humming it all week!