![]() The killer bees are surprisingly intelligent and will even begin to act as bodyguards for the robots after a while. If the killer bees get too close, your own swarm will thin out and it will be more difficult to sting the aforementioned robots. Things are complicated by swarms of killer bees that attack in various phases. The robots become increasingly faster as time goes on, so players are encouraged to eliminate them in a timely manner. The game puts players in control of a swarm of bees (beads?) and tasks them with destroying killer robots that wander around the screen. The game was released exclusively for the Odyssey² and hit shelves just in time for the entire market to crash, so it didn’t generate the buzz that it deserved. Killer Bees! is a unique title and one of the best games that you’ve (probably) never heard of. It moves along at a slower pace than typical maze games from the era, but what else would you expect from a game about turtles? The animated intro and short intermissions between levels highlight the effort that was put into the game, but Turtles is seldom talked about. (Come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure how the turtle is able to drop bombs either.) Most games in the genre gave players the simple task of eating dots, but Turtles challenges them to find baby turtles on the map and return them to their homes. I’m not entirely sure why the beetles are so big, but you can slow them down by dropping bombs behind you. The point of the game is to guide a turtle around a maze while avoiding killer circles that are apparently supposed to represent beetles. The original arcade game was developed by Konami (and later published by Sega as Turpin), but it was ported to only a handful of consoles. The success of Pac-Man in the early ’80s opened the floodgates to torrents of thinly-veiled knock offs, and Turtles kind of got lost in the mix. The hybrid concept never quite caught on like Magnavox intended, but Quest for the Rings deserves a lot of credit for doing something different. Quest for the Rings doesn’t have the same flexibility as traditional paper-and-pen RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, and the video game portion skirts the line between boring and frustrating. A lot of effort went into the game, but the end product doesn’t live up to its potential. ![]() As players advance on the real-world game board, they occasionally switch over to the television to hunt for the eponymous rings in monster-filled dungeons. ![]() Quest for the Rings comes packaged with a colorful game board, an elaborate map, engraved tokens, and a detailed manual complete with character bios, a bestiary, and full-page art for each level. It wouldn’t be fair to describe it as a video game, however, since its basically a hybrid of a video game and a standard board game. At the risk of sounding like a sensationalist, Quest for the Rings is one of the most ambitious and creative games of its era. ![]()
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