0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Atlantis The Lost Continent

       

Atlantis The Lost Continent again is unrelated to previously titled Atlantis games, this title is one of many budget titles released towards the end of the Playstations life cycle by Phoenix Games, several have already been covered like Animal Football and 5 Star Racing.

The game developed by Code Monkeys is a top down puzzle and colouring game aimed at children the game released exclusively on the Playstation in Europe in 2003

The game is a puzzle game with two fairly basic puzzle elements, the first is a tile puzzle game with the player having four choice for the size of the puzzle from the smallest which is a 3x3 to the largest which is a 6x6 tile puzzle, in total there are six different pictures to user for this section

The second gameplay element on offer is a colour section with the player having the choice of six different pictures to colour in all of which are identical to the tile puzzle pictures. When the picture is chosen a larger version will appear on the screen with a colour palette on the bottom of the screen, the player uses the shoulder buttons to switch between the selections of colours then using a pain brush cursor chooses the corresponding area of the picture they want to colour.

The story for the animated film that comes with the two puzzle games is based around the legend of Atlantis, a fisherman’s son named Rodrigo finds a very special message in bottle, with the help of his grandfather the pair works out that is tells them how to find the lost city of Atlantis.

 

Rodrigo’s grandfather exitedly tells his grandson that many have been searching for the lost city for centuries without success, this however does not deter the pair who along with their dog Uzo set out to find the lost city.

This being a budget release and one at the end of the Playstations life critic reviews for it are none existent, so we head to GameFAQs for their user rating with the game currently sitting at an average rating of 2.06/5 from a total of nine user ratings.

Breaking down the user ratings we find some people did enjoy the game with one user rating the game at a 4/5 while another two gave it a solid 3.5/5. From here the games user ratings take a significant drop, with one user rating the game at a 2.5/5 and another drop follows to a 1.5/5.

The final four users rated the game at a 1/5 or lower with three of them rating it at that, the final user could only give the game a 0.5/5 clearly finding the game tedious. Next on to the game difficulty, which amazingly not everyone found it simple, while three of the seven users who rated this category did the remaining four were split between easy, just right and tough, averaging out though the game does come in at an easy difficulty rating.

Finally we have the games lifespan which comes in at an average of 8.3 hours, with a total of five users rating this category with three spending less than an hour with the game. The remaining two users however really seemed to love this game spending up to twenty hours with it.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude who unsurprisingly don’t stock this European only release, same goes for eStarland.com and Amazon.com. Retrogames.co.uk somewhat more surprisingly don’t stock this title either, so we head over to the co.uk version of Amazon to see if we can find any copies.

Which we finally do only a handful of copies are available, these copies though are in pretty good shape, with the exception of the cheapest copy which has a ripped manual. Excluding that copy price wise for a used copy you will be looking at between £7.75 and £9.95 for a very good quality used copy.

If you are looking for a like new copy of the game you will have to pay slightly more at around the £16 mark, if you are interested in one of the two new copies on the market then one can be picked up for just £1 more at £17.03, new copy prices are currently peaking around the £22.50 mark.

  

Written by

P J Gibbon