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One of the long rumored Activision unreleased games, Thwocker
remained no more than a rumor for many years. This all changed in 2001 however. A gentleman
named d8thstar on the AtariAge messageboard claimed to have finally found the game at a pawn
shop for the whopping high price of a quarter. Well, despite some doubts on the messageboard,
less than two weeks after the initial announcement, the long-awaited dump of this game was released
on AtariAge. This is one of the greatest finds of 2001, as the game is very fun to play, and is
probably around 80% completion, and is quite playable in its current form.
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The gameplay control is a little more complicated than most Activision
games, although it still remains simple enough. You are the little conductor guy, and your
first task is to grab the notes in the order that they appear at the bottom of the screen.
Everything except notes at this point is deadly, and you can't grab any notes you don't need.
To control the conductor's bouncing, you can hold DOWN to make him jump low, hit UP as he touches
the ground to make him go higher (DON'T hold it down before touching the floor or it won't work), or you
can hold the fire button down to all but stop jumping. Once the sequence of notes is completed,
you need to hop all the way back up to the top and grab the treble clef. Once you grab this, the song
will begin to play and you can touch all notes and enemies for points! Only problem is with this
game is that the exits are non-functional. You can only play one level of the game at a time, but
the different difficulty settings will change the game slightly, but the gameplay remains
basically the same.
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Scan
provided courtesy of AtariAge
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It gets said so much on these pages, but it still needs to be
said in this case - it's a crying shame that this game didn't get completed and released. Now,
emulation just doesn't do it justice, but if you're one of the privlaged ones like me to have
a Cuttle Cart, load it on up and give it a try. If not, just give it a shot on an emulator.
It's a great game that really deserved more. Now, at the time the game was released on AtariAge,
there were rumors that a more complete version was out there - these rumors have yet to be
substantiated, but you never know...
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