Newscaster

Trying to review Newscaster is kind of like attempting to review a billboard or those little scrawling messages that appear at the bottom of 24-hour news channels. "Well, it does a good job of conveying information, but I can't help feeling that the gameplay is a little uninteresting. The letters looked extremely realistic, however." You see, this cartridge isn't really a game; it's a program for displaying messages on your TV screen. Type in a message, and it scrolls across your screen repeatedly. If you're practiced, you can change the color of the screen. If you're really good, you can display advanced things like commas and a timer. Exciting, huh?

Actually, when Newscaster came out in the early '80s, it was exciting. Well, a little bit, anyway. Manipulating images on a television screen was still a bit of a novelty for the general public, and being able to show your very own creation on TV (even if it was a simple text message) was quite the cool prospect. Who wouldn't want to type in their own name and see it come to life? Hey ma, I'm on TV!!

I remember being very eager to get this cartridge in 1983 or thereabouts. And, once I obtained it, the excitement of typing in messages and changing the screen colors kept me fully engrossed... for about 15 minutes. As I discovered, once you've seen your name scroll by about two dozen times, the novelty wears off pretty quickly. Figuring out how to type a comma, which involves an arcane combination of keystrokes, kept me occupied a few more minutes. After that, I didn't really spend a lot of time with Newscaster. Surprising, I know.

Well, that's not entirely true. Philips made a valiant attempt to turn Newscaster into something fun, and described a few word- and message-guessing games in the manual. My young friends and I actually tried a few of these "games," which had titles like Source Word! and (no joke) Nincompoop!. Unfortunately, we found that they weren't nearly as fun as making naughty messages scrawl across the screen, something we did far too often. Oh well, if nothing else, Newscaster gave me a greater familiarity with a QWERTY keyboard, even if it did seriously impair my ability to find the comma on it. In 1983, this cartridge was something special. In the twenty-first century, it's a relic that won't come off your game shelf often, if ever.

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