These are the days for Maze Craze. Here are the ways it plays:
Maze Craze is, somewhat unusually, a two-player oriented game – each player plays as a cop (who resembles a frog, for reasons) as they chase each other through a large maze, trying to reach an exit. There are various obstacles, including robbers that can weirdly catch the cops, but ultimately you just need to escape the maze. The game is ostensibly set in some horrible hellscape where your beat is in a labyrinthine city from which there are dozens of dead ends and exactly one escape.
Who designed this place?
The mazes are randomly generated, which is a nice plus – every game is actually a little bit different. There are a few modes with different objectives and settings, such as the speed of the robbers and/or the number of them in the maze. You can also have the game obscure part of the maze (which is briefly revealed every few seconds) to make things a little more interesting.
This is definitely the best way to enjoy Maze Craze – it adds some much needed difficulty, and does a great job of rewarding a little bit of memorization. You can even do this for the entire maze, which makes for quite the exprience:
As you’d expect from an Atari series, there isn’t much to it, even with the decent variety of options, but what’s there is entirely functional.
Since I’m struggling to come up with actual interesting content about this game, I’ll note that while Maze Craze inarguably has mazes, the “craze” is remarkably lacking. Much like the Crazy Bread from Little Caesar’s, it is in fact mild-mannered and did not once make me fear for my safety. It’s uncomplicated, fairly enjoyable, but also rather unspectacular – again, kinda like Crazy Bread. I guess having the whole maze obscured most of the time is pretty crazy, though. Just play it like that.
And really, what is crazy about this? Is it that leaf? Is the leaf crazy? Am I the crazy one for eating it?
Anyway, I mentioned a few weeks back that Atari was incredibly dumb and did a remarkable job at doing the wrong things whenever possible, and the creation of Maze Craze is another good example of that. Its programmer, Mike Maurer, thought it’d be wise to make a clone of the immensely popular Space Invaders. The always savvy business-folk at Atari said no, and had him make something else instead, and thus Maze Craze was born.
In fairness, Maurer did eventually get to make a licensed version of Space Invaders for the 2600, but seriously, Atari was so dumb. Lest we forget that Atari (albeit in another form) also released this stupid thing:
I have one of these! It’s only a matter of time before the Retro Roulette wheel falls on it. That’s probably gonna be a rough week.
Maze Craze is not particularly rare or valuable, so if you’re looking for a mildly interesting title for two players, it’s a decent pickup. It’s very simple, but enjoyable for a few games before you go back to just playing Pitfall! or whatever. Tele-Games, the line of Atari games sold by Sears, released it under the name Maze Mania, so don’t pick that up thinking it’s something else.
Next week’s game based on anime or something. It’s not a Jaguar game, which is nice. Until then, my your mazes and bread always be crazy.