Fire Fly Review

Holy crap cakes, am I ever starting to run out of adjectives and creative phrases when I come upon a terrible game! This is just…just horrible. Fire Fly is without a doubt one of the worst games for the Atari 2600. Anything by Mythicon isn’t very good, but this is probably the worst out of them. Fire Fly is absolutely without meaning, without thought and without anything you can fill in this slot. You might want to even avoid reading this review.

Fire Fly starts out with some of the most indeterminate graphics I’ve ever seen. I have literally no idea what I’m supposed to be looking at, and the manual hardly elucidates anything. These graphics are seriously so bad you can pretty much say that someone randomly put some colors together, made a sprite, thought it looked like a bug and made a game around it and you’d probably be right. They are that bad, we’re talking the absolute minimum effort and hardly any display of the 2600’s abilitiies. All you get is a black background and ramdom shapes flitting about. This may actually be the worst graphics display I’ve ever seen, and I mean it this time.

And the sound? Phew, Fire Fly has this endlessly annoying track running and absolutely no sound effects whatsoever. How much worse can it get? Not much, trust me. I can’t believe they didn’t at least add some sort of bullet sound for the dots you fire. All you get is some sort of weird track. I guess it reminds me of bugs, but then again if I didn’t know what the game was called I probably wouldn’t have a clue.

Fire Fly is quite a strange game, and utterly pointless. You will never find anything more pointless than this title. What’s even more laughable is the strange story they give you to try to make sense of the mess they programmed. Get this. Basically you’re some space pilot who has crash landed on a planet of beings that used to be bugs, but over time have changed their biological parts into machine parts. The good bugs want you to help them conquer the bad bugs by allowing you to control their best bug-machine creature. Seriously, go read an HTML version of the manual online, you can’t make that trash up: manual. Anyway, so what does the game amount to? Well, in spite of the fluid controls, all you do is control the bug, fire fly thing, shoot at random shapes, get some points for it, and keep going. That’s it. Wow. Seriously, that’s all there is so say. Don’t believe me? Fine, look for yourself, but keep all sharp objects and guns out of the room:

The only creativity I can afford Fire Fly is the story behind it, but then again that’s just a desparate attempt to make sense out of this pile of filth. Actually, wait I forgot, get this. You talk about this game being bad? Well, how about this. Mythicon released two other games, and all of them have the same exact code. That’s right, in essence this is the same dang game as Sorcerer or Star Fox. They seriously did nothing more than hack the basic graphics and sound. We’re talking the absolute lowest of the low here, folks. Looks bad, sounds bad, plays bad, but isn’t even bad in its own right. Damn.

Do I even need to write anything for the replay category? You will never play this again. You won’t want to play it in the first place. This equals a score of zero.

Fire Fly is just one of the many examples of what went wrong for the Atari 2600 and the console market of the early 80s. Heck, seeing this, I really, really understand why Nintendo had their vicious third-party policy. No way anyone wanted anything like this to ever appear again. Don’t even bother. Don’t end up like me…