Zapper: One Wicked Cricket

WORDS CAN NOT EXPRESS HOW HAPPY I AM THAT THIS GAME IS ON STEAM. 🦗

Genuinely one of my favorite games ever, childhood game that I've been wanting to play again for years. I love this game it's pretty perfect on my 2014 laptop (running windows 10) besides the obvious lag from the device being old. However like others have stated it doesn't work at all on newer devices (for example my 2023 laptop running windows 11) which is disappointing it clearly tries to work as it launches yet it fails to play it freezes on the starting screen and only plays the music. I'd love to recommend the game but if it can't be played on most devices that's a big issues and I hope the devs fix it! I just wanna Zap on my better laptop </3

Doesn't work on windows 11 :( Been in contact with atari and [strike]they suggested to install windows 10 instead.[/strike] They said the team is aware and working on it! [strike]"Greetings from Atari! Thank you for your patience! Based on the issue you're experiencing, I recommend reinstalling Windows and switching to Windows 10. It appears the game may not be fully compatible with Windows 11 due to recent system updates. Please let us know if you need help with the reinstallation process—we're here to assist!"[/strike] "Greetings from Atari! Thank you for your kind words and patience. I have forwarded the issue to our team, and they are currently working on it. However, we do not have an estimated time for when a resolution will be available. Once the issue is resolved, I will get back to you. In the meantime, I will temporarily close this ticket. Thank you!"

Played this a long time on PS2, was excited to check it out again. It's uh...not great! No controller support, and also this game is just mean as hell man. Some of these levels were designed by people with hatred in their hearts. I do still like the puzzle-solving aspects tho'

I think it's amazing that publishers are putting in the effort to bring back old games. While not trivial to traverse all the legal hoops required to do so, I think the bounty of nostalgia makes it worthwhile. Glad to know Atari feels the same way. Little side note: It's a functional retrogame with no extra's whatsoever. No steam achievements, trading cards or cloud saves. You can get it to work with the steamdeck, which is nice. But other than that, from a technical perspective, it is lagging behind compared to community efforts such as retroachievements and retroarch. However, make no mistake. This game being on steam is a massive achievement from a legal perspective, I just find it a bit saddening that it isn't as impressive on the technical side of things.

I genuinely like this game despite its age. A good soundtrack can do a lot to keep me engaged, and this game has a few very good tunes in it. That being said, though, this port is not well done at all. I would even dare call it lazy, and I swear I am not one to throw that word around much when it comes to video game development. The only thing this Steam listing adds over owning the original game on CD-ROM is a launcher that contains a scan of the game's manual, as well as some trivia taken verbatim from TVTropes (in fact, this trivia segment outright contains the link to the TVTropes page of the game). With this rather cheap addition, however, they omit using the old configuration app with which you would have started the original version of the game. That application is the only way to change the game's resolution (and controls, but at least there's the Steam controller overlay to mitigate that). Granted, you can still launch the config app from your local files, but then the game will prompt you to insert the game disc. This means that unless you still have access in some way to a disc copy of the game (which, again, is IDENTICAL to this port, minus the barren launcher) and thus would make buying this game on Steam redundant, it's outright impossible to play the game on a resolution above 640x480 or to change your controls without the Steam controller overlay. On an aside, since I do have access to a disc copy, I can point out that the game really wasn't made for a 16:9 aspect ratio. As a result, it just reduces your vertical field of view, which makes it very obnoxious to play stages that mostly contain vertical movement. Windowed resolution is locked to 640x480, and I imagine a lot of people are familiar with the issue of playing fullscreen in a non-native resolution on multi-monitor setups; it just shuffles all your opened applications around. Worst of all, though, me buying and playing this copy of the game prompted a friend to buy it as well. They are using Windows 11, whereas I'm still on Windows 10. The game won't even launch for them. This, more than any of the other rather large annoyances I mentioned above, is why I cannot recommend you buy this game. If this compatibility issue gets resolved, you can consider this review changed to a tentative recommendation for people who know their way around Steam's controller configuration overlay and don't mind playing the game in what is a very low resolution these days. I am of the opinion that there is no reason for a re-release >20 years after the game originally came out to have such a highly conditional recommendation, owing to a lack of very basic configuration options or even compatibility with the most common operating system as I write this review. P.S.: I double checked the launcher to back up my statement about the trivia excerpt and closed the launcher without starting the game. It apparently kept running in the background and added about half an hour to my play time as I was writing this review. Steam has been trying to stop the game for the past 5 minutes since I noticed this. My already low opinion on the sole thing Atari seems to have changed from the original release has just sunk deeper still.

GAME is NOT WORKING!!!! It's my childhood game, but somethings wrong with the launcher. I can't past the Atari Presents screen, even after the patch in February. Plz Fix this...

cornflakes gaming. I remember getting a demo of this game in a cereal box. There were four games you could get as prizes. I happened to get Zapper: One Wicked Cricket. But I never got the full game. I only played the two levels available on the demo. As a kid, I don't think I realized there was more to the game than the two levels I played LOL

2003 habe ich dieses Spiel für die Playstation 2 gesehen und wollte es immer mal spielen, da es recht witzig aussah. Jetzt nach über 20 Jahren habe ich dieses Spiel nachgeholt. Zapper hat 13 abwechslungsreich gestaltete Level, die man recht zügig durchspielen kann. Das größte Problem ist die Steuerung. Mein Gamepad hat leider nicht funktioniert und es spielt sich mit Tastatur nicht wirklich gut. Mit Pfeiltasten kann man in eine Richtung springen. Mit Strg und Alt kann man blitzen und einen Doppelsprung machen. Shift zeigt die Richtung des nächsten Ei, da man in jeden Level genau 6 Eier einsammeln muss. Und mit der Y-Taste kann man sich in eine Richtung ausrichten. Es scheint noch weitere Funktionen zu geben, jedoch habe ich diese nicht gebraucht bzw. gefunden, da das Spiel die Tasten nicht erklärt. Man muss also die Tasten testen, da die Symbole im Spiel nicht die Taste zeigen. Die Grafik ist zwar farbenfroh, aber ansonsten total veraltet. PS2-Grafik halt. Der Sound ist in Ordnung. Es ist schon witzig und macht durchaus Spaß, jedoch ist dieser Plattformer für mich eher ein Konsolenspiel als ein PC-Titel. Wenn man etwas geduldig ist und sich etwas einarbeitet, dann bekommt man ein schönes, kleines Spiel. Jedoch hätte man das Spiel deutlich für den PC anpassen können vor allem von der Steuerung her. Ich weiß, das Spiel gab es schon damals für den PC, aber es ist wirklich eindeutig mehr ein Konsolenspiel. Für leidensfähige Nostalgiker okay, aber ansonsten gibt es leider deutlich bessere 3D-Plattformer.

Absolutely a childhood classic. One of the very special few games that started it all for me. Still own the original McDonald's Happy Meal Demo Disc and the actual PC game. Crazy underrated game if you're into platformers. I do however wish some things would get addressed in this version like being able to access the original config setup.exe which right now i just broken. You cannot change things like resolutions because of it.