Avalanche was an old arcade game released by Atari Games way back in 1978.
The story
This was one of Atari's last black and white games, the industry quickly moved to color after the release of Galaxian in 1979.
Activision liberally copied the gameplay of this title when they made Kaboom! for the Atari 2600, although their "copy" was technically superior to the original.
The game
Grab your spinners kids, because this is a paddle game. The top of the screen is filled with rocks, while the bottom half has five buckets (stacked on top of each other), that you control with your paddle.
Rocks begin falling from the top of the screen, and you have to catch them in your buckets. The game ends when you miss three rocks. After a little while sections of your bucket vanish, and the remaining sections become thinner, this keeps up until you only have a single bucket segment, which is only a few pixels wide. So far I have not been able to push through that part of the game to get to the next set of rocks (it really is hard), although I am playing with a trackball, it would be easier with a spinner or paddle.
The Machine
Avalanche shipped in a cool looking black and white cabinet. It has three-color painted sideart which shows a group of falling boulders. This title does not have a marquee, instead the monitor bezel extends all the way to the top of the cabinet (this game was seldom converted because of that). The monitor bezel is decorated with a brownish scene of dirt and rocks, and has a clear semi-circular are that shows the black and white monitor within. The game uses a set of color overlays to simulate color on the otherwise monochrome screen.
The control panel is decorated with a brown overlay showing large cracks in the earth, and it has a single optical spinner mounted in the center, with buttons far off to each side.
Where to play
You can play this game using the MAME emulator, although it does seem to have some issues related to mouse and trackball control under Windows NT based operating systems. To fix this, change the individual game controls to left and right keyboard arrows only (no joystick for left right, change it even if it already says that). Then exit the game and restart it. Changing any dip switch settings results in you having to fix this again. (I found this behavior under Windows 2000 and Windows XP, neither Windows 95 nor Windows 98 exhibited these problems, it is probably related to the NT mouse driver.
I would suggest playing Kaboom! after playing this game, as your Kaboom! skills will have improved after playing this difficult title.
This is an alright game to add to your arcade game collection. It is fairly cheap as far as ball and paddle games go, and you can always convert it to Breakout if you get tired of it (it isn't a plug and play conversion, but it isn't that difficult to pull off if you are handy with a soldering iron).