I hate the game Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest for the Atari 7800. It’s possibly the game which I’ve been most frustrated with out of any game I’ve ever owned. Is it the worst game I’ve ever owned? No. It certainly isn’t. But it is definitely up there in the list of top games which I have developed a real hatred for.
For this discussion, my intention was simply to review the game, and it was a game I was excited to get. But for the reasons I’ll go into as I review the game, I have several reasons to be really annoyed at this game. So, let’s get into it, because to explain why I hate Bentley Bear’s Crystal Question so much, I have to take us on a journey through the Atari 2600 Plus, Mr Run and Jump and span a few platforms.
A couple of years ago I was really excited for the release of the Atari 2600 Plus console. A new modern revision of the original Atari VCS from Atari themselves, and what was more, I was excited that they were releasing new cartridges for it. Some of these were rereleases of old games and some were new games for it.
In particular, I was excited for the platform game Mr Run and Jump. I loved the idea of a modern designed platformer for the oldest of Atari’s home consoles which was build in the modern day when the most can be got out the system and there were all the lessons from the year’s of trial and error in game design that Atari didn’t have back in the day.
Heck, when you think about it, there weren’t even really many platform games back in the era of the Atari 2600 as the console predated the likes of Super Mario Bros and Sonic the Hedgehog. So whilst single screen platformers like Donkey Kong or the original Mario Bros did appear on the platform, and there was the likes of the multiscreen and somewhat endless nature of Pitfall, these weren’t designed in the same way as games that followed Super Mario Bros.
But Mr Run and Jump cranked the clocks backwards and gave the Atari 2600 it’s very own mascot platformer. It had progressively harder levels, a main character with a purpose, that being to rescue Leap the Dog as he heads to the Dark Realm.
But the game was really challenging, and got very hard quite quickly. For me, the big problem was that I found the included classic Atari CX40 Plus joystick too stiff to play the game well.
You see, I grew up with joysticks, but other than for nostalgia, I will mostly play games with modern style controllers. I’m very comfortable with a dpad and very at home with a thumbstick. With the CX40, I was making unforced errors in my platforming, and whilst I could have persevered, it wasn’t long before I was looking for alternative methods to play with.
Now, I was excited to get an official modern Atari 2600, but this was somewhat redundant in my collection as I already had a Hyperkin Retron 77 which was a clone console which could play original Atari 2600 carts. Fab! I tested Mr Run and Jump, and it worked on there just fine.
But, I wanted to play the game on the Atari 2600 Plus, and as fortunate would have it, I preferred the looser stick on the Retron 77’s joystick and this plugged into the 2600 Plus.
I certainly did better at the game, but the game was very challenging, and I knew I was a better player than what I was achieving even with the Retron 77 joystick.
So, I tried a bunch of old controllers I had from years ago that I knew had the same connection and would plug into the 2600 Plus or Retron 77.
I tried joystick after joystick and whilst some worked, others didn’t , but it wasn’t the joysticks that caught my attention. I knew that the old gamepads for the Amiga, Atari ST, Sega Mega Drive and Sega Master System all had that same connection port.
To my surprise, none of the gamepads worked…except one. The Sega Master System controller worked, but with bad luck, my controller was a bit old and worn out and not functioning as well as it should.
I needed an alternative.
So, I looked at getting the gamepad that came with the European Atari 7800 console, but couldn’t find one second hand without buying an Atari 7800 itself, and I actually already had one of those…but alas, mine didn’t have the standard European controller with it.
Then I discovered the Hyperkin Ranger controller for the Atari. It was a gamepad style joystick that had a thumbstick to replace the Dpad, and it had a built in paddle and it was comfortable to use. It took me a couple of weeks to order mine in from the United States, but when it came, it was a gamechanger to play Mr Run and Jump. In fact, it became my preferred method of playing all the games I had in my collection on my Atari 2600 Plus, and Retron 77.
So with this, I beat Mr Run and Jump, which itself was no easy task as oh boy, does that game get challenging towards the end.
Several months rolled on, and I kept my eye on the Atari 2600 Plus scene, and although I got myself Bezerk Enhanced and the Paddle Games, the rereleases of Ninja Golf and Food Fight didn’t capture my imagination. And I say that with Food Fight being my favourite 7800 game. It’s just I have it several times over.
For me, I thought maybe Mr Run and Jump and Bezerk Enhanced was it for new or updated releases for the 2600 Plus and after this, there would just be a smattering of old games rereleased.
But then Atari announced the next phase in their plans for the Atari 2600 Plus console line, and that was the impending release of the Atari 7800 Plus.
Now, if you have a 2600 Plus, you’ll know that the console already plays Atari 7800 games, and so in many ways the 7800 Plus is just a redesign of the Atari 2600 Plus in a 7800 inspired plastic shell.
I’ll give more thoughts on the consoles in my separate reviews of them at a later date, but what really caught my attention was that like with the Atari 2600 Plus, they were releasing the new console alongside a mascot platformer.
This one sounded even better than Mr Run and Jump.
Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest was a new game that was a Mario style 2D mascot platformer starring Bentley Bear from the classic Crystal Castles game.
Crystal Castle was an isometric platformer/maze game where you’d have to pick up all the gemstones. You’d avoid enemies and the main antagonist was Bethilda the Witch.
This new game would be a 2D platformer instead of isometric, and features five worlds, each with eight stages.
The biggest thing to note about this game is that it started life as a homebrew game. Programmed by Robert DeCrescenzo, it has actually been available for several years as a community homebrew game through Atari Age.
Something I’ll absolutely give Atari credit for is that they took a fan designed product, recognised it’s quality and took steps to make it an official sequel. And just to be clear, I do think the game has a lot of quality and positive merits, but none of this changes the reasons why I hate the game.
You see, the other reason I was excited for the release of the 7800 Plus was the inclusion of the new wireless 7800 gamepad. This was the two button gamepad in the same design as the original European Atari 7800 gamepads that I hadn’t got with my 7800 console. It was also wireless, and I love me some Bluetooth space age wizardry that works on retro hardware.
Unfortunately, it appears that someone at Atari didn’t check that everything would work as you would hope and this is where the seeds of hate for this game began.
This part is well documented by other reviewers, but Atari decided to make Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest a pack in game with the Atari 7800 Plus when it was near impossible to play with the included joypad.
Yes, that’s right, the two button gamepad that comes in the box with the 7800 Plus does not let you play Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest as you should be able to.
You see, the game works similar to the original Super Mario Bros games in that you run left and right with the DPad, jump with one action button, and hold down the other action button to run. Additionally, you have to tap the run button to fire what appear to be gems diagonally down in front of you.
The problem is that the two action buttons are a fraction too far apart from one another compared to any other gamepad I’ve ever used.
This being an aftermarket game, there were no 2D platformers of this nature released on the original Atari 7800, and as such, no developer at the time had designed their games around this hold run and press jump at the same time mechanic.
It’s crazy that Atari didn’t look at the CX78 controller when they were making it work wirelessly, and also say ‘to play our pack in game we should probably move the buttons closer together by half a centimetre.’
Still, just as I had with Mr Run and Jump a year earlier, my initial plan was to do my best with the included controller. I ended up holding the right side of the gamepad awkwardly so I could tap the buttons with my index and middle fingers rather than trying to press either or both with my right thumb.
Now, the game does give you infinite continues, but there is no save game feature, and so if I was going to beat the game, I’d have to do so in one gaming session. It was a slog, but I got myself all the way to the final level, and by 2 or 3am I decided I’d had enough and switched the game off.
I was frustrated as the game seemed ok, even if it didn’t wow me. But I felt that I probably wasn’t enjoying the game as much as I would be if I had proper controls to play it.
With this in mind, I decided to play it with the Hyperkin Ranger controller that had made Mr Run and Jump such a dream to play a year earlier.
Uh oh. After digging the pad out I remembered that the Retron 77, for which this controller was designed, only had one action button. So whilst I could move the character great, the whole running and jumping scenario was dead in the water.
Any hopes of testing out joysticks for better results were also out as the CX40 and it’s clones likewise only had one button.
Like I did the year before I started trying my Sega Mega Drive and Master System controllers, but they still wouldn’t work, and in fact, my Master System one was now not working at all.
Next up I tried the cart on the Atari 2600 Plus and discovered that the game wouldn’t even run on it. I don’t understand why this is so, but it wouldn’t run at all even though to my knowledge the 2600 Plus and 7800 Plus are meant to be near identical in functionality.
I guess my hope was that on the 2600 Plus I may find a different controller that may work better. Alas this was not the case.
Then I tried the game in the Retron 77 as I figured that maybe the clone system may be compatible with more controllers. But wait, I’d forgotten that unlike Mr Run and Jump that was designed as an Atari 2600 game, Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest was designed as a 7800 game and therefore couldn’t run on the Retron 77 which was strictly a 2600 clone and wouldn’t play any 7800 games.
Refusing to be beaten I decided to look for a solution. Was there an aftermarket controller made for the 7800 that would work and have a more comfortable button layout.
I found two options on Etsy, both were custom made, and both reasonably priced. And when I say reasonably, I mean reasonably expensive. But still, for $20 or $30 dollars I figured I’d solve any future 7800 gamepad problems. Then I realised that both options were located in the United States and the postage was a small fortune and would take forever to arrive in the UK.
So, my next thought was to try to find an American 7800 controller which was a joystick with the buttons either side of the stick. I had no idea if this would be comfortable to play with, but like the previous year when I was seeking out a European 7800 controller, I could only find these for sale second hand with systems. And considering I now had an original 7800 console, and 2600 Plus and now a 7800 Plus, I certainly wasn’t looking to buy yet another version of the same hardware and have four of the damn things.
Then, at long last I thought of looking into adaptors to play on the 7800 Plus with other controllers. All I needed was an adaptor and maybe I could plug in a PS5 controller or something. That wasn’t even needed as I discovered an adaptor called the Mega 7800, and this let you plug original Sega Mega Drive controllers in to play on the 7800.
Finally! This took a little while to arrive and was only £15…I say only. All that money to play a homebrew game that I had bought with a system that was the same as one I had bought a year earlier just to get a controller I was now actively aiming not to use.
I’ll do a review of the Mega 7800 adaptor elsewhere properly, but my results were initially that it didn’t work and it took me several different Mega Drive controllers to get it to work. I even bought the 8BitDo Mega Drive controller (which is awesome by the way) but alas didn’t work great with the Mega 7800 adaptor but is awesome on my Mega Drive. Eventually I found my own six button third party Mega Drive controller that I used on my Amiga 1200 worked.
Kinda.
Not really.
The game kept not registering inputs which I knew for a fact I had made. And although the game wasn’t as hard as Mr Run and Jump, I had found some levels challenging and didn’t want to waste my time getting to the final level just to have to give up again.
So…what now?
As a proud owner of the modern Atari VCS, I recently looked at the app store and to my surprise I found Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest was on there for just 7.99.
I decided to buy the game on the VCS as I knew the Xbox style controller would be perfect to play the game.
However…for a couple of weeks the download app store on the VCS wasn’t working in mid 2025 and so I had to wait for the weird solution where an attempt to purchase the game needs you to complete the sale via an email on your computer. Strange.
But finally, I had the game on the VCS and was ready to play it with a modern style controller.
But then an issue again…
I discovered that instead of mapping the run button to X and the jump button to A, to be the same layout as on Super Mario Bros and Donkey Kong Country and countless other games in the genre, the run button was A and the jump button was B. This meant you had to hold the controller at a weird angle which was instantly distracting and not comfortable.
I couldn’t believe it and I was ready to quit…literally and I tapped the Atari button to bring up the home menu and low behold, it would turn out that Atari left the controls to the Mame based emulator they use to emulate the game as accessible when playing the game.
Now, this menu was very limited, but it did give the option to remap controller buttons and so finally I was able to play Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest as anyone could have hoped for…which to be honest, is a bear minimum that Atari should have got right, but didn’t across multiple platforms.
Unfortunately, I discovered the game actually isn’t all that great after all this effort.
The first level is pretty good, and I actually thought the final few stages were good as well. For the most part though I think design choices make this a pretty unenjoyable experience. Ones that I was hoping were because I was having controller issues, but even with the controller sorted, the things I suspected may be bad were in fact bad. Let’s go through these.
Because I just thought the game was a kinda broken mess of ideas that don’t make sense.
The game is similar to Super Mario Bros in that the screen will scroll to the right, but once you’ve gone right, you cannot backtrack and go back where you came from. This is ok, especially if the game seeks to be a lost game from the same time period in which Super Mario Bros launched.
This does mean there isn’t a great sense of exploration on the levels, although there is at least one hidden warp zone, and I did find a few hidden 1Up objects that gave extra lives.
Strangely I think the only way I got extra lives was through invisible 1UP items, and I can’t remember that you come across these normally as items to pick up. Also when I say they were invisible, I did see one flagged by what looked like a floating full stop, so maybe the others have very tiny clues to their existence.
Unlike Mario with coins, Sonic with rings, Crash with apples, Donkey Kong with bananas, there are no items to pick up that help rack up a high score and guide you through the levels. This surprised me since the original Crystal Castles game was all based around collecting all the gemstones. These could have so easily been the equivalent to Mario’s rings.
Of course, in the original game, you’d have to collect all the gemstones to beat the levels, and I’m glad this isn’t the way it went here. Instead you do just have to find the exit like on Donkey Kong, Crash, Mario, Sonic and most others of this ilk.
When you do reach a level exit, you will be met with a closed door, and you won’t be able to exit until any enemies on the screen at the time are defeated. I like this feature, although could have been used for more mini boss fights perhaps.
The gemstones are utilised in the game, but instead of pickups, they act as the weapon that you throw to defeat enemies in the game. This is fair enough although the combat in the game is probably the part of the game which I think ruins the fun.
Other than the bad controls on every system which didn’t need to be broken of course.
The game has quite a few different enemy types in the game, and these mostly work differently and require different tactics to defeat.
There are the walking skeletons which will appear from the right and can jump over obstacles, these are easy to defeat. Then there are the zombies, which in a neat feature, have to be shot in the head to destroy. Then there is the giant Centipede which is a nice nod to the Atari game of the same name. These just will walk and jump, but frequently get stuck at obstacles and are easy to navigate.
There is a enemy that looks like a werewolf maybe which acts like a tougher skeleton, and there is one that looks like a cross between Link from Zelda 2 and a character from Castlevania who has a sword or a whip. These can block the gemstones you throw at them.
Then there are ghosts that fly in a looped pattern and can turn around and come back after you. One of the most annoying enemies as you go through the game are what appears to be a swarm of bees that will fly in a straight line above and as soon as they fly over you will swoop down and come at you from behind.
There are these flying mini pixie looking things which edge towards you slowly and then will speed in fast and these are pretty annoying, and then lastly there is the floating purple orb with a face which also speed towards you and take more damage to kill and so are better jumped over if possible.
With most enemies they won’t come back after you. As a hint, I discovered the ones that do can be defeated by getting them to go off screen and they won’t follow you back after that. With the swarm of bees in particular, if you hug the edge of the screen to the very left, they will just fly all the way off the screen and not fly down after you.
An idea which I really feel lets the game down is that you do have an energy bar, but if you come into contact with any enemy it will one hit kill you. This was a huge error on the part of the developer in my opinion. It should have been that you have two or three hit points as the one hit kill thing means you’ll constantly have to restart levels.
You can lose energy as there are a few boulder or spike things which if you land on will bounce Bentley away like he’s hurt and he’ll lose energy.
But you’ll also lose energy continually as the energy bar is actually more of a timer than anything else. Other than the spike and boulders which make you lose energy, the energy bar is a timer and nothing more. Every so often you’ll find a honey pot and this will replenish the energy bar.
A big problem with the energy bar just being a timer in reality is that the timer does put some pressure on the player to finish a level quickly, and everything else about the game makes you want to take things slowly.
You cannot jump onto enemies to kill them. The only way to defeat them is for you to hit them with gemstones. And with the risk of one hit kills, you’ll want to move methodically through levels and kill most enemies rather than try to jump over them. An issue here is that the game will throw a large number of enemies at you so you usually have two or three coming at you. Faced with this, you’ll want to take things slow and wipe them all out before they can one hit kill you.
But, as I said, your gemstones will shoot down in a diagonal direction in front of you, and they don’t have very much range. So unless you jump and shoot to get more distance on that diagonal throw, you’ll be doing a lot of close range combat.
You can pick up more powerful gemstones…I think. Every so often you’ll see a floating yellow, green or red one and I think these upgrade your gemstone attack to be more powerful. There’s nothing that makes it clear how this works though.
Very rarely in the game you’ll find a wizard hat and this will give Bentley very limited invincibility. This is where the game feels most fun and like you’d hope it might for the entire game. With this on, you’ll get maybe ten seconds where you can run through levels and actually do some fast platforming and it’s where it feels most fun.
Now, on other games like Sonic or Mario it can feel fun as you zip through and cant get hurt by enemies with an invincibility item, but unlike those games, this is the only time in the game where you can to run and jump over things and bounce from platform to platform meaningfully.
The rest of the game is creep along, and every five steps another enemy will spawn. This is the best method to get through the game, and the slow and steady kill enemy walk for five steps and kill another enemy, rinse and repeat approach kills any sense of fun.
This game would have been a lot more fun if it were much easier or more forgiving and gave you multiple hit points. You could then be encouraged to play through many times to get the highest score.
The only reason I played this as much as I have was determination to beat it in spite of broken controls. As a result I ended up with two copies on two platforms and bought extra controllers and accessories to do so.
The game also does feature boss fights and every single one of these is against the evil witch from the original Crystal Castles game, Bethilda. She flies at you and swoops across the screen in the same pattern over and over. In later boss fights she will launch the little pixie enemy things at you, and in the final boss fight once you’ve done what you normally would to defeat her she will split into several mini versions of herself.
The big issue with these boss fights is that until she is in her mini form, she will also swoop seven eighths of the way across the screen and this means that if you hug the left side of the screen you can stand and hit the fire button over and over and you’ll definitely defeat her without ever needing to get closer.
The only point where this isn’t true is the final fight where she throws the pixies at you and occasionally when close enough these may hit you and one hit kill you from a low angle.
Then when she splits into mini versions of herself these do fly across the whole screen and so need jumping over.
The game does feature mid level check points and you do have a couple of lives which can rarely be increased if you pick up the hidden 1up items. The game doesn’t feature battery back up or saving features, but you can continue from whichever level you died on once all your lives are gone. All this means is that if you geta game over, you may have to restart form the beginning of a level rather than from a mid level check point.
Once I defeated the game, I was pleased but it was the sense of finally, thank god that is over and that I won’t have to play that again.
I don’t think I’d have such a strong feeling of hate towards the game if it hadn’t been for the bad controller that is packed with the same console it is a pack in for that renders the game unplayable, the fact the cart didn’t work on my 2600 Plus, that I had to buy extra alternative controllers and dongles and still find it was glitchy and unplayable, or that I then had to buy it on the VCS and still find the native control layout was bad and needed remapping through an unadvertised means, and then finally that the game was for all intents and purposes, just generic and average and needlessly slow, punishing and joyless.
So, yeah…that’s my review of Bentley Bear’s Crystal Quest.
If you want a platformer on your 7800, or want to play this on the VCS, go for it. Especially on the VCS as it is possible to make it playable on there under the best conditions…as long as the download store actually is up and running…but I wouldn’t recommend this game as being good. If you want the cart for your 7800 as a collectors thing, good for you, but it plays better and is much cheaper on the VCS. I did actually find that there was a version you could play online via the internet archive, but the idea of playing this game with a keyboard was a step to far for me.
So, this turned out to be a bumper deep dive across both the 7800 Plus and Atari VCS versions, and touched on the Mega 7800, the 8bitdo Mega Drive gamepad, the Hyperkin Ranger and even Mr Run and Jump. For all my reviews of those properly and so much more in the realm of retro, and Atari gaming, do check out more of my content!
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