Mattel Aquarius

[jaybird3rd]

I don't know anything about the Aquarius, but i was disappointed to see they are currently dissing it over at digitpress. http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=144177

 

I have no idea if it is bad as they are saying but i hate seeing anything related to the Intellivision being dissed so bad.

Yeah, those are some pretty harsh words for the Aquarius. In fairness, though, I didn't even own an Aquarius until earlier this year, so I can only guess what my opinion of the system would have been if I had seen one in 1983, when I was about seven years old. I did encounter one briefly in a second-hand computer store sometime around 1989, and it intrigued me enough to remember it all these years, but that obviously wasn't enough exposure to form an opinion. I'm certain I would have liked it better than my Timex Sinclair 1000, and that I would have enjoyed playing the games that were released for it, but I think I still would have preferred my TI 99/4A and Atari 800 as computers.

 

The limitations of the Aquarius that I would have noticed right away are the poor keyboard and the lack of reprogrammable graphics. The RF modulator and cassette port were acceptable solutions for audio/video output and data storage at the time, but I would now say that the lack of any built-in alternatives is also a serious limitation, especially considering how convenient it would be to be able to directly connect the Aquarius to today's PCs and composite-enabled televisions. Viewed in the context of what was available in 1983, I can certainly understand why the Aquarius failed, and frankly, I think the marketplace made the right decision in favoring other systems.

 

However, given all of that, the Aquarius intrigues me as a retro gaming platform, mainly because of the capabilities that are added by the Mini Expander: a good set of Intellivision-like hand controllers and a decent sound chip. The keyboard isn't such a serious limitation in this context, since you'd only need it as a secondary input device, and the lack of convenient data storage isn't especially important either (although it would be nice to have a way to store such things as high scores and level data). The Atari 7800 is still my first platform of choice for homebrew game development, but I like the idea of using the Aquarius for the kinds of games that wouldn't be feasible on the 7800 and, thanks to the multi-cart project, as a way of getting more experience with the Z80 processor and with digital logic design.

 

I think that anyone who is considering developing games on the Aquarius has to be very careful about choosing a game idea that is appropriate for the platform. Because its character-oriented display only allows simple movement in eight-pixel character increments, it does not lend itself to smooth animation effects. One of the consequences is that games that involve very precise movements do not translate to the Aquarius very well. This is the biggest problem with games like BurgerTime and TRON Deadly Discs: the animation is too chunky to easily allow the kinds of carefully-planned maneuvers that these games require (such as luring two or three enemies in a row onto a bun in BurgerTime). Night Stalker also suffers from this, although it isn't as much of a problem in that game because the characters will ideally stay far away from each other. Games like Utopia, Chess, and even Astrosmash were better choices, and I think Tetris would also be a good fit for the Aquarius (as evidenced by the quick mock-up that I made). The very limited set of built-in characters is also a challenge, and I hope that my SuperFont idea will provide a badly-needed corrective in this area.