Downfall Falcon

Atari Falcon Game

Entry posted by Christos November 13, 2011

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Some time ago I wrote about Downfall for the atari jaguar and how much fun we had while developing it. For this falcon port little has changed in that respect. GGN tried to add to the game and with the graphics by Templeton and Sh3 the falcon gained a lot of interesting backgrounds. 505 signs the music in this one and the samples from the jaguar version were kept. Some don't fit really well with the falcon, since it's only 32-bit but they are funny to listen to nevertheless .

But as someone who had a playtesting role in both of these efforts I can tell you my observations. First of all, I was much more involved in playtesting this and my falcon logged many more hours than the jaguar emulator did. The second is how much difference the extra storage and ram make. We thought it would be better if we had more frames in the background so Ggn went on and made them 9MB's each. 200 or so MB's for the 14MB RAM version of Downfall. And that is not a problem, I have a 4GB sd card on the falcon with 3.2 GB's free, others would have similar setups. Lastly, adding the music was a piece of cake. The falcon has a very nice dsp with it's own 96K RAM that can replay mods without breaking a sweat.

But what this really made me do, was to rediscover falcon gaming. During this time, I played games that I never had before and revisited others I had passed quickly. So at the moment I have three falcon game addictions. Conquest of Elysium 2, a fantasy turn based strategy game, Teknoball, an arkanoid clone and of course Downfall!

Enjoy Downfall, both in falcon and the jaguar.

P.S. With Impulse X being essentially a falcon to jaguar port and Downfall following the reverse course, maybe more games will follow this path?

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